Every successful business owner understands that marketing is an important part of their business. After all, marketing brings in new customers, profits, and long-term benefits for the business.

In thinking about marketing your business, you may have many questions, such as:

• What’s the difference between online and offline marketing?
• Is one better than the other?
• Which is the better option for you?

These are all important questions, and this guide will help you in making a decision.

What Is Online Marketing?

Online marketing involves promoting your business, product, or service on the internet via your website, online ads, or social media.

Benefits of online marketing include:

1. You can see the engagement of your content and promotions. With social media channels, you can physically see what your audience thinks of your brand and marketing. If you’re seeing lots of likes and shares of your content, then surely, you’re doing something right!
   
2. It’s easy to track your return on investment (ROI). You can track clicks and sales when using ads online, so you can easily see which ads are the most profitable for you. This will help you to make smart decisions regarding future marketing strategies and campaigns.
   
3. You can target specific demographics. With online marketing, it’s possible to drive specific types of people to your offers – people who are more likely to buy your products.

There are also some negatives to using online marketing, such as:

1. Digital advertisements can be annoying. While it’s certainly clever that advertisers can target ads specifically to you, showing you ads for products that you searched for days ago can be highly annoying and even drive you away from a brand.
   
2. The ads are fleeting. Unlike a billboard, an online ad can easily be missed or ignored. It’s easy to scroll past an ad and click to the next page without even taking notice.
   
3. Online marketing is constantly evolving. Whether it’s the latest social media platform or a change to the search engine algorithm, there’s always something new to learn. If you don’t keep up with important trends, you may find yourself being left behind.

What Is Offline Marketing?

Offline marketing is typically anything that does not involve the internet, so any magazine or television advertisements are good examples of this type of marketing.

Benefits of offline marketing include:

1. It can be impactful and easy to understand. A billboard or TV commercial will often become part of a person’s daily life, so it will usually be easy to understand and digest.
   
2. Printed marketing materials are often permanent. Unless a magazine is recycled or put in the trash, then the advertisements found within will be permanent, so they can still work weeks, or even months, after first being published.
   
3. They are memorable. Many offline ads are memorable and likely to be remembered much better than an Instagram ad for example, which is almost instantly forgotten. Think of all the popular Super Bowl ads and other commercials that we all know so well that they become part of our culture.

Offline marketing also has some negative aspects, such as:

1. It’s difficult to measure the success of a campaign. There are ways to measure the success of a campaign, but they are not as in-depth or accurate as those available for online marketing.
   
2. It can be expensive. Typically, offline marketing can be expensive. Even a small run in your local newspaper or a single 30-second spot on TV can set you back a considerable amount.
   
3. Little feedback from your audience. After running the marketing campaign, you can rarely gauge the reactions from your potential customers.

Which is Better for You?

Both online and offline marketing have their pros and cons.

Offline marketing is seen as more traditional and will be better aimed at the older generation, while online marketing is generally a better option for the younger generation. However, these are only generalities and might not apply to your business.

Plus, you don’t have to choose one over the other. Perhaps a combination of online and offline marketing will work best for your business.

You will need to understand what you want to achieve marketing-wise, what your budget is, and most importantly who your target audience is. Study your audience and go with what you think will work best with them, keeping your budget in mind. This will get you started.

Then, track what you can to determine which campaigns bring you the greatest profits. Run new campaigns and track those. Experience is the best determiner. Analyze as you go and stick with what’s working the best for your company until you find a new campaign that drives even greater profits.

Need help with your Marketing strategy? Shoot me an email – let’s talk!

Even though the search engine algorithms which determine rankings change often, there are still tried and true SEO methods that are proven to help you rise higher in the rankings throughout these changes.

Here are the Top 10 best practices for SEO success:

1. Ensure that your website is secure. Most people today are concerned with the privacy and security of the websites that they visit. Consequently, this is also a crucial ranking factor in the search engines. A secure website will always rank higher than one that isn’t secure.
   • Talk with your web host or web manager about the type of security that is most appropriate for your website. A security certificate will ensure that your content is delivered by SSL (secure socket layer).
     
   • With SSL, your website will start with an “https://” instead of “http://” and the little lock icon will show up next to the web address in many browsers.
2. Add your main keyword early into the content. Including your keyword early on lets the search engines know what your content is about. Additionally, sprinkle the main keyword throughout the rest of your content too.
   • This will tell the search engines that this term is important, which will help you rank well for this term.

3. Use unique titles, descriptions, and content. This lets the search engines know that your content is original material and can add further knowledge to the other information that can already be found on the internet about your topic.

4. Optimize your title tag for SEO. Always include your main keyword in the title tag for your website, and if possible, put it at the start of the title. This will give priority to this keyword.

5. Ensure that your website loads quickly. It’s important that you make your website load as quickly as possible. Especially with the advent of smartphones, loading time is an important ranking factor in the search engines.
   • Compress the size of images, remove any unneeded code, and consider using a content delivery network (CDN). If you use a CDN, your website will be able to serve images and other media from servers that are close to your audience, thus cutting down on the loading time.
   • Many web hosts now use CDNs to deliver content for their clients’ websites. Talk with your web host or your web manager about this priority.
   • If you have a WordPress site, there are many plugins that help you speed up the loading time for your website.

6. Optimize any images. You can do this by giving the filenames descriptive names. Using image alt text is also recommended so that the search engines can understand what images are present on your website. Properly optimized images can boost your website rank.

7. Use internal linking. The key here is to link to your main pages. So, any smaller pages can link to a larger, authoritative piece. This will help to increase the rank of the more important page.
   • Try to use the main keyword, or a variation of it, in your internal links to ensure that the search engines know what the page is about.

8. Create amazing content. Write high quality content that answers questions that your readers might have about your topic.
   • If you can answer a question in less than 1,000 words, that is fine. However, it’s worth noting that it’s important to be thorough with any answer, so you may want to write considerably more than this amount.
   • Many of the highest-ranking pages include longer, authoritative content.

9. Build backlinks to your website. Despite what you may have read online that backlinks are no longer important, please note that backlinks, when done properly, are still very important. They show the search engines that your content is valuable enough for other webmasters to link to.
   • When you first start your website, you may want to go slow when building backlinks. After a few months you’ll be able to ramp up your efforts.
   • With this strategy, you want to obtain links from other important websites in this field. Links from low quality websites that accept advertising from anyone to any website are likely to hurt your search engine rankings.

10. Look at the user experience. If you find that visitors are struggling to navigate your website or that you have a high bounce rate, which is when people leave your website after just a short time, take a close look at your user experience.
    • Perhaps your visitors aren’t finding the answers that they’re looking for, or maybe your website is broken in some way. See what you can do to improve the overall experience of your visitors.

Following these Top 10 SEO best practices will enable you to achieve higher rankings in the search engines. The higher you rank, the more traffic you should be able to achieve, and ultimately the more sales you will be able to make.