Learning how to promote your small business online can be extremely overwhelming As a small business owner you probably don’t have endless pockets of cash ready to throw into expensive advertising campaigns to drive potential customers to your website. The simple days of buying a local newspaper or magazine ad are gone and it’s now more confusing than ever to figure out cost effective ways to promote your small business online. When it comes to promoting your small business online you need to clearly identify exactly who your customer is. Where do they hang out online? Do they respond to online promotion? Or even a mixture of online and offline marketing?
Here are 6 promotion methods on how to promote your small business online:
1. Create a Facebook business page
As simple as it seems, many small business owners still aren’t even on Facebook. With Facebook boasting an impressive 1.71 billion active monthly users it seems almost impossible to argue against getting set up with a Facebook business page. Provide great value, good quality pictures and customer testimonials (videos work great) for your audience, this will entice potential customers into clicking your website link and enquiring into your services. TIP: Make sure you properly complete all of the “about us’ type information on the page, an incomplete page can put users off.
2. Set up a business website
Having a website as a small business owners is crucial for developing a successful online marketing strategy. If you don’t have a business website, then our team specialise in helping small businesses get online using our affordable website packages. Having a business website can help you appear more professional, stand out to competitors, get more customers from Google, allows your customers to find out and learn more about you. Find out the reasons why you need a website for your small business on this other article I posted recently here.
3. Use free local directories
Now I know this is a slightly old school method of promotion, but they are free and still work to drive traffic and leads into your business (and that’s why you’re here, right?). Registering your small business with Yellow Pages, Thomson Local and Google Places is a quick way to establish your business online and help potential customers in the local area find you. TIP: to get best results try and set up a separate number which forwards onto your original business number. This will help you track the success rate of the listing itself.
4. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
The world of PPC can seem like an expensive one. Bidding and spending money for someone to just click your advert, regardless of if they even enquire or not seems stupid. Well I’ve seen small businesses go from 2-3 new leads a week to 7-8 leads a week through just putting up a Google Ad. WAIT! Before you go and set up Facebook Ads or a Google Adwords campaign please make sure you have done your research and know exactly how to set them up effectively.
5. Go all in on social media
We’ve discussed Facebook and how that can help with promoting your small business online, but now let’s name some other social media platforms that can help drive potential customers to your website. You need to think where you customers are hanging out and what website / app they are using. Here are some social media platforms you need to set yourself up with: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
6. Engage with your customers online
One mistake I see small business owners doing every day is posting pictures and posts, but NEVER responding or liking their potential customers content. Try and engage with your potential customers by liking, commenting and helping them solve their problems. I’m posting this content to help my potential customers (small business owners like you) promote their small business online effectively. For example, if you see someone on Facebook posting about garden maintenance and you provide garden services, then see if you can help by answering some of the questions. Who do you think that person will come to in the future when they are ready to spend their money? For best results with promoting your small business online a mixture of both online and offline marketing strategies will work best. Successful business marketing comes from not having all your eggs in one basket and creating as many lead generation sources as possible. TIP: learning how to promote your small business online can be daunting because it can either be very time consuming or expensive to implement. Make sure you keep up to date and track your online and offline marketing efforts to see exactly what works and what doesn’t work. When you find this out you can then invest more time or money into something you know will help grow the business.
