Tag Archives: online marketing training
5 Reasons Why Every Food or Drink Business Should Blog!
Blogging is a great, cost effective marketing tool, but not all food and drink businesses seem to do it – and I am completely aware that sometimes it is a question of not enough time to do everything!
However, if you are thinking about embarking on blogging and want to check you are spending your time well here are our 5 reasons why blogging can really benefit your business and bring short and long term results!
1. Drives traffic to your website
We don’t all update our websites with fresh content regularly, so writing a blog post is an excellent opportunity to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website. Every time you write a blog, you’re writing content that can be shared on social media too e.g. Facebook, twitter, so you are potentially reaching a new audience that don’t know you yet!
2. Convert the traffic into leads
Each blog post you write is an opportunity to generate leads if you add a call-to-action in every post e.g. free e-book, free trial, coupon etc.
3. Position your brand as the expert
Creating helpful, relevant content will help establish yourself as experts in your field and connect with your consumers. Writing about your new products, different eating occasions, sharing recipes, events etc will enable consumers to get to know your business and get them to see you as the expert in your area of food or drink.
4. Develop better customer relationships
Blogs will help deepen the connection with your customers, so need to be written regularly. Blogs link through to your website, so customers will be able to get to know your business from the comfort of their home.
5. Drive long term results
Even when you may not be working, that blog is still working for you! It ranks in the search engines, so for days, weeks and months to come you can still be getting traffic and leads from that blog post.
We’d love to chat to you about blogs; so if you need any help or advice on writing blogs or in creating your blog marketing planner, then call Jo on 07723 351884 or email us at [email protected]
How to create and use an email marketing list to gain loyal customers
There’s a simple online marketing concept that until you understand how it works, doesn’t seem terribly important.
Until we learnt about it a few years ago, we couldn’t see the point in it ourselves really.
But once we understood that it is the single most important thing a small business can do online, to give their brand the best chance of success, we began recommending it to every client we work with.
And time after time, they become converts.
What are we raving on about? Put simply, it’s EMAIL MARKETING.
Now as a name, it is hardly what you’d call inspiring, but the principle behind it – building a list of interested consumers who have raised their hand to say they are happy to hear from you, by giving you their email address – is the cornerstone of marketing a small business on a budget.
Think of it as a FUNNEL – you pour in the interested consumers at the top and over time, build a relationship with them through email and social media so that, hey presto, they drop out of the bottom of the funnel as LOYAL PAYING CUSTOMERS.
The beauty of using this approach is that it PUTS YOU IN CONTROL OF COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR CONSUMERS – NOT THE RETAILER, NOT THE PRESS. Oh, and it’s largely free, or certainly will cost you no more than a couple of pounds a month.
- Want to drive sales with a certain retailer? You can give your email database a coupon
- Got a new product you want to spread the word about? Tell hundreds of already interested consumers instantly, through your list
- Need feedback on an idea? Ask you list, with a short, free online survey (via e.g www.surveymonkey.com)
- Need to push sales of particular line? Promote your Christmas gift range? Advertise a competition? USE YOUR LIST!
You have INSTANT, DIRECT ACCESS TO A BANK OF CONSUMERS WHO YOU ALREADY KNOW LIKE WHAT YOU DO! What could be better?
OK, so how do you go about setting up one of these lists – and more to the point, how do you get people on it?
That’s where the FREE TIPS sheet you can download below comes in – HOW TO CREATE & USE AN EMAIL MARKETING LIST TO GAIN LOYAL CUSTOMERS.
Just CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW and we’ll send a copy out to you straight away. As always, if you have any questions, just drop us a line on [email protected].
Image courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net.
