In this day and age, anyone who owns a business should know the importance of growing their brand online. Without good web design, SEO, sales strategy, and social media platforms, it becomes hard to keep up with all your competitors.
This is due to digital marketing becoming a vital part of any small business which wants to become and remain successful. When limited by time and budget, it’s hard to know if business website for small business are worth it.
Discerning on what’s worth your time and money and what’s not may be very difficult. With the following tips on how to grow your business online in 2021, you can outsmart your competitors and hit your sales target before the year runs out.
1. Social Media Strategy:
Be Flexible: It’s very crucial to be flexible when running a social media strategy. Through targeting options, and content type, you’ll be able to find what elicits the best response and engagement among your target audience. Staying updated on what’s happening at the moment is a great way to relate your brand to the world. This would make your business stay relevant in your target market. There are of course various ways to stay updated on trends and happening around, just make sure to check what’s new in your line of business, is there a new technology I could leverage? Are there ways others in my line of business are doing it better than I do? Am I getting the expected result? All these are pertinent questions that needs answers.
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2. Engage your customers: It’s very important for businesses to connect with their audience authentically. We have various social media platforms in which businesses can use in engaging their customers. Even with this, you could get to know more about what your customers want, is it the quality? Or the quantity! All this can be answered by our customers while you engage them.
By interacting online with your potential buyers and current customers, you’ll maximize your social presence and improve brand trust. While interacting you’re your audience online, you can slowly gather qualitative and quantitative information about your audience.
You can even conduct surveys through “polls” and “quizzes” on social media platforms or by using google form to gather informations within a short period of time. These pieces of data will provide valuable insights about who you’re selling and who buys your products.
3. Website Strategy:
Building a User-Friendly Interface: With a business website, you are opened to a global opportunity. It’s much more important to consider user’s experience on their end. Start with the navigation and user experience design (UX), and you’ll be sure to create a solid platform that will attract and convert leads into customers. This is what all online businesses want.
While we all have a great brand story we’re dying to share with our potential customers, a website by itself won’t do your brand justice if it cannot be easily navigated. You have to make every time spent by your visitor’s on your site worthwhile. Think about how you can keep them enticed and engaged long enough so you can tell your whole story from start to finish.
Make Contact Easy: Don’t make it more difficult than it needs to be to contact you. If a customer wants to contact you for business, how would they do that, can they easily get through? Make it as straightforward as possible. Include your contact information in several places on your website, and ensure they’re in high-visibility locations.
Keep in mind that your credibility is at stake when they go to contact you from the site. It’s crucial to have up-to-date, accurate information that reflects the best way to reach you.
4. General Digital Marketing Practices for Small Business: Know Your Customer: Knowing your customer is very key and highly sacrosanct. Your customers are changing every day maybe even more frequently! You need to be able to offer a strategy that can improve with the flow of your community. The moment you stop serving audiences is the moment you’ll start to lose engagement and followers. By truly understanding your customers and “the changing they do”, you’ll be better equipped to connect with them online.
5. Learn From competitors: Studying and learning from your competitors is one of the best ways to see what works, what doesn’t work, and what you’re up against. Small businesses tend to ignore this advice and rater focus on themselves. In following this strategy, they’re missing out on learning lessons vicariously through others and improving their strategy as a result.
You should study all the things about them. Follow them on social media and schedule regular sessions to check-in and see what’s new. Look through their website and note their sitemap. Peruse their online retail listings and see what past customers have said through reviews. Check out their brand assets and identify what they’re doing right.
By focusing on your best content and then finding new ways to change its type, offer a fresh perspective, improve upon the education, or reframe it for the timeliness, you’ll never run out of ideas.
6. Share Knowledge: Talking about and sharing what you know is one of the best ways to position yourself as an authority, create a community, and build trust from your audience. You can do this on your website through blog posts and on social media through regular posting.
Regardless of what you do or what you sell, there’s always something that you can offer to your audience knowledge-wise. A great way to begin creating original content is by asking yourself the prompt of “What are the most common business-related questions you are asked daily?”Break down the answers to these questions through content, and your audience will thank you!
7. Rely on Analytics: You need to rely on analytics to tell you how your business is doing. It’s crucial to stay up-to-date on the current analytics of both your website and your social media channels. Make it easy on yourself by utilizing analytics (like Google Analytics) or using the programs already integrated into your social media apps to check in on things like follower count, engagement (comments, likes, and saves), visits, etc. You can either create these into monthly reports or simply base your monthly strategy around the past month’s data.
8. Work on your SEO: SEO means Search engine optimization and its now very crucial in digital marketing. As far as your website is concerned, you need top-tier SEO help if you want to be found through search engines. This is a very tedious task in which you can hire an expert to do for you. Results found on the second page of Google’s results are 75% less likely to be clicked than results on the first page. Even more, 18% of the people searching will click the top result shown to them. With SEO your business is a go. SEO ranges from listing on google to search appearance to google map locations and so on. (To have a better idea about this, search for website designer in Ede, and you would find a link to this website there on google, your can check through google map and have a location. That’s how SEO works).
An algorithm leads to the ranking of the results, and SEO is a way to work this algorithm in your favor. If you don’t have the time or energy to understand SEO deeply and regularly optimize your site pages for it, it might be a good idea to consider hiring an expert like Mayeconcept.
9. Consistency: If you want to create a recognizable brand among your followers or community, you need to stay consistent with your brand assets and promotional materials. This means you want your business card, your online ads, your social media, and your website to all be recognizable as your brand. No one should be confused about what business they’re dealing with. Inconsistency will confuse potential customers and make them unsure they’ve got the right place.
Having a cohesive brand will also create a mood and a culture around your brand. Think carefully about the culture or mood you want to promote and develop your content and branding around that.
10. Be Realistic: Be sure the plans you’re taking are realistic ones. For example, if you plan to start posting 5 times a week on social media, but you can only keep up with 3 times a week, change your plan. Choose something you can stick with consistently. By showing up more regularly for your audience, the algorithms will reward you. Your audience will also look forward to those points of contact with you throughout the week.
11. Think Locally (local place listings, maps): Are you a local business? Get your name out there! The easiest way to do this is by registering your business listing through sites like Google. When people search for something “near me” online, your results will show up if you offer what they want and are local. It’s a great way to get extra space on the SERP and improve the chances of clicking.
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