Matthew Rusk Student Entrepreneur in Residence

Websites may feel slightly outdated in 2019. After all, everyone talks about social media being the be all and end all of online advertising. While, to an extent this is a true fact, websites are still relevant and here is why.

Think of your website as your online hub. It can be seen as a central repository for your business. You might be driving your customer interaction on Facebook, showing service demos on Youtube and delivering customer service via Twitter, but your website is going to be your central place for discovery and traffic direction.

If you have a good website, it will not only confirm your business as a serious entity (Who doesn’t check Google first when looking for a business) but it will also show your clients a portfolio of what you do, what your business offers and what your mission is.

When a client navigates to your website, they should see a series of links. Links to pages within your website for various topics but also links out to your social media pages. As I said, you may drive engagement and content through your social media channels but imagine your website as your big, digital business card.

This is the place your clients will see what you offer and see how profession your service is. Websites are also a great place to host client testimonials and newsfeed/blog items that are too long for a social media post.

If your business is a business that sells a physical product, or a service, clients are going to be more trusting of a website to handle payments. Your website is an invaluable tool that will really help your business stand out from the crowd. Make sure it’s of a high standard and show the world what you can do.

Posted under Advertising Online

When you get into business, one of the big considerations is how to correctly advertise the service that you’re offering. These days, we live in an age where the internet rules the circuit. Everything that we do and subscribe to, comes from our usage of the internet.

Our conversations with friends take place on social media, our memories are stored on photo sharing sites, our music and film choices come from huge streaming libraries and the knowledge we consume comes from forums, webinars and blogs. So, how can we levy this when it comes to just running a business.

Advertising is key to any business’ success, especially if you have a product of a service that is offered in return for a monetary value. There are a number of services that we can use to advertise online including:

• Facebook/Instagram Ads
• Youtube Ads
• Google Ad Words

All of these advertising channels allow us to cater adverts to a specific audience. The great thing about social media is that everyone puts their own personalities and tastes into it so we can use this information to target them. If your company offers driving lessons, you could target ads to people in that age bracket in your area. If you’re a company offering a business service, such as an accountancy firm, you could target self employed people in a much wider area. You are in complete control of the demographic of these adverts.

Social media has allowed this method of advertising to become very visual so when setting up an ad campaign online, ensure that your photos or video content is eye catching, informative and to the point. You want the viewer to understand exactly what you are offering from the moment that your ad lands in their feed. 

Each social media ad method allows you to view analytics to see how many views the ad has received and how many of those views are converting customers.

Google Ad Words is slightly different as this works on keywords. You would need to list all the keywords associated with your business and create an ad campaign based on this. It will target your demographic audience when they use those specific keywords.

Online adverts almost always are cheaper to run than printed or physical media ads and certainly have more scalability potential. They are so under priced so look at them and see how they can benefit you today.

Posted under Advertising Online

It’s hard advertising your services online. There are so many other great businesses and competition is tight. Let’s take a minute to think about how social media could be a huge game changer for so many of us when it comes to getting our business out there.

So, the chances are you probably spent some time each day scrolling through your newsfeed on Facebook, Instagram or any other social media platform and in amongst the baby pictures from friends and cat memes, occasionally you might come across an advertisement of some sort. Possibly from a local business that are sponsoring posts.

Right now, social media plays a huge role in not only how we consume content, but how we visualise business. That business advert you are seeing is a carefully targeted advert. You are seeing it because either your phones tracking cookies are linking it to content you’ve viewed online or because the advertiser has chosen someone of your demographic to see the post.

You can apply this to your own marketing strategy right away with a few small clicks. Start off by writing a list of who your business or product appeals to. Then, check out Facebooks Ad Manager. You can create tailor made adverts to push your business post or video into the news feeds of the people who fit your demographic.

You can set a daily budget (Which by the way is very under-priced for the exposure you receive) and set your radius and let the systems algorithm do the rest. You are now advertising your business on the worlds largest directory of potential customers.

Don’t have any budget? Not to worry. The great thing about Facebook (And other social media platforms) algorithms is that they recognise when content is popular and make it appear in more newsfeeds. The more it’s seen and interacted with, the further it goes. Get your friends and family to share the post on their own pages. This means connections they have that you do not have will see the post and it will help the organic reach grow which increases the chances even further of it being seen.

Social Media is yours for the taking. Make yourself seen.

Posted under Advertising Online