Simple solutions to expand your marketing

The digital market place is a crowded bazaar where having your voice heard louder than others is a difficult game. For so many businesses, gaining a foothold on internet is a daunting and challenging battle – to be not pushed to the proverbial side alley in a crowded bazaar or pay inordinate sum to have a prime location. Many times, small businesses take the greatest hit for reasons such as little in the way of resources to devote to marketing, including a small marketing budget.

Of course the best options in such case are free options. Now depending how your business is structured – b2b or b2c, your marketing strategy will differ. However, certain overlaps will remain. Whether you are b2b or b2c, building an integrated digital web presence is crux – and you can do it for free. An  ‘integrated’ presence establishes your business’s on multiple web portal with interlinked content, such tactics will improve traffic onto your website and work well in parallel to SEO. We will not be covering SEO – there is plenty of material regarding SEO on the web. What we will discuss is grouping of web marketing tactics to generate traffic to your website.

Divide your marketing content into atleast two broad categories:

• Industry-related content
• Market-relevant personal content

Try to create an overlap between the two categories of content – if sharing industry relevant content from third-party sources, have some commonality with your business. The content can be news, blogs, newsletters, random blurbs (your own or otherwise). Write blogs to inform your readers about specific topics that affect your market, reference and suggest other content relevant to the topic. If you share news, share something related to the nature of your business.

Keep in mind that the content has two purpose:

• Attract the audience
• Inform the audience

If your content focuses on these two things, your audience has a higher chance of trusting you – build a relationship with them via marketing.

Next, where do you find the audience? On social media ofcourse (But you probably knew that). Which platforms you choose to market the content on depends whether you are b2b or b2c. This is when you start laying the net.

For b2b:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Etc…

For b2c:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Etc…

Now that we have determined where your audience gathers, customize your content to the particular social media platforms you will be posting it on. Concise and eye catching, get the users to like, share, and read your content. Furthermore, get them to click on your links. Share the same content on different social media platforms throughout the week and your are bound to increase traffic. How good your website or eCommerce platform is will determine how long the visitor remains on your website.

Such simple methods will create an integrated presence of your business at no additional cost. Simple yet effective, make sure you are persistent and patient.