That's where marketing tactics come in. It can be hard to know the best steps to take to raise awareness about your product or service or to entice people to choose your company over the competition, but fortunately theres no reason to take a trial and error approach.

You can learn from the experience of other small business owners who've gone before you to use what works, and steer away from what doesn't. Here are 6 marketing tips for small businesses to help boost your customer base and raise your revenues.

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1. Get online

The internet is the first place anyone turns to to compare prices, research brands, or find the closest store. If you're not online, that ideal customer may never find you.

Marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Etsy aren't enough. They drive sales, but think of them as like owning a stall at a farmer's market. It's a great way to connect with new customers, but it can't be your permanent store.

Owning your own website means you can:

• Create a fully branded experience, with your color schemes and logo
• Track customer data like cart abandonment rate, bounce rate, and product views
• Build a relationship with customers that goes beyond the first sale

If the idea of building a website makes you shudder, fear not. Website hosting platforms like WordPress or Shopify have pre-set templates and easy-to-use editors that make it simple to create a website even without any technical knowledge.

2. Start a blog

If you want Google to send new customers your way, you need to make it clear what your website is about, and to do that, you need to use the right keywords. It's tough to do that if you’re only running an online store, but starting a business blog makes it all much easier.

Aim to write one blog post a week, but make sure your content adds value. For example, if you run a shoe business, you could write about how to choose the right running shoe. Don't worry about giving away business "secrets;" this information convinces customers to trust you.

Writing blog posts can be tough at first, but it's easier when you pick a topic that you care about. There are also tools to help improve your blog post, like built-in spell checkers, Hemingway to check sentence length, and Grammarly for phrasing and grammar issues.

Once you've written your blog post, make sure you share it thoroughly through social media and to your email subscribers.

3. Hone your website

No one is willing to wait around while your online store takes ages to load. According to one survey, 93% of people clicked off a site because it didn’t load fast enough, and by “fast enough,” we mean under 1.6 seconds. 

Once they leave, they are unlikely to come back, so your business website needs to be easy to navigate, fast to load, and very reliable.

Managed WordPress hosting can help make sure that your website has minimum downtime and responds as quickly as possible, while also taking the burden off your shoulders. When experts deal with the technical side of your website, you can focus on marketing strategies.

4. Grow your social media audience

Social media is basically our second home today, so your business needs to be there. 67% of consumers say they bought something after seeing it appear in their social media feed.

Facebook is one of the best places to start. Set up your Facebook business account and include all the vital information — location, services/products, opening hours, etc. Then you can invite people to like your page, and post content that people want to see and share.

The other channels you use depend on your business. If you're in a very visual line of work, like a photographer or a makeup artist, you might want to be on Instagram. If you’re targeting younger audiences, join TikTok. For B2B sales, make a LinkedIn page.

It's easy to get overwhelmed, so focus on just a couple of channels to begin with. You can write your own new content, post links to your blog, or share other people's content, but make sure it always adds value for your customers.

If this sounds like too much, you can use social media automation. Platforms like Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social help you plan and publish your posts. Set a schedule for a month’s worth of posts at a time, and then leave the platform to automatically post them at the right time.

5. Ask for reviews

It may seem hard to believe, but more than three-quarters of consumers trust reviews they see online from a random stranger as much as recommendations from family or friends.

That means it's worth it to ask your satisfied customers to leave you a review on Google My Business, Yelp!, or social media like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It can also help to have a "leave a review" box on your site, so you can share positive feedback on your social media or your website.

6. Embrace email marketing

Email might seem old-fashioned now, but people still respond to it better than any other channel. It's the ideal way to remind someone about items they forgot in their cart, share news about your new collection, or send discounts and promotions.

Use your website to gather email addresses from visitors, and then segment them into different groups so you can send targeted, relevant email messages.

Email marketing platforms like MailChimp, AWeber, and ConstantContact help with segmentation, automated campaigns, and detailed data insights, to make your email marketing faster and more effective.

The right marketing tactics can drive big growth for small business

Small business marketing doesn't need to be tough. When you build a business site and improve its speed and uptime, share your wisdom through a blog, build a social media audience, gather positive reviews, and promote your site through marketing emails, you can keep increasing your business reach and growth.
As managed WordPress hosting experts, we know what we're talking about, whether you need advice on marketing your small business, building a business website, or improving website speed and uptime. You can trust us with the entire gamut of WordPress questions, so the only one left is... why aren't we hosting your WordPress site yet? Click below and join us.

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What could possibly go wrong?

Your website.

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Businesses that depend on their websites for lead capturing and sales conversions stand to lose significant revenue when their website goes down or loads too slowly. You probably designed your website with conversion rates in mind, but page speed might not have been one of your top concerns.

Think about it. If you have the choice of purchasing a baby gift from three different sites, you'll go to your favorite first. If it's taking time to load, you'll bounce over to the competitor's site within seconds. You're short on time and must complete the task before jumping on a business call in five minutes. Completing the purchase is more important than waiting around for your favorite store to load up.

Nearly 70% of users say that the speed of a page affects their willingness to buy from an online retailer.

Unbounce conducted their own study and discovered that 22% of your website visitors will close your tab if your site takes too long to load. Another 14% say they'll visit a competitor's site instead. If you count on 1000 daily visitors, that's 360 potential customers lost.

Try this formula out for yourself. How many visitors do you expect on your site per day? Multiply that number by .36 to determine how many visitors are potentially lost due to a slow webpage. (You can connect your website to google analytics to obtain real numbers regarding your website traffic.)

Still not convinced? Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).

How do I measure my page speed?

Before panicking, first, determine your page speed by measuring it.

There are many tools available including:

Solarwind's Pingdom

Google Pagespeed

These tools not only measure your page speed but also capture many other metrics as well to help you improve your end-user experience.

3 Reasons why your website is down or slow

There are many reasons why your website may be sluggish or completely down, and more often than not, the solutions are straightforward. Read about more ways to speed up your website here, and try these 3 tips below.

Your website hosting service

Not all web hosts are created equal, which is why Witty Sparks produced this guide on how to compare different options and choose the right one for your needs. According to WebsiteSetup, although most web hosting services promise 99.99% uptime, the average uptime of 32 shared web hosting providers was actually 99.59%. When calculated, that amounts to about 35 hours 32 minutes of downtime per year, per website!

WebsiteSetup recommends web hosts that provide you with an uptime of at least 99.94%.

There are other points to consider when choosing a web hosting provider. Does your web hosting provider offer the following?

1. A CDN: If your business is global, a CDN (content delivery network) enables you to distribute your content from servers located around the world. For example, if your web host's main server is located in New York, and your user is located in India, a CDN will replicate your site and place it on a server in India (and other global locations) so that users in India can access it more quickly.

2. Managed services as opposed to shared services

There are different ways to be hosted. For small businesses that run few campaigns or host less daily traffic, sharing server space with other sites will probably be fine.

For larger businesses with more traffic, campaigns, and frequent spikes in traffic, you may be asking, do you need managed WordPress hosting? This is an option with a dedicated server or a VPS (Virtual Private Server) that will give you more flexibility and space for additional traffic. What is managed WordPress hosting, you ask.

2) Your website content

A website with all the bells and whistles may be attention-grabbing and aesthetically pleasing, but fancy websites tend to load more slowly.

Backlinko's research revealed that the total content size impacts fully loaded page speed more than any other variable on both desktop and mobile.

Too many images, videos, and third-party scripts (like Google Analytics, video hosts, etc.) weigh down a site. As a result, large pages (greater than 3.49 MB) take 486% longer to fully load compared to smaller pages (less than .83 MB).

Perhaps that's one reason why many modern websites have opted for a minimalist design with fewer images and assets.

Have your website developer audit your site. Depending on the results, you can then reduce the weight of your website content by:

1. Optimizing and compressing your images and videos
2. Limiting the number of plugins
3. Reducing the number of JavaScript and CSS files
4. Installing website caching

There are also specific plugins that can help you with all these tasks, like WP Rocket, as recommended here. It includes lazy loading, caching, CDN configuration, and a few other tools that speed up your site.

3) Your end user's device and network

Your end-user may experience a slow load time because he's working from an outdated device or is located in an area with poor internet service. Even if your site is perfectly optimized, there's nothing you can do about the end-user. On a positive note, your competition won't fare any better in this scenario.

Your customer's expectations matter

The first step in any sales process is prospecting or lead generation. If you're running an online business, part of that process occurs through your website. Your prospect explores your site, your product, your blog, and all the assets provided to determine if you offer what they need.

For your potential customers, this research occurs early in their buyer's journey. If you want them to see your value proposition at its best and convert them into real leads, your website needs to be user-friendly. It's not just about having a cool design and top visuals; your site speed is probably the most important factor contributing to your site's UX, although there may also be other design mistakes affecting user experience.

Don't risk losing potentially solid leads and lost revenue because of a slow website. Test your page speed as well as your site speed, and then, fix your site accordingly.

Also, with mobile searches on the rise, your prospects expect their mobile load speed to match their desktop speed. Keep this in mind as you optimize your site.

Then, sit back and watch your leads click and convert.

As managed WordPress hosting experts, we know what we're talking about, whether you need advice on what's making your site slow, how to secure it, or how much bandwidth you really need. You can trust us with the entire gamut of WordPress questions, so the only one left is... why aren't we hosting your WordPress site yet? Click below and join us.

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You can reach a company website just by typing their web address, and it makes no difference whether or not you put www. at the beginning. So a lot of our customers ask us if it matters whether they use it or not.

In brief, the answer is "not really".

With or without www, that is the question - click here

Why is there a difference between www. and non-www. web addresses?

Traditionally, the website address like website.com, without www. before it, is your server name. When you use www.websitename.com, it means your files are shared publicly on the web, in contrast to ftp.websitename.com, for example, which means that your files are shared internally.

But today we usually use the term "domain" to refer to your www. address, not your server, so you can use a www.domain or a non-www.domain, which is also called a naked domain. Technically, using a www. web address can help DNS to limit cookies in sub-domains, but that would only concern you if you're a techie web developer.

As a business and website owner, all you need to know is that both www. and non-www. website addresses work equally well.

Which type of web address is best for WordPress SEO?

For most of our managed WordPress hosting clients, the real question is which formulation is best for WordPress SEO purposes. They want to know if search engines will find them better with a specific type of domain name, or if they could be penalized for using (or not using) www. at the beginning of their URL.

We have good news for you here too. When it comes to WordPress SEO, there is no difference between the two types of web addresses.

Just like your visitors don't pay much attention to whether or not there's a www. at the beginning of your web address, nor do search engines. Using a www. web address is really only a matter of personal preference, not WordPress SEO.

Even Google says that your choice is down to your own preferences, not about WordPress SEO. The only thing that really matters is consistency.

Consistency is key

If you seesaw back and forth between using a www. address and a non-www. address, you'll end up paying for it with your WordPress SEO. Google and other search engines won't know which web address to use when attributing link juice, or which one to suggest when people search for your business' keywords.

You'll end up competing with your own website for WordPress SEO love.

So whichever you choose, be consistent. If you've already got a web address with (or without) www. just keep on using it.

Setting a primary domain

If you're undecided about which address formulation to use, you don't have to make a choice. You can use both www. and non-www. if you think that people might have trouble remembering your correct web address.

But to keep your WordPress SEO going strong, you'll need to set one of them as your primary domain. Otherwise you'll weaken your WordPress SEO for all the reasons we mentioned above - search engines won't know which one to suggest for search queries, so your ranking will be split between the two web address versions.

Here's how to tell Google which domain address to use and maintain your WordPress SEO.

1. Use Google Webmaster Tools

If you didn't add your website on Google Webmaster tools, now is the time to do so. Login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click on your website.

Then click on the Settings Icon and choose Site Settings.

Under Site Settings, choose Preferred Domain.

2. Use Yoast WordPress SEO

If you'd prefer not to use Google Webmaster Tools, there is an alternative, and that's the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. Just click on the link and hit the Download button to add the WordPress SEO Yoast plugin to your WordPress dashboard.

Once you've installed Yoast WordPress SEO, you'll see that it automatically defines the canonical URL in your website header, which lets Google know which is your preferred URL formulation.

Now you're all set and your WordPress SEO is protected.

In case you were wondering, at uPress we prefer to use www. in our domain names. It's not because we think they are better than non-www. domain names, it's just the approach that we like best. You can still use a non-www. web address if you prefer. We won't judge, and it won't affect your WordPress SEO.

We hope we managed to explain the differences between websites with www and those without www in their domain address, and to reassure you about your WordPress SEO.

As managed WordPress hosting experts, we know what we're talking about, whether you need us to walk you through the SEO ramifications of using www, or you want to talk about how much bandwidth your business really needs. If you're asking what is managed WordPress hosting, it means you can trust us with the entire gamut of WordPress questions, so the only one left is... why aren't we hosting your WordPress site yet? Click below and join us.

With or without www, that is the question - click here

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