How do you promote your small business?
I personally believe social networking for business is fun. You can share real-life stories, events, product benefits, user reviews, and so on and so forth. What methods do you guys use to promote your business online fast and free?
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Aug 17, 2019
Market your business yourself if you want to cut cost or for entirely free. SEO, adwords, social media presence, email marketing, fax broadcasting, etc. It is so easy to promote businesses now given all the free tools available to everyone.
I use tools/apps that offer free trial versions to get most of my buck.
Aug 16, 2019
Instance 1 - You are SMB dealing in IT products
- Understand your Target Audience
- Build Buyer Persona
- Understand their decision making journey/ Touch points. For ex - If I'm a Tech company and my audience is CIO's. I know that they are more than likely will look for info on LinkedIn or websites like CIO magazine, Forbes / Search engine.
- Based on the above understanding and research, I will try to market my company on various platforms where my target audience goes and seek information.
Instance 1 - You are SMB dealing in Clothes selling via e-commerce.
Here you need to focus that your buyer persons will seek or buy your products mostly on Facebook/Instagram or via search engine listings.
Your focus will not be Linkedin or CIO magazine but Instagram and Facebook.
Hope you get my point!
Thanks,
Arjun
Aug 2, 2019
The best methods I believe is to connect with your prospects on social media, dig their profile & understand the needs. (I use social media as a research tool.)
Now everyone is doing social media to promote their business why not do something different. Now you know your prospects personally, right?
Let's knock their personal doors, like emails, messengers & other personalized interactions, solving a common problem from your product or services in a very personalized way.
Show them empathy. By my experience - 3 out of 5 prospects always converted into paying clients.
A little effort in beginning & you can convert those paying clients into your brand advocates. More word-to-mouth marketing by them.
Remember word-to-mouth marketing by someone whom you knows is much powerful than a highly paying influencer who is doing it just for the sake of money.
Jul 30, 2019
When it comes to promoting small business, one should leverage the power of local listings and review-based websites. It suddenly boosts the business identity online which gradually results in business growth. I agree with you Ruth that social networking is fun as it helps to reach to target audience easily, however, there are still some other practices which one can include in the promotion strategy
1) Introductory videos about the services/products being offered, as visuals tend to grab user's attention easily.
2) Communicate with local influencers to review your product.
3) Create a Google local business page and update it after regular intervals of time. It can be 360-degree business views, videos, images, and text posts as well.
4) Getting interviewed on some established websites.
5) Doing a press release, which is one of the effective ways to aware people about the newly launched services and products.
Hope this helps!
Jul 30, 2019
It depends on the business but marketing for attorneys, I like to diversify their marketing.
Social is where people are so I never disregard social media.
Google My Business is becoming incredibly important and that trend will continue.
Build links. Social, local, blog, photo, video and business.
Content. No more than 300-word blogs. At least 750 words with anchor text and high-authority outbound links.
The key is doing something every day.
Jul 29, 2019
Hi Ruth,
I think there are a number of components to successfully marketing a small business online - and for little outlay. Small business often overlooks their brand personality. Brand personality is one of the tools we use to determine which marketing tactics are most likely to be successful.
The marketing strategies you employ should reflect your small business personality, niche, and culture. What might suit a small business in fashion will look very different for a small business in car mechanics and maintenance.
So in answer to the question, how do you promote a small business, I first believe you have to determine the brand personality and culture.
We use social media to attract audiences to our clients in the early stages. We select the social media platform that we think best represents the brand identity and personality.
We also look at engaging parallel and complementary businesses online. For example, we look at opportunities for hiring a car company to collaborate with a hair salon. These are non-competitive but mutually beneficial relationships that allow marketing across targeted channels.
By following these collaborations, we're also able to remove some of the marketing costs.
We use email marketing as standard no matter how small our list and we look at ways to repurpose content for multiple platforms. Our articles become videos, our videos become slideshares, and our slideshares become infographics, etc. which extends the number of suitable places we can market our brand for little to no cost.
Jul 29, 2019
Hi Ruth,
Good question! Social media is a great option and one that a lot of businesses use. It's a great avenue to reach customers online without being overly sales. Many of the interactions between customers and small businesses tend to be genuine, which you don't always see with the larger national brands.
Blogging is another good way to gain business exposure for free. There are quite a few businesses that run informative and engaging blogs that keep customers coming back for more content. I know a few small businesses in the food industry that blog about recipes and I've always found that to be engaging. I find myself buying different food products from these brands just so I can try the different recipes. They aren't directly telling me to buy products, but the content does lead me to make a purchase.
Regardless of the digital marketing tool you use, it's important to not try too hard to sell products or services. When businesses genuinely care about their online interactions with customers, it makes the customers more loyal and willing to use that organization's services. Consumers tend to be turned off when businesses online post online abut selling products. The more authentic the business's content, the better chance the business has of converting readers or followers into paying customers.
Jul 29, 2019
Creating and linking social media accounts and business listings is a great place to start. Properly setting up a Google My Business account that can house reviews and increase online presence is both fast and free. If you already have a website, properly indexing it using the Google Search Console also helps with organic visibility.
I would like to add Google's free tool Google Webmaster for proper indexing your business website to promote your small business in Google.