You’ve been promoted!

Your business needs traction and a following in order to help it make sales. Promoting your business and its products and services to get an audience can be done in numerous ways, but some may be more effective than others.

In this article, we’ll go over why promotion is important, and some methods to effectively market your business. Have a read, and see which ones suit you!

Using a website

A website is a base for your company on the internet. You can use it for advertising, promotion, branding and even eCommerce – not to mention, you can optimise it for search engines to bring in a larger audience.

Whether you have a large number of existing customers or are aiming to grow your reach, a website is a very useful tool. Include your contact information, brand personality, products and services to make the most of your website.

Search engine optimisation

If you implement keywords, links and other SEO-friendly tools, your content will start to promote itself! Soon enough, you will get fresh traffic from these areas, without having to do anything else.

Both people searching for these specific categories and people who are looking for similar topics will be directed to your site thanks to SEO. A key tip, as well as tagging images, is to produce original, high-quality content regularly. Keep it fresh!

If you’re completely new to SEO, there are so many great resources available free online. We recommend both the Hubspot Academy SEO Course or the Ahrefs YouTube series as starting points – I’ve definitely learnt a lot!

Create a business blog

Educational content is useful for expanding knowledge, but it also can help with SEO, which in turn, will drive an increase in traffic to your website and widen your audience. By making content and publishing regularly, you also update the recency of your posts, which reinforces your online presence.

Blogs are a wonderful way to help people learn more, as well as giving you a lovely cache of content. Think about posting informative content, how-tos, guest posts, interviews or behind-the-scenes content. Have a look at ours to see what we mean – we post a lot of helpful content (we hope)!

Directory presence

All directory sites will net you views, but did you know that smaller directory sites often pull results from larger ones? You’ll likely begin to show up on other directories automatically once you’re registered on one.

Consider Yelp, Facebook, Google, Glassdoor, and other platforms to register on. With relevant information all in the same place, it’s never been easier for your audience to find their own way to your site. Google My Business is a great directory to be a part of, because it’s essentially instant, incredible SEO – albeit it’s tailored to a more local audience.

Online customer reviews

Testimonials are a very useful way of promoting your business. Having online reviews to bolster your reputation and make you a trusted source is one way of highlighting your credibility. After all, people are more likely to trust something if they are recommended it!

Social media

Promoting your business on social media can cost you nothing except your time – but if you want more effective marketing, you can also pay for ad spaces. Try uploading videos to YouTube, connecting to people on LinkedIn or creating a Facebook business page before seeing whether you could benefit from buying ads.

Try following an inbound marketing strategy on your social media channels – i.e., produce helpful content on a range of topics that will help your target audience learn something new. This helps you be seen as knowledgable in your space.

Influencer collaboration

By collaborating with an influencer, you can create a crossover of two audiences. If you ask for a guest post on someone else’s blog or social media feed, you’re offering them content in return for a slice of their audience – many collaborations will be of a transactional nature, with benefits for both parties.

Networking

You can choose to network both online and offline – but you’re going to have to make connections if you want to get your business out there. By speaking to people and sharing your content around, you can pull in an appreciative audience and have someone else help out with promotion.

Two great online networking groups to consider in the UK are Talk Networking and the Federation of Small Businesses networking groups.

Whew!

We’ve just gone over some of the main ways to promote your business, but there are loads out there so get creative! Try your hand at networking, make sure you have a website and browse social media for ideas of what you could be doing. Give us a bell if you’re stumped – we do this for a living!