How do you get the word out about your business at the lowest cost? If you are an entrepreneur or manager of a small business, you already know that advertising is the lifeblood of your company. The Internet opens up this possibility like never before. With social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, almost everyone is online. And this means that you can reach customers in faraway places with just a few clicks of your mouse.
Paid Search Marketing
Google AdWords and Bing Ads can bring in traffic to the website and help your business feature prominently when people search for relevant phrases. The key is to focus on long-tail keywords that are industry specific. This will get your campaign the highest possible click-through rate and conversions.
The best part about PPC campaigns is that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get traffic. Instead, a targeted campaign with a budget of $20 to $30 a day can generate traffic and qualified leads for your business.
Social Media Advertising
Advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn allow you to target specific demographics and pinpoints you to the people you’ve not reached out to. This eliminates the extemporaneous clicks from consumers browsing or searching for information.
With a small budget, you can target specific customers by their age, gender, education and interests similar to your product/service categories.
Even when people don’t make an immediate purchase, they may end up liking and sharing your business. This helps in building a database of potential customers.
Create and verify your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (Google’s term for your Google listing) is what allows your business to show up in Google Maps results, the local section of Google Search results, and also—when someone types in your business name and location—the right-side Knowledge Panel in Search results. As Google gets better and better at catering its results to the searcher’s location, this free listing should be a top priority.
The key to using your Business Profile to promote your business is to verify ownership of your listing through your free Google My Business account. Once you have ownership, you can optimize your listing to show up higher in search results and for more relevant searches.
If you’re ranking on Google Maps or showing up in the Local Pack (as seen above) of regular results pages (this is very doable), your business is basically promoting itself 24/7. Even better, you can publish posts directly to your Google listing, putting attractive promotions in front of your audience at a time when they have high intent.
Get a website
Every business needs a website, no matter how old-fashioned your business or clients may be. Your website is the go-to for current and prospective customers. Even if they find you on social media or Google, they will want to go to your website and, like your Google listing, it serves to promote your business around the clock.
A good business website not only serves as a promotional tool in and of itself—it tells the story of your business and what you offer, provides contact information, and reflects your brand’s personality and distinguishing characteristics—but it is also essential for measuring and improving the success of your other promotional tactics.
For example, when you run ads, you need landing pages, which live on your website. When you post helpful information on social media, it should link to its home on your website. With all of your marketing channels flowing into your website, you can use analytics to see which strategies are working best and get invaluable insights about your audience.
Although there are completely free solutions to get a website in place for your business, almost inevitably you will need to move to some form of a paid website if you are serious about promoting your business. Having your own domain name, a professional look and feel, and the ability to scale and add features as needed are all essential for growth.
Get Radio Stations to Broadcast Live from Your Business
Radio personalities like to set up shop at local businesses that are hosting events or other special promotions from time to time. If you can get them to come to your business, you can have them talk about all the fun your customers are having.
Place Banner Ads on a Local or Industry Website
Create visually focused online ads, like banner or sidebar display ads, and then place them on sites relevant to your business. These are usually sold at a flat fee or per-impression rate, such as $10 per thousand impressions.
Create a brand & logo
Don’t be fooled by how simplistic this first tip may seem. Widespread brand recognition is your ultimate goal, and your business needs to inspire credibility and persuade others to spread the word about your work.
You need to create a brand you can build on from the start. Start by taking inventory of your business’ unique value proposition, its personality, and the values that define it. Then you can start to think about your visual brand.
Hiring a design firm may be costly, but there are popular crowdsourced design services on the web, such as crowdspring, that provide a selection of custom logo designs for your brand, and at an affordable price. Your visual brand may evolve with your business, but you need to start with something on which you can build your business’ reputation.
Get some business stationary
You’ve got your brand, you’ve got your logo – now to get it out there. You want to create the strongest association possible between your logo and branding and your actual business, this is where business stationary comes into play. Print business cards, order letterheads and envelopes – you can even get a franking machine to print your company brand onto all outgoing post.
Make sure you’ve got your website listed on your business card, at the bottom of emails, printed onto all physical advertising copy leaving your office. The best way to get the word out, is to establish mental imagery with your company
Implement search engine optimization
It’s one thing for you to promote your business; it’s another thing for Google to promote your business. SEO is a set of practices that align your business with Google’s ranking algorithm. But because this algorithm has evolved to use machine learning and user behavior to produce the most accurate and quality results for searchers, optimizing for search engines is really just optimizing for searchers—particularly those searching for what you have to offer.
SEO isn’t just one tactic, but many tactics that collectively work together to improve your rank. Also, because Google has superb location-based results, you have just as much of a chance as big retailers to show up on the first page of Google— without spending a dime! (With the exception of the costs to get a website, of course).
SEO tactics to promote your business include:
- Adding relevant (industry- and location-based) keywords to specific places on your website.
- Producing original, high-quality content regularly, with tagged images.
- Maintaining high page load speeds and security.
For more SEO tips, check out this post on The Top 10 Google Ranking Factors of 2020 (+How to Optimize for Them).
When your business is ranking high in results, Google is basically promoting your business for you—and not just to anyone, but to the people searching for what you have to offer. Doesn’t get much better than that.
Referral Promotion
Customers who are loyal to your brand will tell their friends about you. However, with referral promotions such as a points system or sign-up bonus, you provide the brand advocate with an incentive to make more than one referral. This, in turn, leads to more chances of landing new customers.
Rewarding customers with points, coupons and discounts are great for small businesses with a limited budget.
Flyers and Brochures
Flyers and brochures are a simple, inexpensive and great way to create a buzz about your business. By offer incentives or discounts to people who bring in your flyer, you can not only generate business but also informally track how many people are coming in just because they saw your flyer.
Email Marketing
An email newsletter is a cost-effective marketing tool to engage with your current customers and tap into a market of potential customers regularly.
Use your newsletter to provide your customers with valuable and relevant information. This makes your business the one they remember when they’re ready to buy. Once in a while, you can send a promotion, say an online coupon that they can use to get a discount.
Add calls to action in your emails
We are inundated with emails every single day. At work, at home, on the move. How is yours going to stand out from the hundreds of others crowding your customers’ inboxes?
Ultimately, what you want is a click – you want your customers to read your email, and visit your site. There’s no better way to achieve this than with a big, bright call to action button. Ask a question, spike your reader’s interest or give them an offer, with a blindingly obvious button they can hit to follow this interest.
Ask for reviews
Most local and national sites and directories allow customer reviews. Encourage your customers to write reviews about your products or services. Whether good or bad, reviews make your business more credible to future customers and can be lessons learned for you.
You can ask for reviews on the website by leaving a comment section, include a review link in your email marketing or even add a Pop-Up on your website to encourage people to leave feedback. Be sure to record customer feedback somewhere prominent on your site, so that others can find and read the results.
Conclusion
There are many ways available to promote a small business online. If you want to know how to advertise your business locally ,you have to define your targeted audience first, so you should know what is it that they want or search for.
You can effectively promote your business, with or without money.Implementing the strategies in this post is sure to pay off, especially if you regularly review and revise your strategy.