As a small business, attracting new costumers can be a daunting and challenging task. The emergence of the digital age has helped however and small businesses have found themselves flourishing into bigger entities. Thanks to the Internet, a small business can make themselves known without the high costs of advertising or the time it takes to spread via word of mouth.
With the following six steps, your small business will be able to prove its online presence and begin a successful transition into the best marketing strategy available.
Creative image
Improving your small business’ presence means that having an attractive website is a given. While you may have a website, it might be a great idea to bring in someone with a creative mind to redesign the page. It can only help your online image by maintaining a website that is exciting to look at, properly represents your business’ mission, and is easily accessible for visitors that may turn into future customers.
Communication creates business, not false numbers
Building a connection with your customers and communicating with them is the key to success, people seeking your services want to feel that they are important and are not simply being treated as a number.
Andy Steves, the son of famous American author and travel guide Rick Steves, runs his own business called Weekend Student Adventures (WSA). Since the beginning of the company’s inception Andy has built up a community by speaking with college students who want to travel and by sharing his own travel experiences, he has been able to involve brilliant local travel guides with cultural education. The goal is to give students an incentive to travel at a reasonable price, all the while making them feel that their experience is special.
If you can make them feel this way, they will recommend your small business to other people and increase your odds of profit. What you are doing is forming trust with your community!
Consistent updates
When writing and posting news or articles to your site that focus mainly on your business’ practice, varying topics are essential to make the content high quality and seem fresh and exciting. Covering things such as news within the industry that directly affects businesses in your field or information that can help readers as well is a must as it will provide your reader base with content and information that is relevant to them and that they find interesting. Be sure to make posts of high quality on a regular basis to maintain engagement with the community and share these across social media platforms to further expand your content’s reach.
Advertising
Jump at any chance to advertise your business on other sites, for example other small businesses in the same area or practice or community sites which share tips or advice about your industry, linking within a community creates relationships that can be beneficial for both. Displaying your business on other websites will increase exposure and help improve your image by showing off your expertise; the best way to do this is via posting articles or linked advertisements on other websites.
Use social media
With the popularity of social media sources such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and YouTube, why not make use of the huge community available at the click of a mouse? Create a page on these sites for your business and design them like you would your website, regularly update them with linked articles to your business’ website to backlink and other content to bring in traffic. Always remember to represent your business’ image at all times and remain dedicated to speaking frequently with commenters to build a community of loyal followers that will help spread the message of your business.
Video content
An emphasis must be made on the necessity of including video content because it is the leading source for increasing online presence. With so much noise, the best way to exemplify all of the previous five steps is with visuals. As a small business attempting to build prominence on the web, people want to see what your company is all about without using just words.
That Guy with the Glasses is a website that emphasizes itself as focused on satirical reviews of films, television shows, video games, and other forms of entertainment media. Run by Doug Walker, his successful business began on YouTube with creative video content. The reviews Walker presented were as a fictional character called The Nostalgia Critic. They were original, imaginative, intelligent, and comedic. His viewership grew high enough that he migrated to his own website. By using his own popularized image, the website has developed and expanded to encompass dozens of other webseries.
The goal is to put a face and personality on your business, to be real!
With video content, you can advertise in ways that were never possible before and the best part is that the cost of developing a piece of video content is far cheaper than most people believe. By developing video content a business can reach a wider audience and bring in new customers that see exactly what they will expect from the product. This type of content can exponentially improve the aesthetics of your website and help overall rankings in search engines when people search for businesses related to your field.
By taking these few simple and easy steps, your small business can become more prevalent online and, in turn, create a larger business without losing the image of who you are as a business.
Robert Benoit is an intern at Phink TV who is currently studying English Writing and Mass Communication at Assumption College. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts and is currently studying abroad in London. His future aspirations include film production and professional scriptwriting, as well as a passion for developing creative works. Connect with us on Twitter or Facebook.
