As business owners, we want our businesses to succeed. We want to increase sales, get our products into the hands of more people, capture more leads and increase the amount of exposure that our brands receive. When we are working on all of these things, it’s important to remember the power and potential of your business website.
So many small business owners disregard their website in their marketing strategies and instead turn to social media to promote their business. The problem with this is that they don’t own their following.
You Don’t Own Your Following on Social Media
Has Facebook ever asked you to boost your business’s posts? Facebook needs to make money too, specifically from ads that YOU are paying to run. Because of this, less and less of the people that like your page are seeing the things that you post. Why? Because Facebook wants your Ad dollars. In fact, the average Facebook organic post reach was a measly 22.8% in March of 2015 for pages with under 1000 likes, and that was over a year ago.
Other Networks Can Do This Too
As social networks are driven to increase revenues by investors, they continue to create new ways to make you pay to push out posts to your following. You are going to have to pay MORE for the following YOU accumulated. That being said, you need to develop a marketing strategy that allows for this to happen and your business to still grow online, without spending tons of money each day on advertising.
Your Website As A Marketing Tool
Your website is a commonly overlooked marketing tool that you can use to help you bulletproof your marketing strategy online. Yes, social media is probably going to be a thing that you use to market your business. And, yes social networks aren’t going to ruin it for businesses completely because that’s where they get all of their revenue from. All of this information still doesn’t take away the importance of your website.
With the advent of social media, websites for businesses have fallen to the wayside, and that’s why there is a lot of opportunity to use your website to build an audience, attract a following, and centralize your marketing. Your website can be used in a number of ways for marketing your business online. Here are just a few of my ideas:
Blogging
Using your website partially as a blog is a great way to build a brand and provide value to your customers. People will look for and follow content they like, and that’s great, especially if that content is your content. Figure out something that you can write a blog post about every week, write it, and promote it through your social channels.
Email List
Once you have traffic, you need to build up another channel that you OWN. An email list is a great way to do that because the list is yours. You own it. Because of this, you aren’t going to need to pay to “boost” your emails. You can just send them. The only fees that you might incur are the ones from your email list provider.
Coupons
People love saving money. If you have a coupon of the week, or a deal that you send out to your following, you can drive them to your website and get them on the email list for weekly deals. This way, you can get the people that follow you to see your business on another channel.
Summary
Social media is an extremely powerful tool, but your website is too. Leverage your website and make it a part of your marketing strategy, so that you can get in front of people on another marketing channel. Remember, social media is still a great tool to market your business. In fact, I love social media, but I also love using my website as the central part of my marketing strategy. Figure out what works for your business, go for it, and hopefully, I’ll see your marketing succeed.
