Digital Marketing for Small Business

Speed of your Website

When we speak of digital marketing, the first and foremost thing we need to talk about is your website and the importance of loading speed of your pages. I have previously been guilty of running a theme on inspire99 which literally took about 12s to load which makes me now wonder how many visitors I have lost in transition just because the site was slower to load. And when we talk of a website, a few things are really key to understand and how they impact the speed of your website.

1. Images on the home page. The size of your image plays quite a crucial role in loading your site. Make sure that most images are of a decent size. There are tons of websites which provide you SEO information and how you can improve. But the most useful I have come across is tools.pingdom.com. It is a free resource which gives you a fair estimate of the items that take most space and resources from your website.
2. As we talk about reducing the speed of items on your website, it becomes important to cache the commonly used images. Additionally there are plugins which help reduce size of images which are uploaded into your website. There are quite a few useful ones, but I found WPsmush for wordpress quite a useful tool
3. Get rid of unnecessary pages and ads which might be slowing down your system. They are not really as important as they seem to be. Instead, you are better of placing them strategically.
4. Google webmaster tools is quite useful to understand how your website is performing. You need to combine this along with google ad words to see which keywords in your related area are being the most targeted and which ones you can use in order to stay ahead of your competition. Long tail keywords are preferable considering that most websites use small ones and catchy ones.

In effect, a little bit of strategy can really propel your digital marketing through the website to a very strong position.

Digital Marketing and the Need for QR code

When we talk at length about digital marketing, it would be a significant mistake to avoid the importance of traditional marketing routes. Agreed that digital marketing has replaced some of the traditional routes through targeted ads and reaching people in better ways, but you still need to remember that digital marketing is a tool to make your strategy more effective. And when we talk about traditional marketing, brochures, pamphlets, banners, etc become quite important. If you are hitting a trade show, then it becomes quite relevant to make your banners and brochures catchy and in the tone which is well understood by your potential clients or strategic partners.

The idea is to send your message across, provide them an information which they can take and above all try to get them to your website. In the era of digital marketing – your website is your single most powerful tool. I cannot emphasise the importance of  website enough, the more visitors you have – the better your point of reach as well. A good way to rope your digital marketing into offline marketing is the use of QR codes. The stats don’t really agree about the strength of QR codes in getting people to your website, but they sure make a catchy appearance. And if you are looking at a few resources to enable that, here is a taster below:

When I was trying to do with my own venture here, I came across this website – https://app.qr-code-generator.com/manage/. The site not only allows you to change colours and provides you a range of choices about how artsy you can be about your print material / QR code generation. I have created one for inspire99.com just as a trial to show you how it looks. If it is of any use to you, it will be fun trying out a few stuff.

We will keep adding to this post to make it more relevant and useful. If you have any topics/deliberations or arguments about any of the points we touch upon here, please share your comment below. It will be brilliant to have your take on how the article can benefit your business.