The purpose of every business is to generate profit. To do that, a small business needs to promote its products and services to reach a wide target audience and progressively boost its revenue.
There’s a list of elements that your success as a small business depends on, and online promotion is not surprisingly one of them.
Big brands, like Apple and Microsoft, seem to know exactly how to market a business. But what about smaller companies?
How can they reach their ideal market segments and consistently grow to end up being profitable?
Best ways to promote your small business online
In this article, we are going to list 4 top ways to promote a small business online.
All of these ideas about small business marketing are free to apply. Having said that, if you have a marketing budget, and you can invest in promoting your small business online, you can easily transform the free promo methods into paid campaigns.
So, let’s these four promotion ideas.
1. Create valuable content
We estimate that 99% of companies these days have a website. However, when it comes to blogs, not every business likes to generate fresh content consistently. What’s more, the content that most small companies publish is not optimized for search engines.
According to a recent study, 88% of consumers perform online research before purchasing. Where do they typically go to do their shoppers’ homework? Google Search. And how do they actually conduct their research?
They simply type in keywords and phrases that ask questions. This is quite similar to asking a friend for recommendations. So, people go to Google and type in “what’s the best online marketing agency?” or just “Best online marketing agency.”
Now, if online marketing was your game, you’d love to appear in the top Google search results for a given key phrase. To do so, you need an SEO-optimized site, but more significantly, you need high-quality content that customers are going to click and check out.
In other words, this is one of the best long term ways to promote a small business. SEO can bring high-quality traffic to your website when you do it right. Read this article we wrote about how to conduct a basic, yet effective, keyword research.
2. Work with micro-influencers in your market
Influencer marketing is hot for small and larger business. It appears like the term is all over the internet wherever you try to find information about how to promote a small business. There is an explanation for that. Influencer marketing can bring in huge results if successful. Influencer marketing can potentially outrank every other small business promotion method.
But how do you find influencers? You wouldn’t pursue the big fish at first; Instead, focus on micro-influencers.
Micro-influencers are not defined only by the level of one’s social following; You always need to take into account how relevant and engaging the conversations are among one’s audience members. A micro-influencer is not an expert with a certain number of fans– engaged or otherwise– but individuals whom your prospective customer speaks with regarding a purchase decision.
For a small business that is looking at creating influencer campaigns, it might be hard to find the right micro-influencers.
Go to BuzzSumo, a freemium tool, to find the right content publishers for your niche. Also, visit YouTube, Instagram or any other social media that your audience uses, and do a keyword research to find the right influencers to contact.
This can be an expensive way to promote your small brand; to keep it cheap or even free, offer influencers product samples or to barter services in exchange for your brand promotion.
Another way you can work with them is based on performance; provide them with a UTM link or an affiliate link, so you can track conversions and reward them accordingly.
3. Join online communities in your specific niche
If you want to promote your small business, you need to be where the conversation happens. Join communities where your customers hang out. An engaged online community is what drives an organisation forward and the faster you understand that, the better.
You can either establish your own group on Facebook or elsewhere or simply become a member of the communities that already exist.
Facebook groups is the place to start to promote your products. They completely replaced the majority of online forums and it seems like you could discover a Facebook group devoted to pretty much any subject or a sort of business.
By the way, here’s a set of DFY email sequences you can use right now to promote your physical or digital products.
Facebook groups is also where you could connect with fellow entrepreneurs, exchange some tips or learn new strategies you could implement for yourself to promote your small business on the internet.
Even so, there are many additional online communities out there, just to mention those organized around a hashtag on Twitter (Twitter chats, like #SmallBizChat) or Slack groups like #smallbiz.
Find more about how Slack works and which communities you can join here.
Slack might not be as popular among small business owners, but it’s getting there. It is a source of valuable connections if you know how to make the most of Slack communities.
4. Use Quora
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Quora, it’s a question & answer site where lots of people go to ask questions of all sorts, and get answers.
Here’s an example of a Quora question:
However, it’s not all kinds of questions that you need to answer. There are a lot of business-related or niche-specific questions you can answer to get exposure from.
All Quora questions have topics associated with them, and small business-related ones are very popular.
Quora has been spammed to an extent but it’s still a great place to promote your small business online.
Anyway, pay attention to the questions more as opposed to the topics. It would take a comprehensive, separate blog post on how to promote a small business on Quora, but fortunately, we got you covered with more ideas for business promotion.
The key to reaping the benefits from your activity on Quora is to be consistent. Find the time to respond to at least a question a day, perhaps even more.
While promoting your business by answering questions, be authentic, disclose the fact that you are the owner of the business you are promoting, and share your knowledge to the best of your ability. Don’t be salesy or spammy; offer real value to the person asking the question.
Marketing a small business is simple, really
To wrap up, promoting a small business online is not rocket science. It takes the right strategy, tools and consistent effort to make your promotional efforts bear fruit.
When you try to promote your small business, don’t be too salesy, pushy or over promising. Aside from that, remember that it’s worth pointing out both the advantages and disadvantages of what you have to offer.
Doing that will make you more credible to the readers and will show that you’re not on Quora or a Facebook group just to brag about your company and your product.
A small business promotional campaign won’t be successful overnight; What’s more realistic is that a snowball effect will start working in favor of your business the more active you become on the internet.
If you’d like to chat about getting your business set up with some marketing automation, head on over to the Done For You Email Marketing and Automation page… We’d be glad to take a look and get an Action Plan created for you!