Marketing is vast and many business owners struggle to know how and where to invest their marketing budget. If they only have a very small budget then it is even more important that they receive a greater return on their investment to allow them to continue to invest in marketing in the future.

Marketing your business correctly can be the difference between being successful and failing. There are many ways in which you can market a business such as online through social media sites or through your own, door to door sales or cold calling, email marketing or advertising on the TV or in local newspapers and magazines. If you decide to only market your business using one avenue you may be missing out on opportunities to get more business. If for example you decide to only do offline marketing then you will never reach the people that only search online for a product or service and this is a growing population. Many people are using the internet to find services or products they need and therefore if you have no presence online, you will not be able to compete with those that do.

Online marketing is so vast that it is easy to get carried away with just one element and neglect the other parts that are equally as important. All too often website owners and even web companies forget that there are more than just one or two online marketing platforms and ideally you want to be doing a bit of everything to give your site the best chance.

Think carefully about who your target customer is. This will help you decide which marketing avenues may work best. IF for example you are reaching out to younger people age between 16-30 then you may chose social media marketing as most young people now have access to these sorts of sites. Social media also offers a paid for advertising opportunity which will allow you to only show your ads to specific groups of people. So if you have a barbers, you can select to only show your advert to men in a specific area.  You should also make sure you include SEO (Search engine optimisation) on your website. This will improve the organic listings on your site, so if someone searches on Google for example, your site will rank higher if you have a good level of SEO.

With the current situation, many businesses are still not up and running or if they are – they are having to run at a reduced capacity. This may mean that their overheads are high but their income has dropped down. For this reason, lots of businesses have started to cut back on their online marketing but this is often not the best idea.

Some forms of online marketing are pretty instant such as Google Adwords or Facebook marketing but others need to be built up over time and if you stop them you may lose at lot of the hard work that you have built up over the last few months or years. If for example you are allowing a web marketer to undertake SEO (search engine optimisation) for you then this may take at least 6 months to start to see any real benefit.

Before cutting down on your web marketing, think if there are any other ways in which you can reduce your costs which does not affect your marketing as when you are ready to start trading again you want to ensure you still have good positions on the search engines such as Google.

If you are interested in finding out how your website is performing, then you should ensure that it is linked to Google’s Web Master Tools. Webmaster Tools is free online sofftware that allows you to add any sites that you own / manage. Once added to your secure control panel you can submit sitemaps, track visitors and searches, have an overview of rankings. You can also find out any there are any issues with the website that Google may have found when it crawled your site. These may be issues such as broken links or elements that are not mobile friendly.

This tool is a must for every website owner or its marketing company as not only is it useful from an analysis point of view but also to make sure you are sorting out any compatibility or pages that may not be loading when visited.

If you add a lot of new content  to the website or make a few changes to the site that you want Google to pick up then you can submit a request through the Google Web Master Tools control panel asking them to revisit the site and re-index it.

Be sure to look at the search phrases that are showing up as what people typed in to find you as you may be surprised to find out what people are searching for to get to your website.

Many of us use the internet as part of our daily lives. It may be that you do your banking online, order your weekly food shop or simple use it to keep in touch with friends and family via social media. Over the past decade online security has become even more important and it is crucial that you know how to protect yourself in order to eliminate the risks of a cyber-attack.

Many of us are simply not aware of what to look out for and innocently could be giving away our person details to these fraudsters, opening ourselves up to spam and worse still fraud.

When visiting a website it is vital that you know what to look out for. If the site redirects you on to another site and looks odd, then it probably is odd so don’t use it. Never click a link that has been sent to you without confirming it is genuine. If in doubt, visit the site through your browser by searching on Google for the website.

If the website is asking for person details, always check that you are using a secure connection as open wifi networks can sometimes be compromised.

All too often people get calls from companies claiming they have an issue with their computer and that they can talk you through how to fix it. Internet companies do not do this unless you have registered a fault with them, so if in doubt hang up the phone and call the usual number for your internet provider.

