Digital Art Marketing

This year has certainly been like no other. So many businesses have had to go through really tough times and unfortunately not all of them will make it out of the other side. With lock down and then even after reopening, tightened restrictions having to be put in place which often means allowing less customers in etc even the best-established businesses are suffering.

If you are going to get through these tough times then you need to think smart. As the money coming in starts to dry up you may be tempted to reduce or stop your marketing entirely. This should not be a decision you take lightly as stopping marketing altogether can mean that all the hard work that you have done previously starts to slip away.

Ideally you need to market yourself through this time so if for example you are able to trade but not in your usually way, find a new way in which you can trade and advertise it really well. IF you run a restaurant that cannot seat many people now due to the 2 meter rule then you may decide to also offer takeout. This can help boost your revenue. You will need to find a way of notifying your customers of your new service and often social media sites such as Facebook work really well for this.

When it comes to SEO it can be very complex and it is important to fully understand what you are doing prior to starting. SEO has changed over the years and some techniques that used to be used (although even at the time were not great) should be avoided at all costs.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a very hard technique to master and no one ever does entirely, partly because it is so vast and much of it based on ideas and assumptions. The companies such as Google that decide where to rank sites, use an algorithm. This algorithm is top secret but they do often give handy tips and hints as to what they are looking for and what may have an effect on your rankings.  

Unfortunately, there are still some “Bad” or “Black hat” SEO techniques floating around that the not so savvy marketeer may be tempted to use. These techniques can not only have little or no effect on the actual rankings of a site but can even have a very detrimental effect on the rankings. If you get discovered using these techniques your site may well be seriously demoted or even removed completely from the listings.  If this happens, it can be very hard to recover from it and often it can take months and months to get a to be indexed again.

If you have a website then you need to think carefully about all aspects of your marketing. One important part of your marketing is SEO.

SEO – search Engine Optimisation is vital to getting your website found on the search engine giants such as Google. There are many different elements to search engine optimisation all of which are important. The idea of SEO is to get the site to follow the algorithm that Google sets when ranking sites. If for example the algorithm says that the site needs to have a certain keyword density on several pages to get ranked high, then this is what you need to do on the site.  Many business owners think they know enough about SEO to give it a go but you do have to be very careful as if you make a mistake it can cost you drastically and take a long time to recover. You could even find that your site is removed from the search engine completely and this can take years to recover from.

For this reason alone, often it pays to hire an SEO expert or marketing company to help manage your online marketing for your website, as the money you invest should create more leads and sales.

If you are a business owner then you will have to make decisions about how much you are going to spend on marketing and where exactly you invest your time and money. Marketing is split in to two main types, online and offline. Examples of online marketing are social media marketing, websites and Pay per Click ads. Offline marketing may include leaflet drops, door to door sales, newspaper adverts / billboard ads or cold calling.

Historically, everyone used to invest their marketing budgets in to offline avenues such as Yellow Pages, local newspapers and flyers / banners but now the market has shifted and companies are realising that offline marketing alone simply isn’t enough. The majority of the public now turn to the internet to find suppliers of products or services they want. If you do not advertise in this way you are missing out on a potentially huge amount of sales.

Both forms of marketing have their advantages, but online marketing is certainly a lot easier to track and allows you to change and tweak content and update regularly, which is often not possible in offline marketing. With online marketing you can often very quickly see results and are able to track exactly where your ads are working and where they are not by using a simple program such as Analytics.

When you are browsing the internet whether it be to find information about something or whether you are looking to buy a product or service your first impression of the website you click on gives you a sense of the business and its professionalism therefore it is important as a web designer that you choose the right images on your home page that will convey your business brand.

When you are looking for photographs or images to use, care must be taken to only use images that are copyright free if you do not want to buy the right to use them. Some stock image sites charge a one-time fee whilst others charge for a single use or for a restricted time for some of their images. Look out for those that are in the public domain or those that have a creative commons license as these can be freely used.

Of course, it is acceptable to use your own images, and this is a good idea if you want to give your visitor an inside view into your business premises or meet your staff.

The overriding principles must be that the images are of a good quality and that they translate well if viewed on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet.