It takes around three months for a well-executed SEO campaign to start paying off. Anyone who tells you they can get SEO results faster than that is usually up to no good.

Yes! No matter how large or small, if you have a business, you need a website.
And if you need a website – and you want it to help you make money – you need marketing.

Yes – you can get traffic overnight with Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), a paid traffic solution that shows ads to people when they search keywords relevant to your website. But AdWords isn’t a silver bullet. It won’t get you sales unless your website is set up to take advantage of that traffic.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for a business to reach customers directly. Think about it. You’re not posting something on your site and hoping people will visit it. You’re not even posting something on a social media page and hoping fans will see it. You’re sending something directly into each person’s inbox, where they definitely will see it! Even if they don’t open it, they’ll still see the subject line and your company’s name each time you send an email, so you’re always communicating directly with your audience.

Whether your business is taking advantage of it or not, social media has forever changed the way that consumers communicate with businesses, and vice versa. Being accessible to your customers – and your prospective clients – via social media is a vital means of developing relationships with them and helping them through the sales funnel.

It’s important for both, but in different ways. While B2C businesses can focus on more light-hearted, fun social media posts, B2B businesses need to use social media to share valuable industry content. As a tool for connecting a business with its customers, however, social media is vital to both.

It’s important to remember, however, that ROI doesn’t have to mean revenue. It can, but it can also mean meeting other objectives, such as getting new leads, increasing email subscriptions, or even boosting customer satisfaction. The ROI you end up with is the direct result of how focused your social media marketing strategy is.

One thing is for certain – social media marketing is never free. Whether you’re spending your own valuable time on it, asking an employee to add it to their workload, hiring a social media employee, or outsourcing to a marketing firm, there is always a cost. The key is to get the maximum ROI out of the time or money you put into it.

There is no set answer to this question because you need to have a presence wherever your customers are – and different businesses have different audiences. One demographic spends most of their time on Facebook, while another really only engages on LinkedIn, and some divide their time equally between three or more sites. Find out where your customers are, and follow them there.