Online Marketing For Your Website Promotion

Often, you see your online business competitors doing extremely well and earning profit despite of having low quality products and inferior services. Certainly, it is frustrating, but it leaves a question behind that what makes them so successful? The answer is online marketing strategies that optimize the website and bring it to the top lists of the search engine results.

Today, no one goes after thorough research of any brand or product or dig yellow pages to get the best out of all. Everyone chooses the shortest path; either they pick the brand that appears in the first page of the search engine result or the one that are referred by the others. Again, your website will be referred only when it is visible to the maximum customers and provides the best services. Providing the quality of services is all up to you, but visibility can be achieved by a set theory of online marketing strategies.

The bottom line of online marketing is to maximize it visibility to the customers, so that the possibility of getting prospective customer increases. Once your website is listed in the high ranking search engine result, you will not only start getting business calls, but also succeed in creating a solid impression on your prospective customers. This strategy of business promotion widens the platform of marketing and opens the door of success.

Definitely, online marketing is influential and effective in all terms. In fact, it is a necessity to fight off the ever increasing competition existing in the world of commerce.

What's in the future for online marketing?

The current online marketing environment houses a mix of old and new trends and tools, however, businesses choosing to advertise their products and services with tried and true banner ads and email alerts are increasingly finding that rogue users of such techniques have given them a bad name and are driving their potential customers away. People are generally afraid of clicking on embedded banners and ads these days because they have bad experiences of being taken to inappropriate sites, and advertising emails come with similar concerns. Spam emails are generally deleted immediately by recipients out of fear of phishing and identity theft scams. So where is the future of online marketing heading?

It's been predicted that the future of online marketing rests in the use of strategic combinations of a variety of more recent advertising approaches which leave banners and banners far behind. While search engine optimisation techniques will continue to be one of the most popular and successful online marketing methods, website owners will certainly need to develop new approaches to reaching their seo goals. The most well known search engines such as Google and Bing are no longer necessarily leading the pack, so seo efforts will need to be focussed across many platforms due to the search functions of social media gaining popularity at an incredible rate. Google might handle around 88 million searches per month but, but Twitter and Facebook, which have their own search functions to scan internal and external pages, are also climbing. Facebook and it's 500 million users are reported to top Google in weekly web traffic.

In future, the online marketing of brands and businesses will need to engage an a variety of marketing strategies that combine seo tactics such as social media, search and quality content. Already well known elements of the IT industry are also likely to take their place as new methods of online marketing as we have seen with the introduction of RSS and SMS to enhance and sometimes replace email marketing approaches. While relatively popular today, viral online marketing strategies are likely to continue to be one of the key future developments in online advertising. Online marketing campaigns that incorporate unusual, surprising or inspiring content can be guaranteed to spread widely and quickly and advertising that causes a strong reaction is sure to be forwarded extensively.

The internet itself is such a relatively new phenomenon, and online marketing an event more recent growth area, that the future directions it will take are ultimately hard to determine, however one thing's for certain - online trends develop and shift in popularity rapidly and constantly so it's essential to remain informed and alert.

SMS Marketing as an Marketing Tool

SMS marketing can be a very effective marketing tool for an existing customer base or for customers who have shown interest in receiving information about your products or services. . However, in line with Australia’s ‘Do Not Call’ register it is imperative that you have permission from your intended recipients to contact them.

Overuse
SMS is one of those media that you should wary of over using. Like email spam, SMS spam can be very annoying and with overuse can lead to compulsive unsubscribing. So be sure not to over do it and make sure it is a worthy communication.

Character Length
Obviously SMS messages need to be succinct. You need to be aware that there is a 160 character limit for SMS messages. If this limit is exceeded the message will still be but will be sent in chunks of 160 characters (e.g. multiple messages). On some SMART phones like the i-phone, it will reassemble the chunks into one piece. However, note that charging will still occur in chunks of 160 characters. e.g. if your message is 320 characters long, you will charged for 2 messages. Though SMS campaigns are in general very cost effective, multiply this by many and you will significantly increase your costs. Note that the 160 characters should be limited to 135 characters of text to allow for an opt out mechanism.

