500,000+ Trinis are online. Even small/medium businesses have come to accept that they can’t do online marketing alone and need help from experts.

How many Trinis can you reach? We can use Facebook’s ad creation tool to determine the raw numbers and segment by targeted demographic. No need to throw darts.

On an island of 1.3 million people there are over 500,000 souls online and they know exactly what they’re doing. Local businesses know that they can definitely reach their market via Facebook even if it’s the only means of advertising they use. However, Facebook has made it increasingly difficult to get your business page in front of eyeballs, effectively forcing you to pay for sponsored ads.

Now businesses can no longer depend on the free advertising from Facebook and have to re-evaluate the use of other online marketing tools they’ve been neglected in the past.

With each new year the size of the local labor force is growing meaning more incomes to spend. With each new year a new batch of Form Ones get new laptops. If we think ahead (sigh…who really does?), these kids will have laptops and they’ll know how to use them.

Online Marketing Strategy- an absolute necessity

It doesn’t matter in what dark corner your business may be in Trinidad & Tobago (as long as it’s legal of course), online marketing is an absolute must today. Most people interpret online marketing to mean advertising only, i.e. getting your ad or message in front of your target audience, with the aim being to attract customers.

In the web world the term has actually been refined to INBOUND MARKETING, which refers to using online tools to reach to first ATTRACT traffic and then CONVERT to customers/sales, with methodologies for a structured approach for optimal results- a far cry from the shots in the dark many use today.

With many tools available, like social media (Facebook, Google Plus), email marketing, videos (You Tube, Vimeo), blogging, landing pages, content creation, conversion forms etc., it can be a pretty daunting task figuring out the best approach.