How to create a strong online foundation and get more leads?

The power of online business advertising

The online environment is constantly evolving, recording an impressive growth. Nowadays, it’s important to find that unique and special element that would highlight your business and would attract a large number of potential customers. Expanding a business in the online environment is absolutely necessary. The website is the image of the company in the environment online, and visitors can create their first impression regarding your activity. The significance of the website is to capture the interest of the visitor, therefore the website should answer all the main questions that might interest the visitor and present the products or services in the most favorable way. However, in order for a business to become known to as many people as possible, who can become loyal to the company, its website must be promoted.

Traditional vs online advertising

Compared to offline marketing, the online environment makes it much easier to identify the consumer segments which you are targeting. Moreover, online marketing campaigns can deliver results right after their implementation. If you use AdWords, for example, you can immediately measure clicks and analyze the impact they have with Google Analytics, so you know in advance if your strategy is effective or needs to be changed. 

In recent years, online advertising has proven to be more effective than traditional advertising. This statement is based on the following arguments:

• better quality of the target audience;
• better selectivity (online communication channels are significantly more varied than traditional media);
• the evaluation of the effectiveness of the campaign can be done much faster, allowing the realization of prompt corrections;
• lower costs.

Thus, there are several methods of online promotion, through which you can bring new customers and respectively, develop your online business. Online promotion is essential for increasing sales and brand awareness. The development of the Internet and different social networks offer various opportunities for business promotion, regardless their size and the industry in which they operate. No matter what channel you’re using, the power of social networking is huge. According to Statista, the number of worldwide users is expected to reach 3.43 billion monthly active social media users by 2023, around a third of Earth’s entire population. Have you ever imagined it? It’s breathtaking!

Why choose online advertising nowadays?

Let’s explore the unlimited opportunities offered by online business advertising:

• Social media marketing: Using social media helps you stay in touch with your customers, understand their needs, and raise your company's brand image.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a great tool to optimize the content you post on your website and social media for maximum visibility through search engines.
• Email Campaigns: Allow you to keep in touch with your customer base, send the latest news, do promotional emails showing offers and discounts, send wishes for them on their birthdays, and many more.
• Blogs and corporate sites showcase 24/7 your business to worldwide potential clients.
• Digital ad campaigns: Let you advertise your business, generate traffic to your website, raise brand awareness, and increase sales.
• Inbound Marketing: A marketing strategy based on methodology and digital tools like personalities, content marketing, and so on.

Online promotion is an ongoing process. As you can see in the figure below, 43% of social media users research products online via social networks. If you have managed to reach the top positions on the search engine results pages, you will be able to remain visible to potential customers for a long time, and qualitative content will position your business over time as a serious and reliable leader in your industry.

Source: GlobalWebIndex

Use of conversion elements on the website

One of the indicators of a website's performance is the number of targeted user actions. The more visitors place an order, subscribe to your newsletter, share posts, call the sales managers, the better the web resource works. In order to get more leads you should use conversion elements on your website.

Here are some suggestions:

1. add your phone number to your site's header and footer;
2. use call to action buttons, it’s recommended 3 times on a page (at the top of the page, in the middle, and at the bottom);
3. install a contact form to communicate, help, or get feedback from your clients by using the Contact Form 7 plugin if your site is created on WordPress;
4. connect online chat;
5. to convert visits to shares and become more popular on social media platforms, install convenient social media buttons;
6. adapt your site to mobile traffic, HubSpot’s statistics found that almost 25% of companies invest in mobile optimization as a top SEO tactic;
7. add ratings and reviews from real customers of your products or beneficiaries of services to your site;
8. pay a high attention to page loading speed;
9. publish your portfolio full of projects or works, and list your clients and partners;
10. use push notifications in apps to inform customers about new products and promotions;
11. make your navigation menu very convenient, so the users will be able to easily find what they are looking for;
12. use high resolution images and attractive animation to raise your client’s interest, and make them want to spend more time on your website. A great example is Amazon, which created an animation to showcase clothes. Isn't it amazing?

Source: Amazon

To sum up, it's important to understand, however, before implementing a promotion strategy, what is your business model, what are the main features of the industry in which you operate and which is your audience. Thus, if your target audience is predominantly active on online channels, a traditional marketing campaign is pointless and will not bring the desired results. Also, you should take into account certain aspects that can improve the experience of visitors, and here we can mention: the ability to easily interact with the company, and an efficient purchasing process. We live in a world which gives you a lot of efficient tools to analyze consumer behavior and guide them step by step to your brand.