In this highly globalized and competitive world, it’s extremely important to know how to promote your business. Businesses are coming up with new and creative ways to market and promote a business these days. Successful entrepreneurs are those that develop effective marketing strategies and implement them on time before their competitors.
If you are also looking to promote your business, you have come to the right place. Let’s discuss different strategies you can use for promoting your business in this day and age.
10 Different Ways to Promote Your Business
Here are 10 strategies to help you promote your business.
1. Develop a Good Website
In these digital times, the first thing you need to do to promote your business is to establish an online presence for your brand. The first step to do that is to develop a good website. Building a website these days is not as hard as it used to be in the olden days. Many website building platforms are available on the internet that enables you to create a site on your own, without having to hire a web developer or learn programming languages.
One such good website builder is Strikingly. Strikingly offers tons of website templates for you to choose from. These templates will function as your web design you can install within seconds, which means you can straight away start building your web pages without having to worry about creating the detailed design elements from scratch.
Image taken from Strikingly
After selecting a suitable template, you can use our drag-and-drop feature to add contents to your website. The quality of your website content will make a big difference in the impression you make on its visitors. Be sure to add your contact information so that your site visitors can get in touch with you easily, should they be interested in what you have to offer.
Your website will serve as a showcasing platform to promote your business. Once your website is ready, you can integrate it with your other forms of marketing that we will be discussing below.
2. Use Social Media Marketing
The first and most important form of marketing that you need to integrate with your website for promoting your business is your social media content. This content will either be already present if you have built your social media pages before creating your website, or can be developed now at this stage.
Choose to use social media sites that are most relevant for promoting your business. For instance, if you sell consumer products, you can create an Instagram account and upload your product photos. If you offer human resources-related services, you can promote your business on LinkedIn. If you are a Youtuber, you can talk about your business in your videos and gain traction towards your brand.
To promote your business via your website and social media together, one strategy many businesses adopt is to insert social media icons on your site’s footer. This will link all your social media pages with your website, so that you can drive traffic back and forth between the two.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
3. Build a Brand Community
A brand community is a platform on the internet where a group of people get together to talk about your brand. These people are usually your users or customers, who are interested in engaging with your brand in a way that helps you promote your business.
An online community is good for promoting your business because it encourages your customers to share ideas and feedback about your products and services. If a new customer joins the community, their queries can sometimes automatically get resolved by reading the discussions that have already taken place there. You can also get honest customer feedback by reading the threads in the community, which you can use to further promote your business.
At Strikingly, we have a brand community in the form of our Idea Forum. We welcome our users to discuss and share their opinions about our services.
Image taken from Strikingly
4. Work on Your Site’s SEO
For effectively promoting your business, merely building a website is not enough. You need to work on your site’s search engine optimization. The first thing anyone who hears about your brand will do is search about it on Google. It is therefore very important that your website can appear in Google search results. For this to happen, you need to make sure that your on-site and off-site SEO tactics are intact.
For on-site SEO, you’ll need to add good quality content to your landing page. Also, make sure you add an impressive site description and insert meta tags on each of the pages.
5. Do Content Marketing
Besides the content that you insert into your landing page, you need to add a lot more content all across the internet. Many businesses start a blog where they post articles related to the products and services they offer. This helps in building a brand image, and establish yourself as an expert in your field.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Content marketing goes a long way in promoting your business. It also helps in improving your website’s search rankings. When you insert web links in your articles, they contribute to generating clicks to your site. This in turn increases your website traffic and improves its SEO. That’s why content marketing is an awesome strategy to promote your business.
6. Engage in Email Marketing
Email marketing is the most subtle form of digital marketing. When you send emails to your subscribers, you are not forcing them to open them. You are merely reminding them about your brand and services by appearing in their inbox from time to time.
If email marketing is used in the right way, it can promote your business in ways that you wouldn’t have imagined. This is because the results you get from emailing your customers are not so direct and prominent. The emails are just one stage in your marketing funnel, so oftentimes when you generate leads, you cannot tell exactly which stage of the funnel caused the user to convert into a lead.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
To collect email addresses and build an email list, create a signup form on your website. This is very easy to do in Strikingly. All you need to do is add a new section to your site and select the ‘Sign up Form’ section.
7. Run Paid Google and Social Media Ads
Besides using organic marketing, which includes working on your site’s SEO and creating social media pages to represent your brand, you can also use paid advertising to promote your business.
Paid ads have certain advantages over organic marketing.
- They give faster results.
- They give access to detailed market insights.
- The results can be tracked and analyzed thoroughly.
- They can be improved based on the analytics.
- The budget of paid ads can always be adjusted.
8. Include Referral Marketing Campaigns
Referral marketing means giving an incentive to your customer to spread the word about your services, until they can bring in one additional customer to you. When the new customer makes a purchase from you, the one who recommended gets a cut or discount, or some other reward from you.
This is a great way to promote your business because it creates a snowball effect to get you many customers with no additional expense on your business. Although this strategy is relatively new, among the other ways to promote your business, it has become quite popular in recent years.
9. Create an Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is an arrangement whereby an online business rewards its affiliates for each customer that they can bring to the business through their marketing efforts. This strategy to promote a business differs slightly from referral marketing because you can become the affiliate of a business without even being a customer of that business. In referral marketing, however, you first need to buy from the business yourself and become a customer, and then recommend the brand to others.
Affiliate marketing is good for promoting your business because it is very cost-effective and keeps the affiliate motivated by generating their rewards automatically. We also offer an affiliate program at Strikingly.
10. Offer Discounts and Sales Promotions
It goes without saying that your advertising strategies must always include discounts and sales offers. Businesses usually increase their sales volumes by coming up with sales offers from time to time. Sometimes, they use cross merchandising and bundling, which are also different forms of offering discounts. These tactics are necessary to effectively promote your business.
Now that you know how to promote your business, you can start applying these strategies to hit your business off the ground. If you do not have a business yet, you can start off by creating a website to represent yourself, and take it from there. It is good to have a stream of side income for yourself, especially in times of a pandemic or economic crisis.
To create a website on Strikingly, the first step is to sign up for your free Strikingly account. If you have any questions regarding our tools, you can contact us anytime through our live chat 24/7. We are here to support you in your initiatives, and particularly in your website development process.
