If you’re growing a fledgling business, then it’s important to make sure that you’re doing things right from the start, especially with your marketing. There are plenty of tips and guides on how to help you improve an already-running marketing setup, but if you’re truly new to the market? You’re going to need to learn how to kick things off when you have nothing at the moment. Here, we’re going to look at some of the ways you can grow an online presence from the very beginning.
Build a website
The first thing that you should do, before anything else, is to make sure that you have a working website. This should serve as the home of your small business on the internet, it should give information on what you do, sell the reader why they should choose you, and give them the ability to get in touch or to buy your products and services directly. There are plenty of great website builders that allow you to complete your own website, or you can work with a web designer if you want to make sure that things have that professional appeal. If you’re planning on running an online store, you have to make sure that you choose an eCommerce storefront site.
Get social with it
The vast majority of people, roughly 8 in 10, all use social media. They use it to communicate with friends, and to keep up with family, but they also use it as consumers, and sometimes the right posts or ads can catch their attention and help to convert them. Other businesses will use social media as part of the support arm of their business, taking on customer queries through those platforms. You should be picky about which social media platforms you use for your business, however, ensuring that you’re most active in the space that you share with most of your target audience. For instance, products that have good visual appeal should be marketed on things like Instagram, while B2B operations tend to go better on LinkedIn.
Set aside an ad budget
Advertising on the internet is nowhere near as expensive as advertising through national TV or radio. However, you still need to have a budget set aside for it. There are several spaces you can advertise, but most people make use of things like Google Ads, which allows you to place your ads through not just the search engine but the advertisement network that’s hooked up to thousands of sites throughout the internet. You can also advertise through social media, using your budget to bump your posts, making them even more likely to be seen by more people.
Make search engines your best friend
Advertising, be it through ad portals, social media, or otherwise, is what is known as interruptive marketing. It’s flashy, it’s relatively expensive, and it’s very effective at helping you get clicks in the short term. However, it’s best paired with the long term strategy of making it easier for your audience to happen onto your website naturally. Organic marketing techniques like search engine optimization are an important part of digital marketing. Effectively this means optimizing your website as well as the content on it to make it more likely to appear to those people using search engines in an attempt to find content and sites that are relevant to them. There’s a wide variety of different SEO techniques, so be sure to look up both on-site and off-site SEO to get a better idea of how, exactly, you do this.
Produce valuable content
Content is king when it comes to online marketing. You might have heard that before but what does it really mean? It means you should consider writing valuable content that your audience is going to want to read for a variety of reasons. It can be informative, it can include advice and solutions to problems that your target market is likely to be facing. If part of the solution encourages them to make use of your products and services, that’s even better. Not only does good, frequently produced content keep your website up-to-date, but it also gives you something to post on social media (sometimes with just the right level of shareability), and can even help the aforementioned efforts of promoting your site through search engines.
Get personal with your content too
If your business is closely tied to your personal brand, and you want to sell your personal expertise, then you might want to take the tip above but go even further with it. Turn your blog posts into a more personal thing by transforming them into vlogs. Video content can be a lot more engaging in the right spaces, such as in social media posts, and it has the added benefit of tying your face to the advice and information that you’re giving, which can help you build audience trust in you as an individual. Consider starting a business vlog and using your social media channels to distribute your posts.
Get in those inboxes
You should consider how you can directly market to those most interested in your services and products. Appearing in their inbox might be one of the most straightforward ways to do it, but how do you get them to allow you in there in the first place? You can have an email signup form on your website, promising great content as well as exclusive deals or the earliest notification of the availability of certain products and services. Once you do that, an email marketing campaign can help you build some very loyal customers. But you have to manage it carefully, as blowing up their inbox too regularly can see you getting through in the spam folder.
Everyone has to start somewhere and you should start with the tips featured above. As you keep going, you’re going to find other ways to expand on and optimise the tips shared here, but what’s most important is that you actually get a presence established, first and foremost.
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