Small business owners are battling multiple fronts in an effort to grow their business and often don’t invest the necessary time into their marketing campaign. Beyond that, many small business owners aren’t sure of how to go about promoting themselves successfully.
One of the major aspects of marketing in any industry is a business’s online presence. The average consumer uses online research and forums to decide whether or not a business is worth it, and 72% of consumers will trust a local business if it has positive reviews. So the first step is to make an appearance on the information highway.
Having a stellar webpage is a good place to start. Websites need to have intuitive, simple navigation while maintaining a high rate of engagement. Videos, photos, and quality content are all things that will have a large effect on the popularity and success of your site. Websites that are too confusing won’t receive high amounts of traffic. Keeping the design simple but the content captivating is the key to a great website.
However, even the best website won’t get many visitors on its own accord. Consumers will need to be directed to the site by other means such as social media. Having a quality social media presence makes any business seem more capable in the eyes of the public than offline competitors. A good social media profile will be constantly updated and contain lots of great content and information to keep followers and viewers interested. Using a social media page can humanize a business and communicate to consumers on what they perceive to be a personal level.
Spamming every single social media platform is never a good idea, though. In most cases, one or more of your profiles will suffer due to the lack of activity and poor quality content. It’s important to recognize your specific target demographic and find the platform that hosts most or all of them. Since each platform is more or less designed for specific age groups and types of people, a good marketing tactic would be to identify the persona of the desired audience and adopt it.
As time goes on the content will need to remain engaging and relevant. Letting the content get sloppy or forgetting to post anything for awhile could result in a loss of interest. Make sure to link the website or post the URL to the social media platform as well, or add links to posts and descriptions.
Forbes provides a guide that may help businesses find the right social media platform and it’s important to follow the demographic to whichever site is most used.
After a business sets up their social media presence, the most important thing to do is to stay relevant.