You could be just starting your small business or may be you’re trying to find ways to be more involved online. Either way, your online presence should be an established point on your marketing to-do list. Some businesses already discovered how to engage with their fans or clients so they can fight bigger competitors, but if you’re not there yet, read on because you’re going to learn how to enhance your small business’ online presence.

First of all, you need to understand that “online presence” includes almost everything you do to promote yourself and your services online: social media, marketing, content strategy, website development, PPC, off-site SEO and others.

We mentioned this because we believe you need to be involved in all channels from above if you truly want to improve your small business online presence. It’s not enough just to use Facebook ads or to write blog posts, you need to find a way to improve all those online channels.

Small Business Challenges

We acknowledge the fact that you’ll face some challenges so we’ll adapt our advice to make it more suitable for your own business. Maybe you’re a freelancer or a solopreneur, we don’t know… but we guarantee you’ll face some of the following challenges:

  • Doing everything on a budget.
  • Having a small team or doing everything on your own.
  • Facing extremely difficult competition.
  • Doing business in a “boring” field.
  • Not having enough time for everything.

How to enhance your small business online presence?

When setting up an online presence for your brand, you don’t want to forget anything since you’ll have to pay for it along the way. Check the following tips and tricks to enhance your small business online presence and compare them to your own marketing strategy.

Start with your small business website.

Start with your own website

Before heading out and applying some other tactics, take a good look at your website. This is an inexpensive way to start building your online presence. You can begin by making sure you have to following things in check:

  • Infrastructure. Owning a fully-functional website is vital for both your business and possible clients. Your website pages should load fast and you should limit the number of 404 error pages since they tend to drive people away from your small business.
  • Statistics. You need a way to gather data from you visitors and what actions they take on your website and transform it into actionable tactics. The good news is you can use a free service such as Google Analytics to find out stuff about your visitors and see where you need to improve.
  • Fresh content. Like we said before, just having a website won’t work. Your small business needs fresh content on your website. Start a blog or make it a goal to add new pages to your website on a regular basis.

Use content to build your online presence

When adding content to promote your services, you have two main options: to add it on your own website or somewhere else. For example you can start a blog and post fresh content on a regular basis. This will help establish yourself and your business as the “go-to place” for clients who are looking for your services.

But… you should stop here. Go ahead and start a guest blog strategy. Find the most important blogs in your niche (or related to it) who allow guest blogging and create targeted content for their audience. This will point back to your website and will enhance your small business online presence.

Another great tactic would be to take up email marketing. You probably think this is something that only blogs or physical-product-based businesses such as online shops do. That’s doesn’t have to be the case. You can use email marketing to keep in touch with your small business blog readers and pitch them your services from time to time.

HINT: If you create an account on Scriptly, you’ll access a lot of valuable resources for email marketing such as templates, autoresponders and targeted email sequences.

What social networks are your clients using?

Build a strong online presence using Social Media

After you created your content strategy including website & blog distribution, you need to turn your attention to Social Media. Depending on your small business’ niche, you will have more success on certain social networks but you’ll still have to maintain an online presence on the others since it will allow you to stay in touch with possible clients.

If you plan to have a strong online presence on social networks, here’s what to focus on:

  • Facebook. Take advantage of the reviews you get and feature them on your page. Facebook is the social network where you’ll have your biggest audience so make them see how successful your small business is. Encourage people who sent you testimonials to also leave Facebook reviews.
  • Instagram. While people check in to your venue on Facebook, they will also probably post images on their instagram accounts. The smart thing to do would be to create a place for your business and see when people come and visit. Interact with your customers and thank them for their actions.
  • LinkedIn. You won’t have the same success on Facebook and Instagram if you’re building a strong online presence for a small B2B company. While having active social profiles on those networks, focus in growing your LinkedIn audience. You can do this by adding content and interacting with people who do the same.
small business website social media strong online presence