The internet is by far the most sensible, easy, and popular way to promote new businesses these days. It can, however, leave new business owners scratching their heads thinking, “where do I even start?” Luckily, there is plenty of help out there. Online marketing doesn’t need to be a stressful task. In this article, we’re going to discuss a few of the best online strategies to help you market your business better.
Digital Marketing Companies
If you aren’t looking for a lesson on how to market a company yourself, you can consider hiring a digital marketing company. This makes sense if you have some cash and want digital marketing that works, from the off as there are companies now that incorporate all of your online brandings into one marketing campaign including web design, socials, e-mail, and all other facets of online marketing. You could opt for full-service where you allow the company - or individual marketer - to take control of your company's accounts and campaign and run it for you. Or, a digital marketer could simply advise you and your business on how to properly market yourselves.
Social Media
One of the easiest and cheapest ways to get started with a marketing strategy is to get on social media. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are key platforms to market your business on. The best part? They’re all free. To start a business page on each of these sites costs you absolutely nothing, and in return, you receive insights into who’s viewing your page, where they came from, what time, how long for and more. This can help shape your marketing strategy, posting frequency and more.
Most marketers advise regular posting on social media and encourage interaction with followers. Spend some time replying to comments, engaging your followers with competitions, or sharing special offers. Make sure to respond with interesting comments and strike up conversations to keep people coming back to your page.
Search Engine Optimization
If you don’t know already, you need to learn about SEO. SEO is the process of helping your site appear higher on results pages of search engines’ results pages. Let’s just say, for example, that you’re running a coffee shop in London. You want your business to appear right at the top when people search for the best coffee in London, right? So you need to convince Google’s web crawlers that your site is one of the most popular.
To do this, we recommend hiring an SEO company, as it can be quite time-consuming. They will then create bespoke articles for you on subjects surrounding London and coffee, posting them on great blog sites. These articles will link back to your page, creating more of a web to your site, and more frequent clicks on your site, making Google see your page as more and more popular. Alongside this, they can also help you optimize your website, social media, and more.
Ask For Reviews
Online review sites are also crucial for a business. First, make sure you set up and own the page on each site, for example, Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, etc. Make sure the page has all the accurate information for your business such as opening hours, phone number, and email. Following this, ask your customers to place reviews on the site and once again, make sure you engage. Thank people for their good reviews and offer to help those who leave bad reviews. Anyone finding your page will see your interactions with customers and see you are a friendly and reliable company.
Email Marketing
You should be building your email contact lists from day one. A common way to do so is to ask people to sign up via your website. You could also use your business wifi, asking people for their email in return for free wifi. Once you gather these people’s information, you can start sending them targeted marketing emails. Update them on what’s going on with your business and offer them exclusive email-only offers or rewards.
Including a call to action within emails tends to be an excellent way to increase traffic to your site. Something like a nice big colourful box asking them to “click here” for a range of discounts or benefits. After all, what we want is more clicks through to your site!
These are a few excellent starting points that all businesses should take when trying to market themselves online. Get started with each of these and you will start to watch your web traffic grow and your customer base expand.
