To many business owners, a website is the only real marketing tool they consider, but that of course is only one of many tools available to the business owner looking to promote his or her company online. That's why I have put together this list of some of the top Internet marketing tools that every business owner should consider, regardless if they are a mom and pop shop, or a multi-national corporation.
The nice thing about these online marketing tools is that they are all free (or mostly free), you just need to spend time to learning how to use them properly.
Website:
This should be the center of your marketing campaign! Web sites are cheap - for the cost of a moderate sized direct mail campaign (that lasts only a week or two at most), you can have a permanent position on the web to use for your customers to learn more about your company and services, post specials, direct your customers to for service manuals, or other documents.
Additionally, your web site will serve as a way for people searching online for "auto repair in Elgin" or "Marketing firm in Elgin" etc. If you aren't there, without good content, and well optimized you will potentially miss that customer who is searching online.
(Web sites do require annual domain registration of about $10 and monthly hosting service ranging from $5-$10 / month)
Email List:
Once you have a website and start promoting it to your customers, friends, and associates you'll be able to start creating an email newsletter that will cost ZERO to send out monthly updates, compared to hundreds or thousands for a direct mail campaign that isn't as targeted.
Blog:
Like your website, blogs serve as a way to communicate online - but in a more casual way. This is your opportunity to provide information such as tips, tools, advice that doesn't really belong on your company website but might be of interest to your customers and is certainly a great way to interact with potential customers and build a loyal following of people who consider you to be an expert.
Social Media Profiles:
Social Media Profiles serve three main purposes in your internet marketing plan:
- Drive traffic through inbound links
- Improve branding by building trust and showing your number of "friends" or "connections". In theory, someone with 1,000 connections is more important than someone with only 2.
- Communicate various pieces of information through your friends' network as well as visitors to your profile page who might view photos of your recent events, articles about your products and services, and various other interesting items that are valuable to your overall branding strategy but don't "fit" on your formal business website.
Everyone is famliar with MySpace, but business owners should also consider Facebook and Linkedin, as well as various specialty networks such as dogster, or Eons (MySpace for Boomers) depending on where your target market is.
Twitter:
Twitter can be considered a micro-blog, but its real value is in how connected it is and that it forces one to communicate things clearly and concisely in 140 character tweets. Also, unlike Blogs or Social Media Profiles, where people can comment, but you create the hub of the content, Twitter is both a tool for people to communicate with you as well as you to communicate with others directly.
For instance, you can become an expert by following various tweets and responding to them, but you can also create your own tweets to communicate important news and observations to your followers. Plus, since Twitter is extremely connected, you can connect your blog's RSS feed to twitter via TwitterFeed and share stories with your followers, as well as connect Twitter with Facebook and share your tweets with readers there.
Syndicated Articles, HubPages, and Squidoo Lenses:
Your blog isn't the only place online that you should write articles for. By submitting articles to syndication sites, or creating articles on HubPages or Lenses on Squidoo, you can build a web of links pointing back to your website. These will both drive traffic and most of these services will also pass link value to your sites so that search engines will value your website more highly.
This is particularly true for Squidoo and Google, where a high-quality and well respected lens can dramatically impact your sites ranking.
These are only a handful of online marketing tools available and there is certainly more than I could discuss about each one of them, but this is a general overview of some of the essential marketing tools that all business owners should consider using and how they connect with each other and your overall marketing plan.
What are your favorite marketing tools?
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