Getting your new business off the ground is a great feeling. But it is only the first step in achieving success. Keeping it in the air in a crowded marketplace surrounded by tough economic circumstances is not easy, and according to USA Today, 20 percent do not even make it to their first birthday.
Long-term success demands dedication, ambition and a coherent digital marketing strategy to battle on equal terms with the better-established competition. After all, for many businesses, the website is effectively the shopfront, so placing the focus on a strong SEO strategy and a great online presence is absolutely vital. Here are three basic digital marketing facts that every new business needs to remember.
UX is everything
Without customers, your business is dead in the water. From a digital marketing perspective, for “customers” think “visitors.” The people who visit your site are the number one priority, and everything you do online needs to be geared towards them. That might sound obvious, but there is an astonishing amount of vanity projects out there where the site owners place what they want over what the customer wants.
UX stands for user experience and it applies from the moment a visitor enters your site. Is it welcoming and easy to navigate? Does it make the visitor want to read on, hit the call to action buttons and find out more? Do the pages load quickly and easily on mobile? If the answer to any of the above is anything less than “Yes, of course,” then you’ve got work to do.
Content is king
It’s one of the best worn phrases in digital marketing, but is no less true for that. A great looking, fast loading website is only going to get you so far. It has to have content that will capture attention, engage and inspire.
Visitors arrive at your site because they have entered a search in Google, asking a question or describing a problem. Your content needs to answer that question or provide a better solution to the problem than anyone else. High quality, unique content will also do wonders for your SEO, because it encourages increased traffic and better conversions.
Social media is huge
Pay attention to the above two points and you have a great website with fantastic content. Now all you need to do is make sure people know about it, and in 2018 that means getting social.
The numbers speak for themselves. There are more than two billion people on Facebook alone. If someone had said 30 years ago that there would be a platform that could reach a third of the people on the globe at a single stroke, they would have been laughed out of town.
The right social media strategy enables you to reach and engage with your target audience. That engagement aspect is vital. You post unique, on-brand content. Followers like it, share it, comment on it. You respond to their comments. Once the snowball starts, it can be a powerful thing indeed.
