21 Jul Free Online Marketing Tools to Build Your Business
One of the greatest benefits of digital marketing is that there are tons of options to market your business at no cost to you. You heard that correctly – FREE, NO CHARGE! It may take a bit longer to achieve your goals and objectives with your marketing plan but it can be done. In fact, it is done on a daily basis by small business owners everywhere who know how to use free online marketing tools.
Local Listing Services
Google Places and other local listing services are the best sites to start marketing your business. The benefit of using one of these services is that your business is listed locally so that when a user searches local businesses in your category, your business pops up on Google Maps with your address and phone number. To participate, simply register your business. Google will verify before it is listed. Yahoo and Bing have similar services so it is smart to list your business with all of them.
Social Media
Social Media encompasses a lot of options. Facebook is probably the first site that comes to mind when thinking about social media. You can promote special offers, new products, post your blogs and just about anything that is relevant and interesting on your Facebook business page. Twitter is directed more at your customers and a great way to draw them to your site. If your business serves other businesses (B2B) consider LinkedIn. You can post relevant industry information as well as connect with other people in your field, potential customers, networking contacts, and friends and family members in the professional sector. Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr are more recent vehicles to promote your products. It is especially important when marketing to the under 30 crowd.
Blogs
Blogs are an integral part of online marketing even though they are probably the most misunderstood way to keep your business relevant. A lot of small business owners think all that you need to do is talk about your business or products in a short article but blogs involve a lot more. Blogs offer you the opportunity to be the authority in your industry by writing about relevant information as well as other topics indirectly related. The key to a successful blog entry is to write in a way that is easy to read, engaging and entertaining – easier said than done!
YouTube
YouTube is a great place to feature your products or services in action on video. Whether you are showing how something works or talking about your business, you can create and produce a video. But, as with any YouTube video, your video has to be entertaining and something from which users will gain new knowledge or understanding. Oh, and make sure you promote it on your website and in social media.
Website Content
This is extremely important for marketing your business. On your website, the content must always be fresh, interesting and pertinent so that people want to stay on your site. More importantly, it has have SEO (search engine optimization) so that Google and the other search engines can display your site based on keyword searches.
Lots of Other Online Marketing Tools
There are lots of other online marketing tools but these are a good first step in your online marketing journey. The good thing is that you can do all of these yourself and incur no charge. But, truthfully, it might be a good idea to dedicate a small amount of your business budget to working with someone who specializes in digital marketing to help you especially the writing for blogs, content and social media.
No Comments