In Wales and beyond, small businesses are relying on the internet more than ever. It enables even the most rural companies to find an audience for their products and services, by using a wide array of marketing tactics that were unavailable before. Here are some of the most impactful marketing techniques that businesses are using in today’s shifting digital landscape.
Offering Free Promotions
More than any other marketing tactic, free promotions have become a mainstay for online businesses. This is where a product or service provider will give a sample, or sample period, during which users can try them out. We encounter these often, from the now-extinct Netflix free trial of the 2010s to Amazon’s 30-day Prime trial.
Other businesses attach their promotions to popular services, best seen with iGaming websites. Since those sites offer a bunch of games, they might highlight a certain one by offering 50 to 100 daily free spins on Wonder Wheel. Free spins are a common, intuitive way for iGaming sites to let users try out the games on offer, though these promotions can also come in the form of free delivery or free content access for a limited time. Each promotion brings in new batches of customers, which helps a business spread its brand, and a few of those customers stick around once the trial ends.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a broad tent of strategies and best practices, all geared toward helping a site show up in Google. To rank searches, Google tracks user interest and uses a very advanced algorithm to highlight quality content. So, SEO aims to get on the algorithm’s good side, rank higher and get more human eyes as a result. Getting a lot of human attention helps SEO too, so it becomes a feedback loop that propels a business toward popularity.
The nature of SEO means that it’s a mostly backend strategy, not a customer-facing one. It’s around to stay for as long as we explore the internet through search engines, where practitioners build quality, fast-loading sites with both user and search-friendly design. However, it also involves traditional market research by tracking popular keywords used by customers online and then targeting them. There’s also the branch of local SEO, where brick-and-mortar businesses use similar tactics to make sure they show up online for nearby web users.
Using Social Media
Similar to SEO, social media is more focused on reaching as many customers as possible through relatable content posted on sites like Instagram. Social media will become more important in the future, so it’s never too late for businesses to hop online and start promoting themselves. Social media sites also rise and fall over time, with other services taking their place. This enables even the smallest companies to find an audience and outcompete larger competitors by building an online community.
Social media can be used to run ads, create promotional videos or post promotional pictures. A more recent social media trend involves podcasting, allowing businesses to entertain and inform within their specific industries. Lastly, businesses strike deals with established influencers on social media to market their products or services, reaching new demographics that may not have found the company otherwise.
