How to Market Your Business in 2016

How to Market Your Business in 2016

So what kinds of things should you be thinking about for the new year to generate more leads and more business? There’s no question that the economy is continuing to heat up, and people are spending money again on products and services that may have been put to the side when it all imploded a few years ago. This is an opportunity for you.

These are my top three things you’ll need to put in place now in order to position your business to succeed in 2016.

Update Your Website in 2016

Mobile-Responsive Websites – If your website was built in the last two or three years, you probably need to refresh it with a new theme. It doesn’t need to be graphically different, but having a refresh might help. The main thing to consider is it mobile-responsive. If you’re not sure, you can test it with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tester. More and more people (and Google does too!) expect a good experience on their mobile device, and pinching and squeezing your non-responsive site isn’t good enough anymore.

Search Engine Optimization – Review the SEO on your website to see if it was done properly or needs some spiffing up. A good place to start is the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to get a first look.

If you’re not sure how to do SEO, or your web person doesn’t know how to set up the SEO properly, we’re teaching a hands-on SEO workshop the last week of January, and we have other dates through the year. This class is designed for business owners and employees, and a technical knowledge is not required. Get yourself armed with the latest information about SEO so you can either do it yourself, or direct your web person or employees on the correct way to do it.

Business Blogging – Getting your blog set up to create information for your readers can be the best way to get people TO your website. Keep at it, and create new information on a regular basis. Share your blogs in social media, emails, and anywhere else you have a presence so you’re leveraging that content as much as you can.

Update or Set Up Your Lead Magnets

How do you entice people to engage with you? Just because they visited your website, doesn’t mean that they’re ready to whip out their wallet and hand you money. You’ve got to build trust with them, because they may just be tire kicking for now. You have to get them into your system to nurture the potential leads so that when they are ready to engage, that you’ve already built that rapport.

Traffic to your site does you no good – it doesn’t pay the bills. You have to capture those visitors into your lead nurturing system before they’ll hand you money. Make sure you have good, solid “lead magnets” or something that you can offer them in exchange for their information like their name and e-mail address. Once you have that information you can communicate with them on a regular basis (see next section).

If you’re using a landing page platform like LeadPages.net (we love LeadPages and use it ourselves) or others, make sure that you’re setting up mobile-aware landing pages! If people are coming in from social media or other places that you’re posting links, they are likely on a mobile device.

Email Marketing Is Your Best Engagement Tool

91% of us open our email at least once per day. We’re connected on every device we own, and as soon as a “ding” from an incoming email hits our device, we have to check it. If you’re not leveraging email marketing as your primary tool to get your information out, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to engage directly with people who have already opted into your list.

There are many tools to choose from, but Constant Contact has been our favorite for over 10 years. They continue to improve the platform and have created a tool that integrates well with mobile, social media and events.

For every $1 you put into email marketing, the average return is $44.25 in sales. That’s a HUGE ROI. Putting effort into creating an engaging, mobile-aware newsletter that has a good solid call-to-action in every email, will generate on average, three times more sales than social media.

About Thomas Petty

Thomas Petty is a digital marketing consultant with WSI, the largest digital marketing agency in the world, and has a local office in Livermore. He is also a master-level trainer with the Bay Area Search Engine Academy, and teaches SEO and other online marketing classes to business owners in the San Francisco Bay Area.