Marketing a New Business: Picking a Strategy That Works

Marketing a new business comes with its own set of challenges and nuances. Being a small business owner, you’ll have to understand where your potential customers reside online and which marketing strategies will resonate best with them.

Search engines make sense for a lot of businesses. By that, I mean potential customers may be searching on Google to find products or services related to your business.

A solid foundation starts with implementing both paid and organic methods. They both work together to build your website’s authority while building awareness at the same time. Authority is how Google measures the credibility of your site and there is truthfully a lot that goes into building that.

The attempts to rank higher in search engines is what we as digital marketers refer to as search engine optimizations (SEO). Incorporating an SEO campaign is a great way to be found. But this isn’t an overnight process. We typically couple SEO with paid advertising on search engines for several reasons, timeliness being one.

Let’s take a closer look at both.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of activities that help pages of your website rank well on search engines. Three of the biggest factors for good rankings include your domain authority, the age of your domain, and the number of websites that link to yours.

All of these factors are synonymous with having a healthy web presence. As you can probably guess, building your presence can take a bit of time patience. A brand new website with no authority and no backlinks can take anywhere from 6 months to a year to start seeing results. However, SEO is incredibly valuable as part of your overall marketing plan since it helps your website build its authority and power relative to your competition.

Fortunately, while your SEO campaigns build over time, supplementing your efforts with paid ads is a great way to get traffic to your site right away. Let’s dig into the details in the next section.

Paid Advertising

While you wait for your SEO efforts to pay off, you have to be #1 on Google for your target keywords. This is where Google Ads come in. Promoting your business with paid advertising in addition to SEO makes a solid foundation for any small business marketing plan. Paid advertising will give your business the traction it needs in order to start building your SEO over time.

Another thing to consider is how many websites are already ranking for the keywords you want. This is related to the level of competition for the key terms. If established brands/sites with a very long-standing domain already rank on page one it may be difficult to get your site there even a year from when you start. This is another instance it quite frankly pays to pay to play! You can be on page one through the paid auction which we refer to as Google Ads while you rank organically for a less competitive term but still related to your business.

Google Ads allow you to bid on keywords that are relevant to your product or service to get highly targeted traffic to your site. That way when a user is looking for something specific, you can pay to show up in their results at the perfect time. For example, if someone were to search “auto body shop markham” in Google, you can bid to show up at the top of the results for them!

Many people mistakenly think that Google Ads and SEO are connected to one another.
Quite simply, they both operate on their own quality metrics. Which warrants it’s own post.

While you build your SEO efforts and climb up the ranks, your paid advertisements will make sure you’re showing up on the first page of Google in relevant search results. Eventually, once you build enough authority to rank, you’ll start to appear in those same paid search results organically. And seeing you in both placements builds customer perception in a positive way.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) consists of both organic and paid tactics that enable businesses to appear in multiple locations in users’ results (although this definition is up to debate). If you get it right, the entire first page will be filled with results for your business, otherwise known as “owning the SERP” (SERP = search engine results page).

The term “owning the SERP” is the holy grail of internet marketing and is a possibility for any business if their marketing efforts are aligned with the goals of their business. Here’s an example of a surgeon that’s owning the SERP:

Rock on, Dr. DeLuca!If you look at Dr. DeLuca’s example, the light orange box at the top of the results is a paid advertisement. This is the highest spot you can get on a search engine results page. Directly under that, you can see the organic results which consist of multiple links to Dr. DeLuca’s website including the homepage, reviews page, contact page, and a dedicated landing page for “Albany Plastic Surgeon.” Then to the right is his local Google business listing. Because he has secured of all 3 spots on the results page, this means that Dr. DeLuca is owning the SERP!

Conclusion

Picking the right strategy comes down to what your business objectives are and who your target audience is. Make sure to explore and fully understand what makes your potential customers tick. That way you’ll make the most of every marketing dollar you spend. This is something you’ll want to discuss with an expert first. You know your business through and through make sure to talk to someone with the marketing knowledge to guide you through a proper digital strategy.

Up next, check out my last post on why your Facebook Ads aren’t converting. Make sure to check out our Paid Advertising Services for more info on how we can help your business get the attention it deserves.