Why a marketing consultant can help your business

Marketing and advertising is a vital part of making a business successful. Without any form of marketing, it is very hard to get your products and services found. When it comes to advertising your business, you may want to consider bringing in a marketing consultant who will be able to assist you with all aspects of your marketing. Their job is to access the current forms of marketing that you are doing and suggest other ones that may help your business. They should look at the marketing you are doing and see if it is bring in a good return on your investment. If not then they may advise you to stop it or adapt it to be more profitable. They may advise you to increase your spending on a particular marketing avenue or to try something new in order to reach a wider audience.  

There are two forms of marketing, online and offline. Many companies are now investing much of their marketing budget into online marketing projects such as web marketing, Pay per Click and social media marketing, as a large percentage of customers are using the internet to find companies and services they need and so you need to have good visibility online in order to compete.

How is your website performing on the search engines?

Having a website is the first step to online marketing, but having a website is often not enough on its own. You need to invest time and money to get your website up the search engines and to stay there.

When you have a website, it is important to know how it is performing on the search engines. The first thing you need to do is track how many visitors you are getting to the site. This will show you an overview of how many people are visiting you site on a daily basis. Some servers have stats packages installed on them to allow you to do this or you may wish to use Google Analytics which is user friendly and free. If you find that you are not getting many visitors to the site then there may be an issue with your rankings. To check your rankings, you need to have a list of at least 20 keywords or phrases that you want to be found for. These phrases are what people type in on the search engines, which then pulls up a list that is relevant to that term. Often the more generic phrases will be a lot harder to compete for so ideally you want to have a mix of generic and long tail phrases so see the bigger picture. You can track these yourself by going on to the search engine like Google and typing the keyword in. You have to be careful when doing this as Google will often order the sites you see in order of how often you have visited them rather than if you were just a member of the public searching for the first time

Expanding your business into new locations

Whenever you are looking to do something new within your business, it is vital that you plan for it in advance. It may be that you want to launch a new product or try a click and collect service or possibly target new areas to sell your products or services in.

It is vital that create a marketing strategy well in advance of when the change is going to happen so you have plenty of time to market the idea and let your existing and potential customers know.

If you are going to start advertising in new areas then you need to think of the most cost effective way of doing so. It may be that you decide to do a door to door leaflet drop or perhaps you use Google AdWords to get your site found for new locations. Whatever you chose to done sure to have a way that you can track how successful it has been. Social media is another great way to target new locations and there are often local groups that you may be able to join and advertise in to get the word around. Just always check the rules of the group before posting!

Web marketing through the Covid pandemic

So many businesses have struggled over the past twelve months due to the restrictions in place because of the Covid pandemic. It may be that the business has not been able to open at all such as many in the leisure industry or that the business has had to change to trade online. For this who are still able to sell products or services in some way, it is important to continue marketing.

If you have recently moved to selling products online then you need to ensure that people can find your products. Most people use a search engine such as Google or Bing to find products they want m. In order to get your site found you may need to enlist the help of a marketing expert. They will be able to advise you where’s best to invest your money. It may be that you also decide to do a Pay per Click campaign to get your site found. Google have their own one called Google AdWords which allows you to get traffic to your site almost instantly. You pay per click through to your website in hoping that these visitors will then purchase from you. The amount you pay will depend on the competition for the keyword and the quality of your site in relation to that phrase.

How to market your small business

If you are a business owner of a small business you may not have thousands of punds few every month to spend on marketing. You need to think very carefully about how best to invest your marketing budget to quickly see a decent return on your investment.

You should already know how important your customers are as not only might you rely on their repeat business but also their word of mouth reviews to gain you more customers. Word of mouth marketing is great, but it is not ideal to have to solely rely on it.  You need to explore other marketing avenues that work well for your industry and business. Costs can often be tight in a small business so each pound needs to be spent wisely. There are a few ways in which you can market your small business for little money or sometimes for free but you often do need to be willing to invest some of your time.

Social media is a great marketing platform for business of all sizes. It allows you to connect with people in your local area if your business is aimed locally or nationally. Setting up a profile or account on the social media sites is very easy but you may find that you struggle to manage them. If this is the case then you may wish to either go on a social media marketing training course or outsource the management to a third party.