Marketing is the lifeline of any business, regardless of its size. You won’t sell until you tell people what your product is about, why it is the best, and why they should buy it. But small businesses often underestimate the need for marketing and stay small.
While digitalization has made marketing easier by allowing businesses to reach millions of customers around the globe at the same time, it has also increased the need for good marketing.
Only the businesses with the best marketing strategy in place can get seen and outplay their competitors.
Here are some ideas that will help you increase your business visibility as a small business.
Let’s get started!
Know your audience
Before you start building visibility, make sure you know exactly who you’re marketing your product to.
A key mistake that many businesses make is to think that anyone and everyone in the market is their buyer. While this can be true for large businesses, small businesses need to develop a niche by targeting the right category of people from a gigantic audience that the internet has made possible.
Then, you must put effort into understanding your target audience — their pains, issues, and priorities.
If you’re wondering how important understanding your audience is, consider this Get the Word Out press release example. You can’t develop a good press release that creates buzz without knowing your audience first. The question that you must ask yourself before writing a press release is: is this information newsworthy for the audience that I have? If yes, then writing a killer press release can get your brand free publicity.
The same is true for almost all other marketing strategies out there like email marketing.
Remember, understanding the target audience might seem trivial from the outset but you will not be able to set your marketing strategy in the right direction without doing so. Plus, if you take the approach of understanding your audience by analysing the approaches of your competition, you’ll learn more about your competitors simultaneously.
Create a website for your business
A website gives you an online identity. It allows potential customers, vendors, employees, and investors to get more information about you and your business with just a few clicks. In other words, it makes your business more visible.
A professional website also instills confidence and adds credibility to your company by showcasing your products and services and making your business seem legit.
You can also broaden your reach beyond your local area through a website, which can help you compete with bigger and already established brands.
Given the fact that your business is small, anything that helps you gain the trust of potential customers should be your first priority. Posting positive customer reviews on your website is an excellent way to do this.
You might be wondering what hardcore coding skills you’d need to create a good website. In reality, you don’t need any coding skills to make a website.
Platforms like WordPress have made the creation of websites super-easy. They’ve got thousands of pre-made templates that you can drag and drop to make a customized website within minutes.
While creating your website, make sure that it’s user-friendly, easy to navigate, and optimized for both desktop and mobile. You can also convert your WordPress website into a mobile app to improve its usability .
Leverage content marketing
Now that you have a website up and running, you’ll need something to attract traffic to it. And that’s what content marketing will help you achieve.
The whole idea behind content marketing is to create and disseminate material online to attract more traffic to your website. The content itself can take several forms like infographics, podcasts, videos, checklists, and blogs. You can work with anything that is suited towards creating an interest in your product.
Having said that, content marketing is not just for creating interest in your product. It aims to gain the trust and respect of readers by providing them value.
Your content should prioritize educating and engaging your audience instead of selling your products because its value is what will gain your business recognition. And this will help you get increased consumer loyalty in the long run.
Always make sure that your content adheres to the basic customer sales funnel, which is a process that includes everything from introducing your brand to converting casual readers into customers. Most marketing funnels have 4 basic steps:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Be active on the right social media platforms
Social media can be a really powerful business tool to create awareness for your brand.
If you are selling a product or a service, chances are that you’ve already signed up on most social media platforms.
Unfortunately, just being present on these platforms isn’t enough. You really need to be active and engaging. You can post about what’s going around your business, relevant content from other industries, share interviews of your employees, and anything else that would be entertaining, useful, and inspiring for your customers.
However, don’t sign up on every social media platform at once. Take your time and find out the platforms your target audience uses the most. One way to determine which platform would be suitable for your business category is to see which social media platform your competitor uses.
Once you’ve selected the right platforms, start posting quality content and be consistent about it. You can use tools like Recurpost to schedule your posts. Uploading them in regular intervals will help you keep your stuff organized.
Don’t forget Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps improve your page/website/social media account ranking and improves its overall visibility on the internet. It’s the single most important step you can take for greater visibility.
If you already have a website but it doesn’t show up on Google, chances are that your SEO strategy isn’t effective. While creating content certainly helps with search engine visibility, many technical factors also play a role. And discussing everything that goes into SEO would need an article of its own.
But to help you get started, here are 11 DIY SEO tips that can help you save money (and improve your visibility).