Marketing is an essential aspect of any business, whether small or large and whether it sells products or services. Unless, you inform people about your products and services, they will remain unknown in the market. Thus, we have Marketing!
The first step towards marketing your business is to do it cautiously! You need to make sure that your brand remains intact and that your marketing campaigns produce effective results in order to retain a good profit margin. A significant part of any marketing budget is expenditure on product promotion. However,
with efficient strategies in place, you can often devise very cost competitive ways to market your products and yet achieve great results.
The Internet is one of the most powerful and effective platforms to promote your business. Not only does it reduce your marketing costs, but also it also takes your business to a global scale and makes it accessible to international audiences. Here are some of the online marketing channels that you can employ for your business:
Email Marketing
Pay Per Click Advertisement
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Banner Advertisement
Video Marketing
Business to Business Marketplace (B2B)
These resources help you drive traffic to your business website, which is essential to increasing your sales and revenue. Moreover, you can monitor the amount of traffic that you attract to your website, and also sort between junk and targeted traffic.
Let us understand each of the above online marketing channels in more detail.
Email Marketing
Also referred to as ‘online marketing’ on a broader sense, email marketing involves firing promotional email messages and online newsletters to potential audiences. Done diligently and consistently, it keeps audiences informed about your products and services so that they turn to you whenever they need any kind of product or service that you offer.
Pay Per Click Advertisements
Pay per click advertising is a very effective form of online advertising wherein advertisements are placed on various websites and search engines. Businesses pay their host each time their ad is clicked. In case of search engines, advertisers bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
Banner Advertisements
Businesses can pay other websites to display the business’ banner advertisement on that other website. This enhances the visibility of the business and invites users to click through to the website.
Video Marketing
With the advancements in social media, videos are becoming an increasingly popular way to market your business to your audiences. Videos allow you to demonstrate the efficiency and work process of your products and services. This allows for greater transparency and, therefore, increased credibility.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is an extremely powerful way of attracting relevant traffic to your website and takes businesses one step closer to their sales hits. However, SEO is a slow and gradual process that takes time to show effective results. It requires investment on full time SEO experts who are dedicated to working on your website..
Business to Business Marketplaces
B2B marketplaces are excellent platforms for businesses to come together and promote their products and services to other businesses who might be interested in the same. Unlike B2C platforms, B2B portals often have users with larger budgets and, therefore, greater revenue potential for your business. You can connect with entrepreneurs, non profit organizations and even government agencies from around the world and increase your business networking. It is great way of online business procurement and reduces marketing and trading costs by a huge margin.
Disclaimer : Sabra Easterday is the owner and founder of MatchB2B. Sabra is also a lawyer with a special interest in business issues and e-marketplaces. Notwithstanding that Sabra Easterday is a lawyer, nothing in this article and no services of MatchB2B or its website are legal services and no attorney-client relationship exists between any reader of this article or user, customer or potential customer of MatchB2B, and MatchB2B, its website or Sabra Easterday.
