Competition for the hearts, minds and cold, hard cash of the buying public has never been fiercer than today; thousands of small businesses all desperately trying to get the attention of the same limited customer base does not bode well for easy business. It has never been more important to make your business that little bit different, to stand out from the crowd and get yourself noticed. Your business has an important message to impart, it is “look at us, we are better than our main competitors!” and so it is vital to use every tool available to you to get that message across.
For most small businesses the problem is amplified by having less of everything to play with than the bigger boys and yet the need to distinguish yourself from the rest is often even more pressing.
A website is a must of course and we are fortunate to live in an age when the internet can in many ways provide cheap and sometimes free methods of marketing that can, while keeping budgets small, give your business some very slick and potent means of promotion.
Once you have your website up and running, it is important not only to have people visit in their droves, but that those who do are the right people and that they stick around once they arrive. You also want these sought after visitors to return and bring their friends. It is one thing to have a successful, well placed website and quite another to have a site that might as well be made of rubber with visitors bouncing out almost before they’ve read your company name.
So how to attract the right sorts and keep them hanging around long enough to allow the search engines to register how well your site is working, not to mention getting them to stay long enough to learn about your wonderful product and place huge orders.
The simple truth is that the most exciting site in the world will become dull to visitors pretty quickly if it doesn’t ever change. The best way to be exciting and inviting is to keep up-dating your content, when your site provides something for people to come back for they usually will.
An easy and practical way to provide continually up-dating content on your business website is to offer a newsletter; having a regular business newsletter obviously provides the added marketing benefit of giving your business a platform to talk endlessly about itself, your products and even your favourite customers.
By getting your customer base involved you create a community around your business, which is more likely to foster loyalty from customers; loyal customers are a great source of free marketing as they will happily and often evangelically promote what they see as their personal product.
Having a newsletter which invites comment from visitors is also a great way of gathering customer feedback which will prove invaluable in the development of your business.
If a newsletter is starting to sound like an ideal way for you to improve your small business website do remember one thing, once you start, you must continue updating and regularly; a business newsletter is a serious commitment and a newsletter that stops almost as soon as it’s started can do more damage than never having had one in the first place. Good luck.
By Marco Lombardo