Internet marketing for new businesses in Brisbane the good, the bad, and the ugly

Whats the value of a great website?

A website is every businesss dream employee. It works around the clock, it brings customers, and it never complains.  However, many new businesses view their website as merely an add-on feature. They couldnt be more wrong. Your website is your most powerful marketing tool, and a direct reflection of your business. Some websites out there are cringe-worthy and what businesses don’t understand is that a poor presenting website can actually work against you, first impressions are what determines your fate even on the web.

The Good: Resist temptation to scrimp; invest in your website. Hire a professional who can give your website a professional look and present your services and products in a user friendly way.

The Bad & the Ugly: Although it may be tempting to use cheap services from India or web farm slap it together yourself products from Yellowpages and Sensis, where you slap on some clip art, write up some quick non focused content, and launch away, good luck actually getting a customer call when you present yourself like a beggar at a product convention.

These cheap alternatives disregard the importance professionalism, clear navigation and usability, and not to mention effective design. Your business is judged within seconds of your potential customer landing on your site and in reality you only get one chance for any customer to impress. The funniest thing in this whole picture is that, the services and products which these companies provide are not even  value for money and in fact will even up costing you more after a very short time in most cases, don’t be fooled.

Social Media Marketing

Page rank is swiftly becoming effected by social media content. SMM and building trusting relationships with customers is the wave of the future in marketing and ranking results.

The Good: Engage! Create the type of content that will attract and entertain the reader. This includes frequent blogging, consistent social media updates, and participation in forums. If you do this, viral word-of-mouth marketing coming straight from satisfied customers will launch your business by itself. There is no marketing technique that can match the power of customer endorsement of your product.

The Bad & the Ugly: Many new businesses think that Social Media Marketing is merely an optional add-on to their overall marketing plan. If I was asked a year ago about the importance of Social engagement for your business, I would have told you that its great to build links to potential customers however it wont do much for you in regards to page ranking. However with the recent changes to google ranking with the release of Panda and Penguin updates to googles search results, social engagement is now becoming a player in search results. This type of information is not the type of info that easily falls into the laps of businesses in Australia, nether-lone Brisbane businesses and unfortunately it may take most businesses years to play catchup to re align with current trends.

Optimisation

Website optimisation and SEO is a category of products which has a love hate relationship for many. Some view it as a necessity for success, and others see it as ploy to con the ignorant. The truth is, at essence optimisation is no different than planning an outline for an assignment or creating a business plan. Every page on your website needs to have a focus, how else can google know what it is that your business does and when to feed search results for your business to potential clients.

The Good: Hire a professional who is up-to-date on the latest trends in optimisation. They can ensure that your website is optimised correctly, thus increasing your page rank.

The Bad & the Ugly: With the latest ranking updates released from google especially in the past month, many Brisbane websites are suffering greatly in there ranking results due to get high ranked quick schemes. Greedy internet marketing companies targeting local businesses around brisbane, feeding off there desperation for new business during these desperate times following the economic down turn from the recent Brisbane floods and global economy crisis.

Content Marketing

The goal of content marketing is to increase the visibility, marketability, and credibility of your company. The Internet has forever changed shopping behavior. Considering the fact that 3 out of 5 shoppers buy online, professional content is key to generating traffic and increasing conversions. The now rather cliché saying Content is King still holds firm ground, and will continue to do so as major search engines turn the majority of their attention to quality content.

The Good: Either spend a significant chunk of your time writing and planning perfectly executed content, or hire a professional to do it for you. Either way, the content needs to be entertaining, engaging, and educational. It needs to draw the customer in, establish trust, and evoke a conversion.

The Bad & the Ugly: Do not slack on the creation of your content. This is not an area that you can let slide with a few articles here, a few blogs there, and a few paragraphs on your website.