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Today, starting a business is almost the easy part. You can set up a high-quality website and register a business name, and begin providing products and services right away.
The tough part isn’t starting the business, it’s getting attention from your ideal customers. The market in every industry is very competitive and crowded, and consumers get thousands of advertising messages every day.
Fortunately, there are ways you can promote your business online and stand out from competitors. Let’s look at 10 effective strategies.
As of 2021, Canadians spend an average of 1 hour and 46 minutes on social media each day. In addition, 91% of Canadians use the internet regularly. That means taking advantage of social media communities is a great way to promote your business online.
Remember that the purpose of social media is in the name — it’s social! That means the best way to engage with users is not to blast your marketing message over and over, but rather to communicate with followers and create engaging content regularly.
For example, a plumbing company can create a group to share plumbing tips and tricks with their local community. As people join the group, they’ll gain access to helpful posts about easy fixes, along with an invitation to contact the company for more serious problems.
These types of communities can help you build a strong relationship with people in your local area, leading to more leads and appointments.
Videos are a powerful way to connect with your audience. Because video provides the full experience — audio, visual, and nonverbal communication — your audience will feel like they’re hearing from you personally. When you create videos, you’re connecting with your audience on an emotional level, not just intellectual.
Video gives you a chance to not only demonstrate a product or service, but to allow followers to get to know you on a more personal level. This builds trust, which makes someone more likely to purchase from your business.
Even better, video can be shared almost everywhere online. A single video can be placed on a company YouTube channel, shared on Facebook, sent through email, and shared on Vimeo. Videos also do very well in Google search results, meaning prospective customers could find it organically as well.
The power of video to bring in customers, combined with the wide reach a single video can have, means it’s one of the most effective ways to promote your business online.
Having a professional website is a great first step, but it’s only the first step. To make your website more visible and turn it into the 24/7 marketing tool you deserve, you need to optimize it.
Search engine optimization (SEO) allows you to improve the chances that your website appears on Google’s first page for specific keywords and search terms. The best strategy is to focus on keywords that ready-to-buy customers in your local area enter into Google.
A well-optimized website gives you a lot more visibility online and can bring in organic traffic, leads, and new customers for a long time to come. That’s why it’s the best way to promote business online.
However, SEO involves a lot of different parts of your website and your online presence. Keeping your ranking strong also requires a bit of ongoing maintenance and staying on top of changes in Google’s ranking system.
That’s why many small and medium businesses decide to outsource their SEO to a high-quality marketing firm like Local SEO Search. It gives you excellent marketing visibility online while allowing you to focus on your core business needs.
Google My Business is essential if you want to build up your reputation and effectiveness online. Even better, it’s free! Your Google My Business page is absolutely the best way to promote your business online free.
You start by claiming your page and putting in your business name, address, and contact information. From there, add pictures of your business, products, and services. You need a written description of your business that uses the right keywords so that your listing will be seen as relevant to searches related to your products and services.
Finally, you want to build a strong review profile. That means soliciting reviews from your customers as a regular part of your post-sale customer service process. Most people trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation, so having a lot of positive reviews is a big part of establishing your authority and trustworthiness.
Your Google My Business page is a key marketing asset, second only to your own website. That’s why claiming and optimizing your page is the best way to promote your business online.
A blog is an informational section of your website where you publish informational content to engage your visitors and encourage them to do business with you.
A full 80% of web searches are informational, meaning that the user is looking for information about a topic or process. Providing this educational content in an engaging way allows you to begin a relationship with the user and build trust in your business as an authority on the topic.
Creating high-quality content regularly also gives you more opportunities to target keywords that are relevant to your industry and customer base. Because Google aims to provide the most relevant and helpful information to its users, the more content you create the more likely you are to rank well.
Use your blog to answer common questions your customers and prospects ask about your industry, products, and services. You can create how-to posts, lists, or do interviews with experts in your industry. The key is to answer the questions consumers are actually asking in a clear, engaging way.
When you do, you’ll not only do well in search results, but you’ll also build relationships with the readers who find you on Google.
Running ads online is a way to boost your immediate visibility, but it’s also very expensive. Another drawback is that when you stop spending money on the ad campaign, you lose all of your visibility right away.
As a result, it’s important to be judicious about how you use online ads to improve your brand reputation and visibility. The best thing to do is to run ads as a short-term strategy to boost your company while long-term initiatives, like SEO and your social media community, gain traction.
When you run ads on social media, you can either promote specific blog posts to drive traffic to your content, or you can promote your products and services directly to encourage immediate purchases. Either way, it’s vital to speak directly to the needs of your ideal customers so that they will respond to the ad.
Running ads on Google involves targeting specific keywords so that you can show up above the organic search results. However, your listing is prefaced with [ad] so users know that you paid for your position. Make sure your Google ad is highly relevant to what a user searching that term is looking for to boost your click-through rate and conversions.
One of the most creative ways to promote your business online is to let your customers do it for you! Too many businesses focus so much on a sale that once the transaction happens, they no longer nurture their relationship with the customer. That’s a huge mistake!
A loyal customer can not only bring in additional revenue by making additional purchases, they can also become brand advocates that help encourage other consumers to become your customers. This type of marketing is among the most powerful available because the customer who advocates for you isn’t paid — they truly believe in what they’re saying.
People want to have a great experience with a business that offers the products and services they need. When you have existing customers who talk about their amazing experiences with your business, you’ll get new customers quickly.
Of course, word-of-mouth has always been an important marketing strategy, but when you move it online the impact is multiplied many times over. The power of someone speaking online is that they reach far, far more people than they ever could face-to-face. That’s why cultivating brand ambassadors online is such an important way to promote your business!
As you can see, there are many different ways to promote your business online. When you take advantage of these strategies, you’ll find that your business will grow more quickly and consistently than it did in the past.
Online strategies are here to stay, and you can’t afford to overlook them. If you’d like help with online brand building and SEO, we’re here for you. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you be successful!
