If you’re in the process of setting up an online business, it’s worth looking at the people who have come before you. There are a lot of online established companies, and some are more successful than others. It all depends on the type of marketing campaign they run, whether they can reach their pool of demand and how well they stand out from the competition . The good news here is that you have the advantage of hindsight. This means you’ll be able to look at the companies that have succeeded and the ones that have failed, finding the trends to ensure your company is a massive hit. So, what is the difference between the success stories online and the catastrophic failures?
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When you’re running a business online, you need to understand that your website is the heart of it. It’s where people are going to go when they want information about your company. It’s the place that you’ll release fresh content first. As such, you must make sure that it is designed to perform and this starts from the initial setup. You need to use a company like ipage to buy and establish an area online for your business site. If you look at ipage reviews or reviews of similar companies, you’ll see that it gives you unlimited disk space. Why is this important?
One of the crucial factors you need to think about running a business online is your search ranking. You need your search ranking to be high to ensure that customers can find your company. A trait that measures search ranking is the speed and agility of your site. If you can’t ensure that your site responds effectively, it will be dead in months. This is why you should always host your site and ensure unlimited capabilities. If you check out some of the dead domains online, you’ll see that a lot of them clearly failed because of their performance.
Head to a site like IGN, Virgin or Buzzfeed, and you’ll see that they respond rapidly. In fact, site owners are even changing the layout to ensure that it’s easy and fast for users to view content on these sites.
Make It Personal
Image source FlickrWhen you think about setting up a marketing campaign for your business online, you can’t afford to be too formal. You need to think about giving customers something personal that they can connect with. For instance, if you look a company like Synergy Dental, you’ll see that they have been sharing stories of days in the office through Instagram. By doing this, you can give users a window into the background behind your company. Online businesses to do this too, essentially showing some skin online.
It’s so easy to do this these days, and you’ll see that if you check out Snapchat. Browsing through the stories, you can see that many of the updates highlight the people behind the company, Journalists are announcing stories, tech developers are showing off new products, and reviewers are giving their thoughts on the latest films and movies. By doing this, you are connecting to your audience in a real way that they are going to respond to. Better yet, they will engage on social media. That, in turn, could lead to you attracting more customers for your business.
Going Viral
If you want to make sure your business is a hit online, you need to think about ensuring that part of your marketing campaign goes viral. The definition of going viral can change depending on who you speak to. For some people it’s 10k views, for others, it’s 100k, and some media outlets won’t refer to a story as viral unless it hits one million. It all depends on the perspective, but the truth is the number doesn’t matter. If you are happy with the performance that piece of content has had, it’s gone viral for your company.
The question then is what type of content makes this kind of impact online. Well, it’s important to tell a story. All great pieces of marketing content have a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s just like the marketing funnel . You bring customers in and with the right content you can then direct them to committing to a purchase.
One example of a great piece of content would be the ‘be more dog’ campaign by 02. What’s the story behind this? Well, the idea is that people aren’t enjoying life enough and are missing out on great events and opportunities. Like a cat, you’re too laid back and not being active enough with what you want to do. The solution is to gain access to exclusive notifications to new event, which it just so happens 02 provides! Using this, you’ll be more of a dog and stay active getting the most enjoyment from life. Unsurprisingly, this marketing campaign was a success for them and caught the attention of online customers. This is what you need to aim for when marketing your own business online.
Staying Connected
Image source FlickrFinally, you need to make sure that you are connected online to the right sources. You might think we’re referring to social media here and that’s certainly part of it. You should have social media profiles for your business on all the major networks. This will allow you to stay connected to your customers and hopefully interest new users and buyers. But it’s certainly not the only factor you should be thinking about.
As well as this, you should be looking into how to connect to different businesses and websites that can lead to further leads for your company. This is what the top companies do online through link building. By link building, you form relationships with sites that ultimately could bring customers to your business. As you can see then, there’s a lot to learn about learning how to make a business a success online. Luckily, there are plenty of templates that you can use from successful companies. By doing this, you should find that your business has no trouble competing on the modern online market.
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