This is a guest post by Joseph Eitan founder of Photo Paper Direct.
Most business owners have the potential to become excellent online markers, but for many the difficulty is deciding where to start. Here are my tips to get you pointed in the right direction:
1. Invest wisely and carefully – It’s common for small businesses to invest in the development of their website and leave little finance for online marketing. Consider developing a website which has the most basic functionality that meets the needs of your staff and customers. The reason is, that before running your business for a while you’ll find it very hard to know precisely which features you need and which are obsolete.
2. Evaluate short term vs long term channels – Some online marketing channels will take time to generate traffic and some will take just a few minutes to generate traffic. If you’re still fine-tuning your business model, prices and products perhaps start working on a longer term online marketing channel. For example, search engine optimisation is considered a long term traffic channel because it takes time to optimise a website, while pay per click channels such as Googles’ AdWords can start driving traffic in minutes.
3. Price each channel and budget well – There are various traffic channels in online marketing, some free and some paid. Free channels such as social media optimisation, search engine optimisation, free directories, Google product search etc. are free and will require investment but more in terms of your time. On the other hand, paid traffic channels such pay per click, niche directories, affiliate program, Amazon product placement, eBay product placement etc. will cost the business money from the get go and will therefore require close monitoring.
4. Employ a type of multi-channel strategy – Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The key to small business online marketing is to use all the channels at your disposal and within your budget, from blogging to email marketing, from pay per click to local PR.
5. Always measure and tweak as you go along – It’s important to quickly examine the different marketing channels, their costs and the total revenue generated from those channels to decide whether to stop, tweak or invest more in a particular channel. If you haven’t already, I suggest you use Google Analytics, a free web analytics program from Google which can give you all the transparency you need and revenue per channel.
6. Don’t exceed a set CPA level – Cost Per Acquisition / Action is a term describing how much you can afford to pay to accurate a customer and your online marketing should revolve around this figure. For example, if your website conversion rate is 10% it means you’re converting 1 out of every 10 visitors. Now evaluate how much it costs you to drive 10 visitors to your website and you’ll have your CAP. In some cases the CPA might be acceptable, in other cases it won’t so make sure to stay within an agreed CPA.
7. Keep an open mind - Try, experiment and quickly react to market trends. Online marketing channels which are not working for you today might work in the future and those which are working for you today might prove too dear in the future.
What aspects did you take into account when you’ve decided on your online marketing strategy?
Guest post by Joseph Eitan founder of Photo Paper Direct. Joseph started the business a few years ago which now sales a selection of Inkjet media from large format paper rolls to iron on transfers.
picture credit
Loading ...