Digital marketing requires specialized skills. While you may be adept at sales or developing creative ideas, you may falter when it comes to actually marketing your business. If you’re an entrepreneur who is struggling with the digital PR side of things, here’s a crash course in online marketing.
1. Web search is important.
You may know how to use a search engine, but do you know how potential customers are using their search engines? Securing a great ecommerce website builder is a start, but you’ll want to hire an SEO pro who can maximize the content. You’ll need to position your company’s online presence to rank for search terms. Plus, search engines gather important information about search trends and mobile device use, which you can mine for intelligence. This will help you refine your marketing messaging so it’s relevant to your audience.
2. Approach social media marketing with sophistication.
If you haven’t yet used social media for business purposes, you may have a skewed view of how people use their accounts. Sure, a lot of people upload funny photos from the weekend to Facebook and write to their favorite celebrities on Twitter. However, there’s an entire community of buyers and influencers out there to tap into.
Understand that you need to spend money on social media in order to make an impact. Also, don’t expect every single post to go viral. By attracting followers to your social media accounts with the help of paid advertising, you can direct them back to your website, blog, or online shop.
3. Draft savvy pitches.
Once upon a time, it was enough to send a press release to a number of journalists. Most of the time, you’d get some sort of coverage. Today, things have changed. There’s an overabundance of information and journalists are bogged down with junk pitches day in and day out. Before you contact a journalist, find a story about your company that is actually interesting. Then, learn a bit about that journalist and the kind of stories they write. Finally, contact them via e-mail with a personalized, succinct pitch, not a standard press release. If you must send a PR to a number of outlets, make sure there’s an attractive headline, as well as a hook in the first paragraph.
By learning the ropes when it comes to marketing, you give your company the best chance possible at competing in your niche.
