Using social media to promote a new website or product / service

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If you have recently had a website created that has gone live or have a new product or service that you wish to promote, you may become frustrated that the search engines have not re-crawled your list and indexed the information, meaning that no one will find you on the search engine result pages. This could lose you valuable sales and if you have a special offer that is only on for a limited time could potentially mean that the offer has expired before it has even been picked up by the likes of Google, Bing or Yahoo.

You could go down the route of setting up Pay per Click adverts which are normally pretty instant but can be costly but you should also ensure that you take advantage of the social media websites, most of which are free. Social media is growing fast in popularity and you can easily reach thousands of people within a few seconds. You need to build up a group of followers and find places that you can post your links in order to reach the most people. But if done correctly it can get instant traffic to your website.

Making sure you use all aspects of social media marketing

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When people think of social media marketing, they normally think or either pay per click types of advertising within the social media websites, or simply of creating a business page and promoting it to gain likes / followers and build up a community etc. These are both great forms of social media marketing but there is often one very important aspect that people forget to consider.
Social media is a place for consumers to discuss a product  / service or company with friends and family. Often this information can also be seen by people that follow the company and may not know the writer of the comment. It is very important to read comments made about your business and proactively respond to positive and also negative comments. A negative comment can have more than 5 times the impact a positive one can and therefore it makes sense to act on these. It may be that the person has made a mistake in which case you need to confirm this in a public response (always making sure you are friendly and professional) but if the person has a valid point then do not be afraid to admit that you are disappointed in the service they have received and will ensure that the situation is rectified. People can be very forgiving and will often not be put off by a company who admits that they had a problem but that it has been resolved and that is very proactive in sorting out any issues that arise.

Internet marketing techniques

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No matter what industry you are in, the internet houses a whole host of avenues for marketing techniques. One increasingly effective marketing method is based around the trade services such as building carpentry and plumbing. These types of tradespeople can be marketed on review based websites such as Myhammer, ratedpeople and checkatrade.

These websites allow customers to leave feedback regarding services and read and rate tradespeople after receiving their services. This is a fantastic marketing idea for tradespeople who have a great customer satisfaction reputation even if they charge a little above the average costs as most people will be willing to pay a little more for a builder/plumber with a great reputation.

Internet marketing for any industry that allows customers to post feedback is a great advertising tool and shows that you have confidence in the service your business provides. It also allows a method of dealing with any negative feedback as on these websites you can reply to customer comments to show that you also offer great customer service if clients aren’t 100% satisfied.

Using social media for brand recognition

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Social media can be great for targeted marketing campaigns, having your advert appear at the side screen of your targeted audience, however this can be quite costly as is a very direct form of advertising that may not suit all businesses.

For many start up companies advertising is much about brand awareness as the promotion of any particular product or service. It’s said that generally you have to see something new at least 3 times before it will actually stick in your mind so for brand recognition purposes setting up a free page for your business could be a good place to start. The page needs to be quite simple explaining who you are and what you do then once you have invited as many people as possible to ‘like’ your page add updates every few days to ensure it appears in peoples news feeds.

A great idea to promote your brand is to offer a competition to people for ‘sharing’ your page, or for leaving you a review on the social media website, this will encourage others to look at your page increasing your audience.

What is SEM

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SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing and covers a range of topics from Searching Engine Optimisation (SEO) to Pay per Click (PPC) and much in-between.

If you want your website to perform well on the search engine results pages (SERPS) then you need to ensure that you have a level of Search Engine Marketing that is correct to the current level of competition and the results you hope to achieve.

You can carry out certain elements of online marketing yourself, even with little knowledge but this can be risky and can actually end up being detrimental to the rankings of your site.

I would strongly recommend that you take advice from a specialist marketing agency who will be able to assist you with the process and advise you on what they think you need to do in order for the website to perform well.

Budget is always the main issue when it comes to marketing, so you need to have an idea of what you wish to spend and be aware of the restrictions you may face if the budget is particularly small.