Establishing yourself as an apt entrepreneur takes grit, and this journey is often riddled with more challenges for women than men.
We always want to support our readers who have an eye to expand their horizons. At least one in three business owners is female, and being aware of emerging digital marketing trends will help you to keep a steady hand.
Set up an Email Address for Your Business
Do you still use your personal email address to contact vendors, suppliers, or customers? You should immediately switch to a customized email specifically created for your brand, if you can — or to a separate free business email account if a paid, domain-specific one isn’t yet a possibility. With 72% of consumers prioritizing email communication, making a professional first impression is of profound importance. It will also help you keep personal and business communications separate without creating too much chaos on a single account. Here are some additional benefits you should consider:
Maintains Anonymity
When conversing with the clients or sending newsletters, firstname.lastname@domain will reveal your identity. On the other hand, something like hello@yourdomain.com will ensure professionalism and allow your team members to continue conversations on the same account, when appropriate.
Avoids Spam
When you keep business and personal email addresses separate, you don’t have to deal with spam messages from various subscribed services. As such, the inbox stays organized, and you can reply to crucial conversations on time.
Helps Run Email Campaigns
When you send branding emails to hundreds and thousands of potential clients, you don’t want to be flooded by the responses. Additionally, people will more likely mark the message as spam if it comes from a personal id.
Create Social Media Accounts for your Business
Social media marketing is a goldmine filled with opportunities for you! Once you unlock them, you will realize how easily you can reach the target audience and maintain an online brand presence via varying platforms. Therefore, marking a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and other relevant platforms should be a top-shelf priority for all entrepreneurs.
Setting up social media business pages will also let you track daily engagement, new users, and understand the kind of content people engage with most. Here are some notable aspects that social accounts can improve:
Marketing
Social media reaches customers where they are! Think about it – are your prospective clients reading business magazines or scrolling on Facebook or Instagram? Actively posting on your socials will help you gain credibility and improve brand visibility.
Customer Service
More people nowadays are resorting to social media for taking up complaints or feedback. You may be surprised to know that 42% of consumers expect a reply from the business within 60 minutes. Therefore, staying active on social media and promptly solving customer issues is essential.
Sales
Advertising on social media and running campaigns is one sure way of getting more people to visit your site. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook let you run online shops and make direct sales through the business account. You can also partner other entrepreneurs or social media influencers to spread awareness about your products or services.
Website Builders for Small Businesses
A crucial factor in digital marketing is your brand’s customized website. Where most customers will check out your product collection or range of services offered. Therefore, you must have an optimized and highly responsive website to direct consumer traffic.
You don’t need strong coding skills or an entire web development team for this. You can set up a channel to sell products online using some of the below-mentioned website builders.
Squarespace
With aesthetically pleasing and highly visually appealing templates, Squarespace is the right website builder for you. Its ease of use and design flexibility, also provides excellent social media support and marketing tools for your business.
Wix
Boasting over 800 website templates, Wix remains one of the top choices of entrepreneurs for website building. Besides creative control, it also lets you use built-in SEO and marketing tools. You can even translate your site into various languages if you are catering to people of different nationalities.
Self-Hosted WordPress
WordPress is one of the most widely recognized and used Content Management Systems (CMS), responsible for running 40% of the internet. You can build a site using thousands of free themes and templates and search and install various Plugins for SEO tools, Google Analytics, etc.
Web.com
This user-friendly website builder gives you a plethora of templates to get started. Simply drag-and-drop different elements needed on the web page and customize accordingly. The cost of setting up an e-commerce site starts at $3.95 for the first month, followed by $20 per month.
HubSpot Website Builder
HubSpot is another drag-and-drop website building platform where you get a range of CRM and automation tools. You can use preset templates to form landing pages, emails, etc and one significant feature: you get adaptive testing, i.e., you get to know which website version will best suit your business.
Wrapping Up
Are you trying to dip your toes into the entrepreneurial world and experience substantial customer growth by presenting your brand online? Regardless of how complicated it may sound, getting started with digital marketing is possible with the right internet tools.
Begin with a customized business email address and social media accounts. Next, start working on your site by using a free website builder. This will help you establish the company’s social presence for the world to see.
Follow up by running advertising campaigns and optimizing digital marketing strategies based on user engagement analytics.