Comparisonsmaster
How A Person Can Promote Their Business
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For instance, if an aspiring artist wants to paint and this is his passion, he has to sell paintings in order to provide himself and focus on fulfilling his passion. However, free marketing is slippery slope. People can try to post a lot on social media, they can try to rank better on search engines, they hope their friends and their friends will love their work so much that they will share their posts and provide them with the marketing they need to succeed.
However, the sad reality is that free marketing is not for everyone, it takes a very long time to build an online presence strong enough to receive free marketing. In my opinion, most of the people who try to go in this path fail. For every successful influencer, twitch streamer or a YouTuber there are hundreds of people who have failed to achieve that status. For every aspiring painter, musician, yoga instructor or dog trainer there are hundreds of people who couldn’t find enough clients to provide themselves and they had to forgo their passion.
The aim of this article isn’t about slaying people’s dreams, it’s about providing people with some marketing insights that will help them to promote themselves.
For instance, if an aspiring artist wants to paint and this is his passion, he has to sell paintings in order to provide himself and focus on fulfilling his passion. However, free marketing is slippery slope. People can try to post a lot on social media, they can try to rank better on search engines, they hope their friends and their friends will love their work so much that they will share their posts and provide them the marketing they need to succeed.
However, the sad reality is that free marketing is not for everyone, it takes a very long time to build an online presence strong enough to receive free marketing. In my opinion, most of the people who try to go in this path fail. For every successful influencer, twitch streamer or a YouTuber there are hundreds of people who have failed to achieve that status. For every aspiring painter, musician, yoga instructor or dog trainer there are hundreds of people who couldn’t find enough clients to provide themselves and they had to forgo their passion.
The aim of this article isn’t about slaying people’s dreams, it’s about providing people with some marketing insights that will help them to promote themselves.
General notes about paid marketing and business
Unfortunately, the cliché that time equals money is correct. If a person wants 10,000 people to see his social media posts he can post a hundred times and pray that the algorithms will fall in love with his content and show his craft to an audience. Creating these posts can take a very long time, multiply this by 100 times and you’ll have to work almost 30 hours just to have 10,000 people see your craft. Generally speaking, with paid advertising, you would have to part between $40-$200 to reach that audience. Therefore, I believe that if a person wants to assess the potential of his business, he can speed the process with the insertion of money.
One more point is that some multi billion companies are bleeding hundreds of millions every year while their value increases. It seems odd for the average Joe, but without investing in your business it’s almost impossible to succeed. There aren’t many businesses that were profitable from their first day, it takes time, effort and money to build a profitable business. Money doesn’t drop from the sky on anyone and relying on algorithms to promote us isn’t a realistic strategy. I don’t want to say that it never worked for anyone, but it almost certainly didn’t work for most people if they don’t have much business experience in their respective field.
I’m a true believer in online marketing, I believe that a business with an online presence is a healthy business for years to come. As the world goes digital it’s crucial to have an online marketing plan. I will try to shed some light on this matter and provide our readers with some general guidelines for online marketing
Do you need a website?
My general recommendation is that every business needs a website. This way every business owner will have better control on his own destiny and won’t rely too heavily on algorithms of the different channels. However, for some businesses a website is more crucial and for others they can wait until their business generates enough income to invest in one. For instance, if you are selling physical products such as an ecommerce store, your art or craft you definitely need a website. You would be able to display your catalogue and have a transaction system in your website, on top of that you would be able to collect data to use in retargeting campaigns (advertising only to customers who have already visited your site or made a purchase) and on smart audience (custom audiences that are created on the advertising platforms).
