You can have the best product and service in the world, it’s all irrelevant if the public doesn’t even know it exists. The barrier of entry has been significantly lowered into commerce, and all it takes is a laptop and a dream to start nowadays. The hard part isn’t building a business however, but bringing people in and building your brand. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools and techniques that you can use to attract an audience with strong buying intent, even on a budget. Here are a few tech tools that you can use to boost your marketing efforts.
SEO
Search marketing can take various forms. But when we speak about the term, we’re usually talking about SEO orPay Per Click advertising.
Both of these options have their pros and cons. SEO is the science of ensuring maximum visibility on search engines whenever someone conducts an organic search. This is done by having a consistent content creation strategy and increasing the number of organic mentions of your site among other things. But it’s also about optimizing user experience through good site performance, relevant keyword rich content, and good navigation for instance.
SEO is for those who are trying to go for a long term strategy. While it can take time to get dividends, SEO can start paying for itself in totally free organic traffic to your site.
SEO is also a great tool if you want to get more attention locally. Local mentions could get you a lot of attention from the people closer to you. However, mastering local SEO is not easy, and you may require some assistance, at least show you the ropes. And you have to work with an agency that understands your core audience. If you live in New Hampshire, for instance, only a New Hampshire online marketing firm will truly understand you clientele, and where your business needs to be to get maximum attention.
Pay Per Click Marketing
Pay Per Click marketing, or PPC as it is commonly referred to, is also a form of search marketing but works very differently. In this case, people bid certain amounts on keywords related to their products or services. They then pay every time someone clicks on their ads wherever it is displayed, whether it’s on search engines, websites, social media, or e-commerce marketplaces like Amazon.
The beauty of PPC is that you only pay for results, and you could start getting traffic literally minutes after a campaign has gone live. The issue however is knowing how much you can actually spend on bids, and if you can turn a profit. PPC is not always the best option for very crowded niches either.
Geofencing
Geofencing is the next frontier in mobile marketing and can be an extremely powerful tool in the right hands. Geofencing allows you to create a virtual fence around a certain area and send targeted ads to people entering the fence. This could be the geographical area around a store, but also around an unrelated area, such as a parking lot for instance.
The implications of this are huge. For instance, you could target a certain health spa’s parking lot and send them offers to products they may like, or target a stadium’s parking lot after a big win and give special deals to fans for instance. Geofencing, when used creatively, could allow you to attract tons of highly targeted traffic fast and with little effort.
Conclusion
Technology has always been an integral part of marketing, and in a world where a growing number of transactions are made virtually, we can only expect the barrier between the two to continue to slowly disappear. This is why it would be wise for any marketer to stay on top of the newest trends, and use them to their advantage to gain an edge on their competition.
