I don’t have a solution to all the above mentioned problems but yes somewhat can help you out in Sales and Marketing being from the field. Trying to spend those thousands on generating leads to a Marketing agency or even Just dial can (sometimes) lead to no help at all and ofcourse if you are a startup then doing 1 of them or any of them could be impossible. Website optimization is a good solution for lead generation (my opinion). There is no harm in being on the top of the biggest search engines mainly Google, Yahoo, Youtube, Rediff. Today everyone is going on the internet for the smallest requirement so why not you be there too.
Search Engine Optimization means looking at what people search for, what is typed in the search engines and which search engines are opted by your targeted audience. Optimizing a website, in technical term, means editing the content of the website and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers. Hence SEO is a must to drive traffic to your website. Let’s look at more ways to drive traffic to your website.
To drive traffic website it is important to do 4 things :
1. Search Engine Optimization : Discussed in the above para’s.
2. Social Media Marketing : I do not want to write too much about it because there is nothing new I would say which is not said before about Social Media Marketing. Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin to market your business is an effective way to spread awareness of your product and traffic to your website. Though in actual terms how effective it would be to generate prospective sale leads depends completely on your product/service, its demand/supply and not to forget a good brand name.
3. Email Marketing : ‘A medium which helps people not forget you exist’ is how I would term it. Be it any festival or new discount offer, sending across emailers is a good option to be remembered by people. You might think it is not required but a mail once in a while does no harm to you.
4. Search Engine Marketing : This includes a lot of things Pay per click, Cost per impression, Search analytics & Web analytics. In a broader outlook, SEO is also a part of search engine marketing (SEM). Being in the field of web & graphic designing SEM comes very close to our nature of work. However it has taken much time and effort to figure out how it actually works.
SEO is one part of internet marketing where in you are on the top of the list of search engines. There are other ways to do internet marketing by contextual advertising & paid placements.
Search Engines like Google and Yahoo started a new business model that would finance their services, and called it Pay per click. Wherein you put up your ads on these search engines and pay only if someone clicks on your ad, much better then ‘Cost of impression’ where you are not even sure if your ad was fully looked at and it barely drives any traffic or is of any help to increase your potential to get sale leads. Hence pay per click is buying advertisements at a price for a click.
Search Analytics means analyzing the statistics for an effective SEM. Search engines provide access to their statistical data helping you improve your search on the search engines. Web Analytics is the visitor’s journey on your website without the knowledge of the visitor, which pages they visited and what all information was browsed, what lead to a sale etc. It is mainly used to improve website and marketing campaigns.
Finally after trying everything and after all the extra knowledge in this article, I believe that word of mouth was, is and will be the most effective way to spread the word(though it takes much longer for it to start happening) All of the above will surely support your efforts to spread the word.