A surprisingly low percentage of small businesses even bother with online marketing – 26%. Especially for small businesses in competitive sectors, developing an online marketing strategy is important. In a field where visibility and site traffic are everything, the earlier you adopt online marketing, the sooner consumers will start finding you in the search engines – and the sooner you’ll be able to reap the rewards.
Online marketing isn’t something you can do just once and leave it alone. You need to maintain your presence and update your content regularly. This is because online content has an expiration date, at least as far as its ability to keep your profile high goes. Regularly updated content is seen as more relevant by search engines; and if you don’t update your content regularly, your competition probably is.
Just having a website isn’t enough; you need to reach your potential customers where they spend their time. This could mean starting (or regularly commenting on) a blog, using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or other social networks and social media platforms – it all depends on which media channels will do the best job of reaching your audience.
Businesses who don’t use social media may assume that their customers don’t either. They’re wrong; just think about the numbers involved. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn combined have 750 million daily users – more than twice the population of the US. You may also want to consider this statistic: the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women between 35 and 65 years of age.
When businesses take a proactive approach to online marketing, they have the opportunity to do something that every business and every brand aspires to do: build a relationship with consumers. If done right, this can build the kind of loyal customer base that every business wants to have.
Green Elephant Social Media Marketing 