Expert Feature: Top Three Online Marketing Must-Haves for 2015
We’re already banging up against the end of the year, and I’m not entirely sure where 2014 actually went. Do you?
However now is an ideal time to start planning for your marketing activities for 2015. With all the changes that Google has put in place over the last few years, it’s important to put in an online marketing plan that works with those rules, not against them.
What should you as a business owner be thinking about now when you’re planning out your 2015 marketing activities?
Create Content on a Schedule
The most important thing for all business owners is to create content on a regular basis. Content can include blog posts, articles, videos, or a host of other types of content.
By creating content on a regular basis, you’re helping in several ways:
- You’re building content for your customers to consume which helps them to get to know, like and trust you.
- The content will help searchers on the search engines find you for so many more terms than you would otherwise
- It will help your overall search engine optimization efforts, especially if you “SEO” or search engine optimize the content as it goes live.
Use an E-mail Newsletter at Least Once Per Week
By creating a regular newsletter that includes the content you’ve created on your website, you’ll continue to engage with your clients. This keeps your potential clients engaged with you, and reminds them every week that you’re out there.
The newsletter should primarily be informational and occasionally promotional. If your newsletters promote too much, you’ll turn off your readers. You must keep it interesting to keep them engaged.
Encourage your readers to click through to your website or blog by only putting a highlight of your content in the newsletter. Give them the highlights of the article, then a link to “Read More”.
This way you can keep a gauge on how engaged your readers are by measuring the click-through-rate. This also gives you a gauge of how interested your readers are on specific topics.
Use Social Media to Engage, Not Sell
People are not typically in “buy” mode when they’re on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. So it’s best not to use these platforms to try to “sell” people.
In stead, keep them engaged and interested by posting links to your articles and videos online.
Remember that the more engaged your fans are online, the more your content will show up on other people’s feeds. To increase engagement, encourage your readers to comment or “like” posts, by prompting them.
An example could be: “Like this post if you agree, or comment below if you disagree.” This prompts people to do something. The more people do this, the farther it will travel.
Use hash tags in your posts to help it travel even further so people see it who aren’t even connected with you.
Use Google+ to post your articles and videos. If you don’t have a Google+ business page, you must set one up. Google is keeping track of clicks, +1’s (the equivalent to Facebook “likes”) and shares, and the more your posts will show up on others’ feeds.
Bonus Tip: Create an Editorial Calendar
Make sure you have an editorial calendar for 2015. Put down the topics for each week that you’re going to create, and write it down.
It’s easier to create several posts at once than maintaining the regimen of doing it on a regular basis. After all, life (and business) gets in the way, and there will be weeks when you don’t have the time to do it. By pre-scheduling your posts to go live on specific dates, you can batch your writing and not have to carve out time each week to do it.
Photo by Courtney Dirks
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Very keen insight into the core usefulness of social media– all too many small businesses make the mistake of using their social platforms as an avenue for abbreviated sales pitches, all with little to no success.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Glad you liked the post, Brian.