Getting your products and services in front of the right customers is vital. In order to do this, you need to start off by understanding who your customers are and why they are likely to buy from you as this will determine who you are going to market your business towards.

This group of people who you consider to be specifically interested in your products and services are the people who you want to find your website amongst the many websites out there but how do you make your website attractive to your clients?

A good web designer will be able to advise your business on the best design for your website. They will discuss your options and will be able to advise you on the most effective way to promote your business. Most web designers will be able to provide a website to fit your budget. It is important at this meeting to identify who your target client group are and discuss your ideas for how to direct your clients to the relevant pages of your site.

Targeting customers is not a onetime activity so to help your business grow you need to be continually looking at ways to attract new clients. Ensure that you keep your customer database up-to-date, refresh the information on your business website regularly to ensure the information on it is current.

When it comes to websites, getting them ranked well on the search engines is not always easy. You may find that there is a lot of competition for your main phrases and that you struggle to make it on to the first page. There can be other reasons why your site may not be performing that well such as a penalisation from the search engines. This can happen for a number of reasons but usually Google sees your site as either risky or spammy.

Years ago some companies did a number of black hat techniques to get their sites ranked but over time, the search engines picked up on these and started to demote sites that were using them. This meant that a site could literally see all its rankings lost over night. Even if you are not purposely trying to do and bad SEO techniques you may accidently cause your site to look spammy by overloading it with keywords. Adding too many keywords to the same page or filling the meta data with a phrase you want to get ranked for can land you with a penalty. Although this can be rectified sometimes it takes a long time to get back to a position of authority.

Social media is a great way to advertise new or existing businesses. There are several social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram an LinkedIn. All of them have different ways in which they work meaning you may find some work better for your business than others.

When it comes to social media marketing, try and start off with a plan of what you want to do. Some of the social media platforms offer paid for advertising but you may decide to start off with a free profile and then build on it from there.

Having a social media marketing plan will allow you to easily keep track of what you are going to do and what you have planned next. This will also help when it comes to evaluating how successful something was. Some of the social media sites such as Facebook give you information as to how many people you have reached and how many have interacted with your post. This can be useful to help determine what content gets the best reaction. You can then use this information to tailor your marketing plan going forward. IF you do decide to do paid for advertising through the social media sites, be sure to do your research and make sure that you are setting them up correctly.

A website can be a fantastic marketing tool. It can really make a huge difference to how successful a business is, especially during these times when many businesses have had to revert on online trading during Covid lockdowns.

Some people have a website created but then leave it for months, even years, believing that they have all the information on there that their visitors will require. Although this may be the case, the search engines like to see new content added that may be useful and that is relevant to your business. Search engines such as Google like to see that new content is added to the site on a regular basis. This ensures that the site is relevant. It will really help to improve your rankings on the search engines and push you higher up the results.

So how do you go about adding content without clogging up your main navigation? There are a few ways to do this but some of the most popular ways that work well are to have a blog, news or case studies section. This allows you to add new content, daily if you wish, without over complicating the main site.

If you have created a directory website then marketing is very important and needs to be done with care. There is no point in having a directory site where people can list their business is you have no traffic to the site but there is also no point in having traffic to a site where there are no listings. You need to ensure that the two things are done alongside each other. Ideally you want to get a good number of businesses signed up to start with. You can then set the site live and start to attract traffic. Once the businesses can see that they are getting enquiries through their listing on the site they are more likely to continue with advertising. You may even want to offer them the first month for free.

Sometimes directory listing websites can appeal to small businesses that maybe do not want to go to the expense of having a full website. Allowing them to have an online presence on your site can work wonders for their business and give them another way to attract customers. You do need to think carefully about what forms of marketing are going to work best. If you have a big budget you may try and do a bit of everything, such as social media marketing, TV or radio ads, cold calling, Google AdWords and organic search engine optimisation.

Marketing is vital to help any business survive and grow but with so many different places to invest your money, you need to make sure that you are getting a good return on your investment.

