Getting your business out in the open is probably the most challenging part of building your startup. You need connections, good marketing strategies, and a product that appeals to a large market. That’s why so many people turn to online marketing. With social media and other forms of paid marketing, it can be much cheaper than taking out huge ads on the side of the road in the hopes that someone will come to your store.
If you’re interested in promoting your business online, then here are some tips for people just starting out that can really help you go the extra mile.
Listing Services
There are a few main services that you can register your business with to get easy traffic. The biggest being Google My Business. When locals search for your niche, your store will display in a snippet if you’re one of the closest or highest reviewed. You only need to fill out the form to register. Similar services can be found on Yahoo! Local. They are completely free and worth the few minutes they take to set up. Microsoft’s Bing also has a similar service.
Social Media
One of the most practical forms of online advertising is social media. It starts by building a following. You can do this organically or you can spend a small amount of money each month to create custom campaigns through Facebook and Twitter to build a large audience quickly. When you have your audience, then you can start creating ads and getting your message out for free. It’s a lot of work to manage and engage with your audience every day but you’ll find it’s worth the effort. If you have a product, powerful tools you need to utilize are more visual-based platforms like Pinterest and Instagram. Pinterest has become its own shopping platform, allowing you to extend your reach to more people than ever before, it’s vital that you make your own account and establish some authority. For Instagram, you’ll want to use this more supplementary with your own website, displaying crisp images in a masonry block is just one example.
Blog
Many businesses overlook this free piece of advertising but you should seriously consider starting a blog. The primary use of a business blog should be to provide customers with relevant and useful information. You can also write articles around specific keywords that you need to hit for your niche, improving your overall SEO. Another bonus is that you have more material to circulate through your social media accounts, driving more traffic to your site.
Visual Media
2016 was the dawn of visual marketing. The course of digital advertising changed more businesses start implementing video and image-based ads. These mediums are much more engaging than mere words and allow you to get a complicated thought to your customer using a single ad. One great source to use is YouTube. The service is free and offers paid features, similar to Facebook and Twitter. Again, the videos you make can be sent through your social media to create a well-oiled marketing machine
On-Site SEO for Your Company Website
Search engine optimization is the focus of most companies, looking to the future. Google is placing more emphasis on this factor and companies are hiring SEO experts left and right in an attempt to get to the top. By assessing what your niche is and breaking that down to a single key term or phrase, you can use tools like Google Console to see who’s on top and what they are doing right so you can implement and improve your own strategies.
Press Releases
Now, keeping with the different mediums and feeding them into your funnel of social media, your website, and videos, press releases are another great tool that you can use to build your brand. There are hundreds of companies that partner with newspapers, magazines, and televisions stations and they can push your PRs to these outlets. When an influential media publishes your press release, you can then feed it through all the channels mentioned above. In this way, you get a continuous cycle of intriguing articles, videos, and ads that people see every day.
If you want to Promote Your Business Online, then you need to focus on these popular channels and mediums and create your own system that runs everything back to your website.
Buying Traffic
You can also buy traffic from vendors, like Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Yahoo! Gemini, Outbrain, and Taboola. If you’re starting from scratch, you might want to consider this to build an initial following, and then slowly weed it out of your routine as you continue to amass more and more people that like your product.
Email Marketing
This remains one of the most powerful tools that businesses use today. There’s nothing more effective than learning someone’s shopping habits then sending them an ad based on that information. If someone likes a certain brand of perfume, you could easily send them a coupon. When you do this effectively, your subscribers become life-long fans of your business. A lot of your time will be spent building lists of people and separating them into convenient categories that make sense for your store, however.
If you’re interested in learning more about promoting your business online, then contact the experts at WebCroppers today!
