Igniting Business Blog

We often look at businesses that have prospered over the years and learn important lessons from their experience and success. After all, recreating success is often our goal, especially if that success launched a company into the stratosphere in earnings and reputation. Sometimes, though, it pays to look at history's failures to learn what not to do. Understanding what worked is often complicated and requires a nuanced understanding of the moment in time that made a given product or strategy work. When something fails, however, there's often a much clearer lesson left in the financial fossil record. Learn from these four historical marketing missteps:

Last month we discussed the difference between popular and profitable keywords.  Today, we want to propose a general rule of thumb that will help keep your different keyword strategies scalable:

Growing your audience is one of the main tenets of online businesses. If you're not being seen, you're not getting customers. Most internet users have such a short attention span that you need to be seen by a lot of people to get the customers you need. But if your audience is growing just for the sake of growing, then your audience may be getting too large which can create its own set of inefficiencies.  Ask yourself: Although the number of viewers is getting bigger and bigger, but is my conversion percentage getting smaller and smaller?

Instagram has become more than just an online platform for pretty faces, selfies, and memes. The popular image sharing social media platform now has the power to help businesses showcase their products and services to reach visually more potential customers.

Promoting your business and products on social media sites means more than posting a few blogs with links to your website—it means having a comprehensive strategy.  An effective social strategy will enable you to create a bond with prospective customers based on empathy and an understanding of the problems they face and your company's ability to solve those problems.  That strategy must encompass a wide range of content, everything from informative articles and humorous anecdotes to credible product reviews and current customer testimonials. Your efforts will work best when you think outside the box.

One way to generate more revenue in your small business is to acquire more of your best customers.  Rather than continuing broad marketing activities that are not providing quality results, analyze who your best customers and tailor your future marketing efforts accordingly. 

Online advertising is constantly transforming. It started as text-based ads with hyperlinks, then became static, clickable images. Soon it evolved to videos, recommendations from trusted content creators, and reviews. The full range of what online advertising means is growing every day, and every avenue leads to more exposure and more recognition. If you have a small business and you're wondering if the time is right to start advertising, here are three indicators you likely should invest in online advertising:

Social media sites commonly make small tweaks and adjustments to their interfaces in an attempt to find the best ways to keep users engaged and scrolling. While these changes are usually geared towards revamping the user experience, these features can also help small businesses keep their followers engaged. Here are some recent changes Facebook has made to its News Feed that small businesses can use to keep up with their audience.

Social media pages are evolving to be a continuous, scrollable presentation of content. They're designed to always offer users something new to look at, so they pull from more and more sources to fill users' homepages and timelines. While that means you have a wider audience for your content, it also means it's easier to get lost in the mix and for users to scroll past your specific post. 

You have done the research, chosen your niche and have the capital to get started. You are passionate about your work and excited to get started launching your business. For a last check, walk through these five marketing tips for small businesses to launch your business with impact to ensure that you are ready to go.