How to promote business online: 8 Simple Steps

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Without promoting your product or service, We believe it is impossible to have a successful business.

You have a lot of interesting promotional ideas, but don't know how to get started? Are you confused about how to promote your campaign for right customers on all social platforms? How to advertise my business locally? Here’s an 8-step guide on how to promote business online -

In the early stages of your startup, you may not have enough cash to market, but there are no effective ways to get your brand out.

Small companies had a few ways before the internet to market their products cheaply, such as printing fliers or sponsoring small local events. There are now all kinds of chances on the internet — you just have to know where you can look.

Here are 8 steps to online marketing:

1. Use the three big local listing services

Registering your business with Google Places allows it to be found more easily on Google searches and it shows up on Google Maps. All you have to do is fill out the form and register, then get your business verified through their confirmation process, which can be done either with a phone call or snail mail. Yahoo! also has a big database of businesses called Yahoo! Local. It's free, and is certainly worth the few minutes it takes to set up. Microsoft's Bing has a similar service that's easy to sign up for.

2. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is not just an instrument to increase awareness— it is now a necessary time for every enterprise to invest in it. You can link ads and offers to a direct network with your customers on Twitter on your Facebook page. LinkedIn networking— individual and corporate — can also help your startup. Not all social media channels will fit your business. Think about why you want them before you set up any social media accounts. Then develop the correct social media strategy and concentrate on delivering great content.

Here’s how you can use your social media to promote your business online:

Share your expertise – Post little known facts, best in an easy and fun way, to share your knowledge. You can do this also in the form of questions and offer the first person something that answers them properly.

Ask conversation starter questions – This is how you cultivate customer relationships. You also start a discussion that increases the likelihood of new people following your clients.

Context – Don't post a product update info with a feature graphic on Instagram. Rather take a picture of a happy team that has completed a bad-ass project and update the information on the products to Twitter and Facebook. "The content is the king but the context is God," someone said. Set content to the channel on which it is posted.

The one-in-seven rule – We have written several times already, you should put things from other people in your social media. We recently discovered the "one-in-seven rule." It means you should promote your business only in one of every seven posts you publish. The other six may focus on sharing valuable content, including community posts. You can promote your business obviously in other tasks but not directly.

3. Develop Blogs

Not only does a blog help your company get its name from supporters, but it is also a more direct way of connecting to your consumers. However, keep your stream updated as often as you can as a major key to blogging. Nothing's worth a sleepy, abandoned blog.

4. Use multimedia on YouTube and Flickr

YouTube offers a free way to distribute creative promotional videos, but to be successful, you have to create content that is relevant to your business and that people want to view — an ad simply won't work. A Flickr profile can also help you to compile all the photos of your business and to link back to your site.

5. SEO your business website

In the world of continuous Googling, search engine optimization can not be underestimated. Pick an online SEO guide and make sure that your site is prepared for performance on search engines. While all of the points mentioned above relate to reaching your customers and readers directly, SEO is doing what it can to enable you to find your potential customer.

We had long thought that SEO is like a balance of morality (obviously "on-line morality!") by producing brief articles, not so valuable, full of some keywords only to be indexed on Google's first site. Some companies seem to be doing this. Now, however, we know about real SEO. And we think if someone has reacted negatively to SEO, it might be because their companies don't do it right. For us, SEO is about preparing content to be found by the reader. And when SEO's done right, it works for your business without you lifting a finger.

You must take into account the keywords related to your company and industry when preparing content on your website. Right now, because it's a huge subject, we can't go any deeper here. Nevertheless, you can browse further – “Our free SEO Guide”.

6. Press releases

Every time your company does something worthy of news, do not hesitate to release a press release–perhaps people will pick it up. They are a powerful tool in the media to generate advertising, and free distribution is a bonus. You can use dozens of websites for your press releases available online.

7. Join a relevant online community and contribute

Each niche has online communities in which you can participate. However, signing up for a forum and posting about your business every once in a while is no good for anyone. Put your business actively in place and build a relationship with the community. Promote your company passively by placing a link or only when the context is appropriate.

Finally, but not least, the word of mouth marketing that always deserves to be mentioned. They will market for you free when you develop contact with your customers and make them happy with your service.

8. Online reviews

Customer reviews are very powerful. They can make you the market leader.

How to get them?

Well, you need glad customers first. You must also encourage them to talk about their product or service experience. It is very important to encourage customers. And with that, nothing is wrong. Sometimes customers forget or have insufficient motivation to leave a review.

We ourselves know it. We had the best adventure in an Indian hill station Nainital, and we promised the guide to write a TripAdvisor recommendation. Although we create articles every day, we have not written a few phrases recommending his service. After the trip, he wrote on WhatsApp, but we never left him a review (Sorry Kancha!). We suppose we want the revision perfect, and we think people won't believe us anyway once we created it in our head.

In our defence, we can say that we talk about this tour guide pretty often, whenever we talk to people about travels. We say about what an unforgettable day we had with this guide and we recommend it to anyone. So, note that a little poke requesting your customers to refer your business may do wonders. Because it’s not like they don’t wanna do it!

Word of the mouth is the strongest drive to attract people. We know most product conversations take place live, but not all. For example, people on Facebook have a lengthy dialogue on a certain website, company or product. They also often ask themselves if they can recommend anything on their Facebook wall.

Promoting your business

If you’re an entrepreneur your business promotion on a daily basis can be: improving your product, sharing new upgrades and updates and maintaining relationships with customers. But to your daily activities, you should also deploy all the actions we mentioned above. Step by step.

These actions are not simple, we actually have dedicated people for most of them, like Social Media Specialist, Website Specialist, SEO Specialist, Graphic Designers, Content Experts and so on.

Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see immediate effects. They usually take time. But it’s worth the effort.

Want to Dig Deeper?

info@bigassert.com

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