Is promoting your business a necessity or an option? Many people believe it to be optional, which is why their business doesn't take off. Your product or service could be excellent and still not get the audience's attention because people don't know how great your product is and where to get it.
Promoting Your Business–A Necessity
Fresh businesses need to understand how critical it is to promote a business. Promotion is the voice of your company you send to people, letting them know you exist. You would only be able to divert the attention of pre-occupied consumers toward your product with promotion. It is an active process that needs to be well constructed to obtain the best results. With a proper promotion strategy, a business can reach its full potential.
If your promotional strategy is not well structured, it might not be able to target the right audience. A well-constructed and Thought-out promotional plan can make you aware of different segments of consumers and help you offer suitable solutions to your clients.
Benefits of Business Promotion
- Educate your target audience about your brand.
- Increases customer traffic on your website and social media pages.
- Generates sales.
- Builds brand credibility.
- If promoted rightly, you can set your business apart from your competitors.
Leading Strategies To Promote Your Business
Before implementing business promotion strategies, ensure your product is free of reasons that can drive your consumers away. Here are some ways to promote your business successfully.
1. Get a Website for Your Business
Nowadays, nearly half of the world's population has internet access. An excellent online presence is one of the many things you need to promote your business. A well-functioning and up-to-date website is an excellent way to showcase your brand online.
Building a website nowadays isn’t hard if you choose the right website builder. Numerous website builders are available online that claim to be able to create a professional website in a pen's stroke without having to involve an experienced programmer.
Image taken from Strikingly users' website
We have found strikingly to be one of the most dynamic yet accessible website builders with excellent customer service. It provides you with a vast range of templates, that you can edit in the intuitive site editor.
With Strikingly's simple drag-and-drop features, you can create a gorgeous, responsive website within minutes, saving a lot of money and time.
To ensure a good reach, ensure the content on your site is up-to-date and avoid compromising the quality. Ensure to provide contact info so visitors can contact you if interested in your product/service.
Your website is an effective tool to promote your business, and once it's ready, you can integrate it with other marketing techniques, which we will discuss below.
2. Promotion by SEO
When promoting your business online, having a website is not sufficient; SEO for your website is also crucial. People search for the products or services they need on Google. Your site needs to be search engine optimized, so it appears in the search results. SEO helps your site generate traffic and gives your business an upper hand over the companies in line.
To ensure your website's growth, keep your SEO tactics intact. Make sure to add quality content, tags, and impressive site descriptions on each page, because search engines favor fresh content.
3. Promotion By Online Business Directories
One great way to promote a business is to register with Google My Business. It's a free tool that allows you to make your business appear on Google Maps and Search Results.
Many online directories are available, which enable you to register at no cost and make promoting your business hassle-free. You can engage with customers, and they can leave ratings or provide feedback on the experience they had with your product/service. Yahoo local and Microsoft Binge have vast databases and are easy to set up.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media isn't just for posting random stories and family videos anymore. You can use it as a tool to promote your business. It is an important way to communicate with customers. By creating social media pages on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other networks, you can post about your latest products, discounts, and events and keep the audience updated about your plans. For video promotions, you can create a youtube channel. You can also partner with influencers to advertise your product.
Ensure to link your social media with your website by providing a link to your site in the bio and inserting social media links in your site's footers.
5. Content Marketing
Image taken from Strikingly
Besides the content on your website, you need more content to help your potential customers. An easy way to do this is to start a blog about your business. Post the content on the topics of your brand’s niche. Blog helps build a brand profile. Make sure to provide the readers with essential information.
Remember to include your niche-related keywords in your blog posts for your articles to show up in Google’s results. You can also share your posts on your social media pages to lead your followers to your blog.
You can build a blog with Strikingly and add features to improve the consumer experience. Strikingly enables you to activate Accelerated Mobile Pages, enable comments on blog posts, categorize your posts, and enable RSS feed.
You can add the features listed above and more from the blog settings.
Image taken from Strikingly
6. Write Guest Posts
Guest posting refers to writing content for other websites. It can be an effective strategy to promote a business if done smartly.
Writing blogs for other websites gets your attention from their crowd by adding links to your business website. This way, your brand receives a high volume of audience. If your brand provides quality services that meet the audience's demand, they will return for more.
Moreover, Guest posting on related sites allows you to showcase your depth of knowledge in that particular field.
7. Email Marketing
Email is the oldest form of communication and an effective digital marketing tool. Despite increased social media users in recent years, every person has an email account. By email, you can reminisce with people about the services/product you provide in their inboxes.
If email marketing is done smartly, it can promote a business in ways beyond your imagination. You can send emails in vast amounts informing people about your business plans and sale offers.
Strikingly allows you to send newsletters effortlessly and cheaper than email marketing agencies. Before sending emails, ensure it is well-crafted and conveys your message.
Follow these steps to begin your email marketing campaign with strikingly.
- Go to “Newsletters” in the dashboard.
- Click “send a newsletter.”
- In the newsletter editor, compose your email.
- Select your recipients. You can filter the contacts (uploaded manually, collected by your site) according to the site and sources.
- Now, you can send yourself a test email, save the newsletter as a draft, or send it directly to your customers.
8. Build a Community
Every business has an online community. It involves people related to your business, users, or customers interested in communicating with your brand. The community serves as a platform to promote your business.
A brand community encourages people to share ideas and reviews on your product. You can also get honest customer feedback from people in the community. Make sure to resolve all your audience queries, share posts about your upcoming products and keep the community updated.
Image taken from Strikingly
Strikingly has a brand community in the form of idea forums. Here we encourage people to share their ideas and feedback on our services.
9. Marketing Through Paid Ad Campaigns
Besides other marketing techniques, you can also do a paid ad campaign for your business's promotion. It is a method that involves payment for ad space over the internet.
There are many types of paid ad campaigns. Still, two of the most common are:
Social Media Advertisement
Businesses can pay social media platforms to make their post visible to a larger audience. Ad offering format varies for every platform. Some social media platforms to promote your business includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Banner Ads
You can also pay to put banners of your business on other web pages directing traffic to your page.
A few advantages of paid ad campaigns over organic marketing are:
- Increase brand reach.
- Prove your authenticity.
- Increase reach, clicks, and conversion.
- Offer insight into campaign analytics.
- The campaign budget is adjustable (according to the number of days or reach).
10. Referral Campaign
One marketing strategy that has become popular in recent years is referral campaign marketing. A referral campaign is a great way to promote your business without wasting extra dollars. It involves asking your customers to spread the word about your service/product, and in return, they get a reward (can be a sample of your products, discount coupons, etc.).
Some companies might reward the referrers when the customers they brought make any purchase.
11. Affiliate Program
An affiliate program involves rewarding people for bringing in customers to your business. It is a great way to promote your business because of its sustainability and fruitfulness. An affiliate program differs from a referral campaign because you don't have to be a customer to be an affiliate. Affiliates can bring in customers by any method they see fit. A reward keeps them motivated to work purposefully.
12. Discount and Sales Promotions
Introducing discount coupons and sales is a proven strategy to promote your business successfully. You can use bundling and cross-merchandising techniques to get customers' attention.
13. Press Releases For Business Promotion
One of the great ways to promote your business is by calling out press releases. It serves as a great way to generate publicity. Whenever you do something big, consider calling a press release, it helps spread the news rapidly, which brings a new audience to your business. There are dozens of websites online that you can use for press releases.
That's pretty much about how to promote your business. Apply these strategies correctly to hit your business off the ground.
