So you’ve created a website, launched your business proposition, and now you’re twiddling your thumbs waiting for the enquiries to roll in.
Building a new brand takes time and patience. You might even need to rethink your strategy or change your approach. But, with a clear vision and determination, plus a little know-how, you can build a successful brand online.
First things first, you need to plan your internet marketing strategy. To make a plan, consider the following:
The objectives you set for your business shouldn’t focus on how many followers or likes your social media posts achieve. Instead, you should measure success based on engagement, click-through and conversion rates. By outlining realistic, measurable goals, you can assess the effort required to ensure you set about achieving your goals.
Your business needs to establish its identity. To do this, you must focus on representing your business consistently using the same colour scheme, formatting, branding, ethos, morals and personality, to ensure potential customers view your outfit as genuine and trustworthy.
For example, if you claim to be environmentally friendly, and friends of the planet – packaging products in reams of plastic isn’t going to present your business offering as authentic.
Getting to grips with identifying your target audience and what they want will help you create an offering that will stand out from your competitors.
When establishing customer personas, consider the following:
Recognising that your target audience is real people with actual needs will benefit your approach to your internet marketing strategy and resulting engagement.
How is your competition interacting across social media? Check them out and see what they do well and not so well and consider:
By understanding your competitors and the content they post, you can identify where and what information is lacking and find a gap to fill to help you maximise the potential of your online business. It is beneficial to follow your competition to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Such knowledge can help you build your brand better!
If your business is not already on social media, it’s time to identify the platforms offering the most value to your business. Choose platforms your target audience is accessing, including:
Avoid signing up for too many social networks as it will be impossible to keep up with all of them effectively. Remember to keep branding consistent across all networks and web pages to ensure people know how to identify your brand.
If your business is already on social media, you may need to assess what is and isn’t working. Check out your competition and ascertain if you are targeting the right people with the right content in the right place.
Plan your content meticulously with a social media calendar. Create content that educates, entertains and inspires to encourage a reaction. You can post:
Understanding the content that your audience will engage with can help you plan and execute your content plan. For help with written content, optimised for search engines, get in touch with Writeable. We create Writing to Rank… Content to Connect. Here for all of your content writing needs.
Sharing content across relevant forms of social media will help create conversations that enable you to communicate directly with potential customers. Make sure you get involved in:
Talking to your customers and addressing comments and feedback, helps build your brand image as a caring, feeling, customer-friendly business with consideration for its customers.
Tools such as Google Analytics will help you understand the return on investment (ROI) of your internet marketing strategy. Understanding the results of the measurables will help you as a business re-evaluate and tweak your approach for long-term success.
Here at Writeable, we like to support other small businesses by helping them understand the ins and outs of internet marketing, social media and search engine optimisation. And as experts in SEO content writing in and around Aylesbury you can rely on us if you need support to build your brand with written website content, blogs, eBooks and much more.