If you’ve started a business recently, congratulations! However, starting is only half the task – you need to secure customers to ensure the success of your business. Not so long ago there were fairly limited options for promoting a new company, but with today’s digital marketing options, you can do almost anything; these are our top tips.
USE SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is a great way to get the word out about your new business. It’s free (unless you opt for paid ads, but these are optional), it’s hugely popular, and it’s everywhere right now. There are so many platforms to choose from with a massive combined audience-base, so using social media to promote your business just makes sense.
By posting regularly you’ll keep your brand in peoples’ minds, you can also interact directly with your audience and potential customers, and you can get feedback for your products or services direct from the source of those who matter the most.
However, it can take a while to see a return from posting on social media, so it’s easy to become demotivated and let it fall to the bottom of your to-do list. Instead of grinding at it day-in, day-out, we suggest setting aside some time to create batches of content, and then use a scheduling tool to manage the uploads. This way, you can forget about posting for most of your month, and instead focus on interacting with your audience when you’re on the apps.
OPTIMISE YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH ENGINES
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of tailoring your online content to boost your website’s ranking in searches, and with proper SEO you can sit back and let search engines promote your website for you.
There’s more than just one method for SEO, in fact there’s countless different ways that content can be tailored to boost a site’s visibility. Keywords, links to other trusted and well-ranked websites, meta descriptions for content, compressed image files, and easy to understand URLs are just a handful of SEO tactics that can be employed.
It’s also worth setting up a Google business profile so that your company information can appear in searches, easily accessible to potential customers. It’s free to do, so there’s really no reason not to!
OFFER A REFER-A-FRIEND SCHEME
Word-of-mouth promotion should not be overlooked. It’s infinitely more powerful for converting sales than through company testimonials, as potential customers are more likely to trust the word of someone who has spent their own hard-earned cash on a product.
A great way to ensure that you are garnering word-of-mouth promotion is via refer-a-friend schemes. By offering exclusive discounts or deals to those that refer their friends to your business, you’re generating potentially double the sales and gaining potentially double the exposure as a brand. As well, once you’ve implemented the scheme, you can forget about it as it runs for you in the background.
An important thing to remember is to only offer what you can afford as a business. You should walk the line between making the deals enticing enough to induce action from customers, but conservative enough to ensure you don’t take a financial hit and end up operating at a loss.
CREATE A BLOG
We recently published an article 'IT'S ESSENTIAL FOR YOUR BUSINESS'S GROWTH ONLINE. PERIOD.' all about blogs, and why they’re so useful to businesses. As a new business looking to make a name for yourself, you should strongly consider setting up a blog section of your website. It’s easy and free to do, and the returns can be huge.
Via a blog you can establish yourself as an authority on a subject, you can interact with existing audience members and attract new ones for your brand, you can help to boost your website’s ranking through SEO, and you can offer more to your audience than your products alone.
Just as with social media content, if you feel that you don’t have time to spare in your day-to-day for writing, we’d suggest allocating one or two days a month to creating blog-specific content. This way, you’ve got a bank of articles that are ready to be posted as and when you want.
USE EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is nothing new, but it’s stood the test of time and has more than kept up with other marketing options. And, with our emails accessible in the palm of our hands, it’s a hugely powerful tool to add to the mix.
Set up a mailing list and send out regular newsletters to your subscribers – the frequency and schedule is entirely up to you, but it’s important to judge the balance carefully between keeping yourself at the forefront of a customer’s mind, and being over eager and putting them off. You could include exclusive discounts or perks in these newsletters as an incentive for people to sign up and to ensure that your emails get opened. As well, it’s another way to interact with your audience and communicate your brand values to them.
At LVE THT we’re no strangers to building a brand up from scratch, and supporting the company in getting the word out about their new brand. The promotional methods noted here are some of our favourites, but they only scratch the surface of what’s possible. The most important thing is that you’re staying true to your brand values, and having fun with it, as this will shine through your marketing.
If you’re looking for help with setting up a new brand, we’d love to hear from you! Follow this link to start a conversation today.
Comments