If you are a barber, own a beauty saloon or a moving company. You don’t need a website, it could help you to attract customers but there are other tools to manage your clients without the hassle of operating a website. After you would generate enough income a website could help your business but it won’t revolutionize it. Since creating a website isn’t expensive it’s recommended for every business
So how much time and effort does creating a website take? This question is very difficult to answer, but i’ll try. You can invest thousands of dollars in creating a website, hiring a designer, buying a premium domain and hosting your website on an expensive platform. But, if you are looking for the most cost efficient way, I would say that $10/Month is doable. You can create a website on many platforms and each and every one of them has different advantages and disadvantages. The free option is WordPress which most of the internet uses, but it requires some assistance if you aren’t tech savvy. Many freelancers on Fiverr or Upwork can assist you for a minimal price (less than $50). If you go with that option, you’ll have to buy a domain from GoDaddy or Namecheap (around $20/per year) and set up a hosting server (starting from $5/month), my recommendation is Digital Ocean as it’s cheap, easy to use and easy to scale once you have a lot of traffic.
The cheap way isn’t the most convenient way. Other website creation provides include Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and more. With these platforms you pay for convenience and support but not for an enormous price tag. I would say that for $15-$20/Month you can create a website to fit your needs. If you won’t have more than thousands of entrances per day this is a great way to get things going without stalling on website creation
Social Media
Choosing the right social media channel to promote your business is a very difficult task. But instead of wasting hundreds of hours on the advantages of each platform, I would recommend to spend $50 on each platform and see where the results were the best. Facebook who owns Instagram as well, is probably one of the most expensive platforms to spend your money, but their ad algorithms and targeting options are the most advanced. Therefore, you can find yourself paying the most for each user to see your ad, but paying the least for each user completing your marketing objective. Facebook’s marketing objectives are designed for almost any business, if you are looking to convert your users on your website, FB page or through DM’s Facebook got you covered and you can always count on their traffic to be as genuine as it gets.
As a general rule of thumb, I would say that to reach 1000 people (CPM) to view an ad it costs between $7 to $17. Where a cost per click should be between $0.4 to $1. But, with the amazing targeting features of Facebook, if you have a local business, you can be certain that these 1000 people live nearby and could potentially become customers.
TikTok and Snapchat are a great way to connect with younger audiences. However, younger audiences won’t necessarily hold a lot of money, meaning that they might be more reluctant to spend it. But, the traffic is much cheaper and you can find yourself with amazing results for a fraction of the cost of more traditional social media channels. However, their targeting options aren’t as advanced as the traditional platforms. You can find yourself bringing hundreds of clients without any of them converting on your desired marketing objective. If you are paying over 20 cents per click on these platforms it means that your product might not be the perfect match for these platforms
Reddit, Twitter and Pinterest are great platforms for users, but their ad algorithms are difficult to use and the creation of ads is complex. Nevertheless, these channels work amazingly for very specific niches. Their traffic is much cheaper than Facebook but won’t necessarily deliver results for cheaper prices. Their audiences are more mature than Snapchat and TikTok so I believe they are a better place to start.
Conclusion: Facebook ads are the best place to start, you can try Instagram or Facebook to learn about how to promote your business and after you’ll reach success you would be able to duplicate it to other channels. You just have to remember that patience is the key and if you fail at your first attempt, don’t give up, you might succeed on your 5th attempt. There are many marketing objectives for FB ads and finding which one is right for you takes some time. But, remember that the algorithms are very smart and they need data in order to do their job properly.
Search Engines
When Google dominates more than 90% of the market this is a great go to place for aspiring businesses. The Google Ads platform is a state of the art advertising platform that helps users tremendously in achieving amazing results. Their keyword research tool will give you great assessments of the costs of the traffic and see how you can outbid and outperform your competitors. While it seems easy, it’s really not. Google are doing whatever they can to make this process accessible, but bidding on keywords and not on audiences is not intuitive. It takes time to master this platform.
Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and others are harder to use and don’t produce the results Google does consistently. Therefore, my conclusion is that you should always begin your search engine marketing adventure with Google.
Native and Display Traffic
Platforms such as Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent and other display networks have enormous amounts of traffic, but for marketing beginners they are complex and requite a lot of time, money and optimization to succeed. My general recommendation is to try and avoid them until you gain some marketing experience.
