4 Online Business Growth Strategies for Long-Term Success

Transcript: As a business owner, manager, or whoever may be looking to expand your company’s revenue, you’re probably always looking for different business growth strategies to drive revenue and find new customers. Stop what you’re doing…well, I guess what you’re doing is watching this video, so don’t stop. But I have 4 online business growth strategies that will boost your digital presence.  Don’t go anywhere! I’ll be right back after this intro. Digital marketing as a whole is an excellent strategy for business growth, and you don’t have to be an online-only business to take advantage of it. 

Four major elements of digital marketing are: 

• Content marketing
• SEO
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing

There are other elements of digital marketing, like PPC and web design, but I won’t touch on those in this video.  The four elements I just mentioned are all a part of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing

Inbound marketing refers to marketing practices that bring people to your business when they’re looking for something like what you offer. SEO, for example, is an inbound marketing practice because it helps people find your website in search engines.  Traditional forms of marketing, like TV commercials and cold calling, fall under the outbound marketing umbrella. These forms of marketing require businesses to reach out to people instead of people reaching out to them.

There is a lot of luck involved here and it’s often hard to measure exactly how successful your efforts are. Inbound marketing is considered less intrusive than outbound marketing because people interact with inbound marketing content exactly when they want to. And since it’s online, it’s pretty easy to track what campaigns have the best ROI (return on investment). That brings us to our 4 digital marketing strategies for business growth. 

4 digital marketing growth strategies

First up is…

Content marketing 

Content marketing is the practice of creating valuable content online that gets people to engage with your business.  The content you create doesn’t just have to be written. You can write a blog post, and make a video to go with it. Take some creative photos and design infographics for people to share.  Share is the keyword here.  The more people visit your website, share your content, and link to it on their websites, the more likely it is you’ll see higher rankings in search engines…which brings me to the next business growth strategy.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

When you optimize your website for search engines, you make adjustments to your website based on known ranking factors so that it shows up when people search for things you have on your website.  Search engine optimization can be broken down into a lot of different pieces. Basically, there’s on-page SEO, which has a lot to do with the keywords you target and other elements you control on your site. There’s off-page SEO, which focuses on earning shares and links to the content on your website.  And then there’s technical SEO, which deals with how your website functions and if it’s able to be crawled and indexed by search engines.  SEO is a long-term business strategy, so you won’t instantly reap the rewards of your efforts.

But the work you put into your SEO strategy will pay off in time when you see your business grow.

Email marketing

With email marketing, you use email to engage with email subscribers or current and past customers.  How do you get said subscribers? Well, you can start by having an email sign-up form on your website.  Email marketing ties into content marketing because you can use your emails as an outlet to share your content.  Send a weekly newsletter with the latest from your blog, or update your past customers with specials and sales coming up!  Just don’t be spammy and send 5 emails in a day. That’s a way to push people away. Encourage people to subscribe to your emails on your website, in your content, and on social media.

Offer a reason to do so… with coupons, discounts, or other helpful information. Speaking of social media…let’s move on to the last of our growth strategy examples.

Social media marketing   

Just one second, I’m finishing up a tweet. Hashtag follow WebFX on social media…and done.  Okay, where was I? Ah, yes, social media marketing.  Social media marketing uses a variety of social media platforms to communicate and engage with your target audience.  You don’t have to be on every platform, but you should be on at least one.  Your business should be wherever your target audience is, so if you’re on Snapchat and not seeing any success no matter what you try, you should focus your efforts on another platform. Kind of like email marketing, social media marketing also ties into your content marketing strategy.   It’s another outlet for you to share the content you create.  Really, though, all the growth strategy examples I’ve mentioned work together. 

Here’s a scenario of how that happens: 

You’ve developed a new product.

You write a piece for your website about how your product impacts the world, and include a nifty infographic to get people’s attention. You take time to research keywords and include those throughout your content.  It starts to rank in search engines.  You share this content in your email newsletter and post your infographic on social media to drive traffic to your website.  Your content starts to rank even higher.  Then, you catch the attention of a major publication.  They write about your company and link to your website, then more people find you from that publication. Now you’re at the top of search engines for your target keywords, and sales have spiked from all of your hard work.
This can be you if you start using digital marketing growth strategies.  But you can’t just write something once, share it, and then call it a day.  Digital marketing doesn’t stop. You have to continually create, optimize, and share content to see consistent growth.