Firstly, that’s where your customers are. Checking out goods and services on the internet is now the norm for the majority of consumers. 65% of people search online before making any purchase, 70% are regularly engaged in social media and 76% use email. And now that facebook pages are no longer a viable business tool, a website is the only effective platform to reach those customers and to promote your goods or services using the world wide web.
How to promote your business online
But a business website that isn’t promoted effectively won’t work. It needs traffic driven to it by ranking well in Google searches, effective social media campaigns (paid or organic), regular blogging and e-marketing – all proven ways to reach your customers. These are measurable and targeted marketing tools, more so than conventional advertising, and will all help to bring customers directly to your website or indirectly via organic searches.
So putting time into online marketing is the most cost effective kind of promotion that you can do. Measured in ROI (return on investment) the research shows that online marketing produces twice the return of conventional advertising, euro for euro.
Online marketing is now more effective that traditional advertising
HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing co surveyed 3,300 businesses in 2013. and found that online promotion has replaced direct sales as the most popular and effective way to promote business. The chart below shows how social media, email marketing and SEO are now ahead of traditional marketing methods (trade shows, adverts, brochures etc) in generating contact with customers. Social media had twice the reach of trade shows and over twice that of traditional advertising in generating new business leads.