You may find that some marketing avenues do not directly bring in sales but do help to build your brand up over all or get your company recognised. This may help to increase sales further on down the line and also increase the likely hood of returning business.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is done in order to attract organic visitors to your website. Organic visitors are visitors that have found you on the search engines and not through social media or Pay per Click.  Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is mostly done on page and should increase your rankings for certain terms on the likes of Google, Yahoo and Bing. If you find that your website is not showing up for your major search terms then you need to go back and look at your SEO.

There are a number of different theories as to how exactly you do this and although Google will give you details of the sorts of things, they look in their algorithm and what they penalise against, their specific ranking algorithm is strictly confidential.

With the UK slowly coming out of the third lockdown, many businesses are hoping that they may start to return to some sort of normality later this year. Lots of businesses are still able to only run at part capacity. They may have staff working from home, had to close business premises and shops and have furloughed some staff members so not able to deal with queries and orders as quickly as before.  During this time, lots of businesses decided to cut down on their marketing as they couldn’t cope with demand or were not able to offer al the products and services they usually would. But when is the time to star  ramping up the marketing again? Start too early and you may find that you disappoint people if you cannot keep up with demand, leave it too late and you may miss out to competitors.

You need to assess the situation on a regular basis, often week by week. You may want to start doing a bit more advertising now and as the rules and regulations about reopening and restrictions become clearer, adjust your marketing to suit. If you are looking at doing paid for advertising but are not quite ready to start yet, then you could set up all your campaigns meaning you literally just have to hit the button when you are ready to go.

When it comes to launching a new product, you need to plan ahead of time to ensure that it is prevalent when the product is available to sale. You will need to put it on your website as soon as possible as it could take a few weeks for it to be picked up by the search engines. Often, when it is first indexed it may be quite low down the search results, which will make it harder to get traffic to the site.

Ideally if you want to ensure that your product advertising has time to be picked up, you need to start your marketing a few months prior. On your website, create a page with as much information as possible and make sure you put a launch date on if the product is not available to buy now. You may want to put a count down on. Some companies allow customers to pre order items so they know who much demand there may be for the item. A good way to collect data is to ask people to register to receive updates. This will allow you to collect their email but be sure to get their permission to contact them about other news and offers that may be of interest to them.

If you have a website that sells goods or services that are particularly popular around Christmas time then you may of noticed an even bigger increase than normal in traffic to your site. This is because more and more people have decided to shop online more this year due to COVID and so a large percentage that may of come in to your store or bought in persons from a different shop, had now come to you. Although this is great, it does mean you need to be ready for the extra traffic and also extra orders. As the deadline for the last post before Christmas gets closer, it is important to ensure that you get all the orders out in a a timely manner. It is a good idea to have a banner of your website and make it clear at checkout if the parcel will or will not arrive before Christmas. Allowing the customer to pay extra shipping to upgrade their deliver timescale is a good way to make a little extra money whilst also getting more orders in. To cope with the demand for extra bandwidth you need to ensure your hosting is good enough and ideally that you have cloud hosting which will allow for the changes in demand.

Some people may think that in these days of instant messaging and social media posts emailing is a thing of the past but for a small business it can be a valuable marketing tool when used to target clients and promote a business.

Obtaining email addresses of potential clients is key to reaching the target audience and it is commonplace for businesses to ask for email addresses as part of the ordering process. Requesting that customers sign up for a business newsletter or giving away products and services for free are valuable ways to persuade customers to provide their email addresses and hopefully give permission for marketing information from your business.

It is vitally important to respond to email enquires promptly and positively as this can make a good initial impression however bombarding the recipient with countless email marketing correspondence is counterproductive and may result in the client unsubscribing to the email list completely. Emails once a week is ideal but certainly once a month is essential for effective marketing. Autoresponders can be set up to ensure regular emails are sent out as it might be difficult to keep up as the business grows. Always make the emails worth reading by providing useful information, special deal news and repeat customer offers worth having.