Content
In terms of the content of your message, be sure to make it enticing and targeted. Ideally an SMS marketing campaign will offer a discount for a product or service and a simple way to add urgency to it is to put a timeframe on it. e..g. 20% discount on spare part purchases ordered prior to 99/99/99. Another option that adds urgency may be to offer a discount to the ‘first 40 callers’ for example. Make sure that your message is not ambiguous and is genuine and there are no trick mark ups involved.

Call to Action
A clear call to action, words that urge the reader to take immediate action should be apparent. A phone number or website link is ideal .

Unsubscribers
As with email marketing campaigns, ensure that any unsubscribe requests are duly actioned. Your customer just may not want to be contacted via SMS but may be happy to receive your marketing messages via other means. The surest way to infuriate and possibly lose a client is to ignore their instructions.

How to use online marketing for your eCommerce business

So you’ve spent months preparing the content and appearance of your online store, it’s looking just the way you always dreamed it would and the products are in stock and ready for send-off. There’s just one problem. Your customers are nowhere to be found. When you first opened the site there was a decent amount of interested shoppers, but that traffic seems to have dwindled in recent months and you’re trying to avoid your accountant because you’re terrified of hearing about your profit vs. loss. Sounds like your ecommerce website is in urgent need of an online marketing strategy!

There are infinite plans of action when it comes to online marketing, but let’s look at some of the top choices that are particularly useful in ecommerce:

Sharing: Install plugins that enable shoppers to tell their friends and colleagues about your store by easily sharing links to pictures and descriptions of products through social networking channels, such as Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, or by email.

Content: Revamp the written content on your website information pages and your product descriptions to make sure that it is professionally edited and incorporates the key words related to your industry in order to be search engine friendly.

News: Create and send out professional looking newsletters to advertise company and product news. Install a box on your home page that offers incentives (discounted shipping for example) for shoppers to sign up to your newsletter and refer a friend.

Blogs: Start a blog on your website with daily entries about new products and industry trends and send out customer email alerts to promote fresh stock, sales and specials because blogs and email updates are proven to be some of the best online marketing strategies available today.


Videos: Search engines love video. Try to find a way to incorporate short video clips and slide shows into your ecommerce website. For example, if yours is a fashion store, you may want to include clips from catwalk shows where the garments have featured.

Wiki: Prepare and publish a Wikipedia entry about your online business or product. Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites worldwide and ranks highly in search engine listings and a wonderful cost-free method of gaining notoriety.

To measure the success of all your online marketing strategies, don’t forget to measure your visitor statistics. This data will tell you how your visitors arrived at the site, which products they viewed, what they purchased, and how long they spent in your store.

Infinite IT Solutions is a Melbourne-based premium web design and online marketing company Melbourne that specialises in maximising the online presence of your business. As well as bringing ten years of industry experience to their web design and comprehensive online marketing services, Infinite IT offers outstanding SEO, web development, website redesign and content writing solutions tailored to your specific needs. To find out more about how Infinite It Solutions can tailor your online marketing strategies to grab the attention of your target customers, call us on 1300 881 594.

How to use videos for website promotion

Increasing average consumer bandwidth has meant that online videos are much more accessible and reliable than only a few short years back when bandwidth limited user’s consumption. These days, viewing of videos online is par for the course and the success of You Tube is indicative of this.

Online videos, as part of a website design, can be utilised for several purposes. Online videos can be used to introduce yourself and your company thereby creating a relationship and connection with the viewer. Online videos can also be used to provide real life testimonials from your existing clients. It is imperative that these be managed carefully to ensure that integrity and authenticity is maintained. Online videos are also a great tool for learning. Think of the time and resources that can be saved on that regular query that comes through to your office that could perhaps be answered with a video tutorial. In this way, a process procedure can be explained both audibly and visually and remains on your site as an excellent reference tool. And of course online videos can be used to promote your specific products and services and provides the ability to show them in action.

It is important that you use high quality video and audio equipment. Consumer expectations are very high and anything short of this will be quickly passed over. It is also equally important that the video is produced, directed and edited appropriately to ensure that key information is imparted succinctly but fluently. At the same time, depending on the target audience, there may be merit in producing video that is not too polished in an effort to portray authenticity. A good video production and editing service will be able to advise you on appropriate strategies for your business.