With Christmas well on the way you should already be thinking about January and if and how you are going to do January sales. More and more businesses are getting on board with January sales and most companies have some sort of deal on during this time.

If you are in the ecommerce business then you will probably have already completed most of your Christmas sales, but soon after the big day Boxing Day / January sales start and you need to be quick to have a chance at competing against the other players in the market.

When you list items for sale on your website, they will often get indexed by the search engines such as Google within a few weeks, but you may find that this is too late to start to attract any customers and you may miss out on a huge opportunity. It is worth spending some time and get your products listed on Google Shopping, then when the prices change you can submit the list to them for them to quickly update.

Another way to get your pages picked up is to do paid for pay per click advertising to show that you have a sale on and perhaps to promote some of your top selling products.

A marketing strategy is very important to any business. It can be easy to get carried away with investing in multiple marketing avenues and you need a way of being able to track how successful they are and how much money you spending compared with the return you get on the investment. Some forms of marketing are done not to directly get sales but to boost awareness of a brand or to get customer feedback but these can all help have a positive effect on other marketing you do.  If you are using multiple companies for your marketing then you may also find that they overlap their services meaning that you are paying twice for the same thing, or even missing out a significant areas that you should be investing in. 

You may want to have your own in-house marketing team or person who are responsible for your setting up and analysing all your marketing campaigns. You may decide that it is more beneficial to outsource the marketing to a third party agency if you do not have the knowledge and experience in-house. This will often cost more but you may get a better return.  

It is important to create short term and long term goals when it comes to marketing and be realistic with your expectations.

Google Adwords can be a very powerful marketing tool if used correctly. It can bring in visitors to your site almost instantly and help you to get to the top of the search engine results with little effort.

It is relatively easy to set up a Pay Per Click campaign, and many people do it without really understanding exactly how it all works and what they need to do in order to get the most for their money. There are so many settings within Google Adwords (PPC) that it can be hard to know which ones you should use.

Google often set many of the settings by default but this is not always the best setting for you and your business. You need to be able to tailor the settings to suit your needs and get the most out of your campaigns. When you set a campaign up be sure choose the “all features” option rather than a standard campaign this will allow you to tweak each setting individually and give you full control over the ads and keywords. 

Another option that you may want to check is regarding the budget. You can allow Google to optimise your budget to obtain clicks, but again this leaves you little control to be able to set your own budgets per keyword etc. If you are not confident with Adwords then it is recommended that you use a specialist company to at least set the initial campaigns up for you.

Online competition is becoming much more prevalent and if you do not stay ahead of the game, the chances are you will lose many potential customers to your competitors. It is important to put some time aside, ideally on a monthly basis to review your competitor’s online presence and compare it to what you offer. This means checking not only their website but also their social media and other forms of online marketing.

If one of your competitors have started to offer a service that you currently do not, then you need to think carefully about if this is something you should also be offering and the cost / time implications involved if you did.

It may be that they are simply a lot more active on the social media sites and by dedicating a little bit more time, you could also up your game on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  Video is growing in popularity on websites and customers like to be able to see videos of the products or services they are interested in purchasing. This can be costly but can increase the number of conversions you get, meaning that it will pay for itself quite quickly.

Many people have been bombarded over the last few weeks with emails and letters from companies asking them to opt in to receiving further communication from them. This has all come about following the new EU GDPR rulings (General data protection regulation) that is coming in to action on the 25th May 2018.

Many companies collect data from websites, enquiries and social media and then use this data to contact their customers with offers and updates. GDPR has been bought in to allow people to have more control over who has their data and what it is used for. From the 25th May, companies will be expected to clearly state what information if has about its customers and what it intends to use that information for. They will also need to allow people to easily opt out of receiving this information and ask to see what data is being help about them. GDPR will also ensure that should there be a data breech there are processes in place to ensure that everyone who is affected is contacted.

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