It’s staggering the number of businesses who have a website made upon starting their business and then never give the content they have online another thought. Not only can this approach give you real problems going forward, but you are also missing out on fantastic opportunities to get more sales through the door. So here we look at how to keep your content up to date, why and when to do it.
Social Media: The Quick & Easy Way
We all know of social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, it’s where we go to argue about football, politics and to look at pictures of kittens, right? Well, yes, but it can also be very useful for business promotion as well, and the beauty of it is that anyone can use with practically no IT knowledge or training. But what is useful is to know is how to use these to get the maximum effect from the postings. Firstly you need potential customers to see your posts, offers, and adverts, you may be coming up with the most engaging content the world has ever seen but if you have 10 followers (and 6 of those are bots) then it’s all for nothing. So firstly, encourage current and past customers to follow you on one or all of these platforms, especially if you post offers and deals they can be persuaded more easily if they see a benefit to them. There many ways to get followers, which has been covered here before in more detail.
The other great thing about these platforms is that they are designed with targeted marketing in mind, you will no doubt have heard about how companies like Facebook gathers all of your personal data for commercial gain, but maybe thought how it that worthwhile? Well, it’s here, and it’s useful for you! So when you decide to pay for adverts or promoted posts (yes you have to pay to gain advantage of this data, but it’s easily worth it) you can ensure that it gets to your exact customer -base, you can specify age, gender, location, and even hobbies and interests, giving you a very economical method of advertising. There are strengths and weaknesses to each of the social media platforms as well, and they should be used in different ways, and they might not all be as perfect for you as each other depending on your business type. Facebook is the oldest and most traditional one and has the most mature user-base, it is good for having a business page that people will find and posting occasional offers and updates to your followers. Twitter is still very established but is much faster-paced than Facebook, posts come and go faster and is very much based on trends, and what’s trending. If you find a trend that relates to your product or service then tag on, using a hashtag and you will get more exposure this way. For example, if you sell soccer memorabilia and the World Cup is on, put loads of posts with hashtags such as #FIFAWorldCuo. Other platforms such as Instagram are much more visual and lend themselves to photo and video content very well, although more visually striking content is a good idea on any post.
The Website: How do you Use It?
Once Social Media has been taken care of the next logical thing to talk about is your website, and although social media pages are important, any business of a decent standing has to have a good and functional website. So what is your site used for? Is it a fairly static site with some background information on the company and a few contact details? If so then it probably needs minimal updating, but even a site like this needs checked every so often, even if it’s only to check it’s not gone offline, as a day or two of lost presence on the internet can be very costly. If the site is more dynamic, with changing content and even an online shop then it needs to be monitored a lot more closely, even have a member of staff or a team dedicated to this. The number of visitors is important, but not everything, you will want to monitor any rises and falls in this amount and see if it makes a big difference to sales.
Constantly Assess Success
So now that you know what the website is being used for you will want to monitor if it is achieving that or not? You don’t want any downtime or, in fact, loss of performance. So as we stated before check visitor numbers, but also your marketing success, through the website and social media. Ask new customers where they heard of you and you will quickly get an idea of which online promotional channels are working for you and which aren’t. There is some excellent software that can do this for you, if you utilize an app like ContentKing, it can take a lot of the hard work out of this for you.
Is It Seen?
A big part of having a successful website is to ensure it is seen. So we will want to be certain that Google and the other big search engines give you as a viable result when people are searching for something. Firstly, you will want to know what keywords and phrases that your customers are searching for that will turn into sales for you if you come up in the results, especially high up the first page. A big part of succeeding in this is to build a quality number of backlinks, this simply means the number of other websites that have links to your site from theirs. But it can’t just be any old links they must be quality, fewer quality links far exceed a high number of poor links in usefulness. If you are unsure you can employ an outside agency to do this for you, one such as outreachpete.com is excellent for this.
Are the Right People Seeing It
Finally, it pays to make sure all this work is not for nothing and that you are getting the right audience to see your content. Some market research might be a good idea before-hand and see who is interested and who is not.
