10 Ways to Market Your Small Business

Between managing employees, keeping customers happy and taking inventory, small business owners have a lot on their plates. This is why it’s common for them to overlook the importance of a comprehensive marketing strategy. However, being a successful small business means having an online presence and effectively promoting your business on this channel.

Here are 10 easy ways to market your small business online.

1. Create an Email Marketing List: Email remains a strong marketing channel because it’s inexpensive, fast and effective. The best way to obtain email addresses is by running a promotion where users can subscribe to your email list for an incentive.
2. Communicate on Social Media: Being on social media is an inexpensive and easy way to communicate with your audience. Don’t use this channel for trying to push more sales, however. Your audience will respond better if you use social media to share information, ask questions and respond to comments.
3. Manage Your SEO: SEO includes many components, and good keyword usage is one of them. Do your research to evaluate good keywords, and use them naturally in your content to help with ranking.
4. Have a Relevant Website: Your website is one of the first impressions you’ll make on a visitor, so make sure it offers a strong user experience. Your site should be clean and organized, have easy navigation and provide a positive interaction.
5. Contribute Interesting Content: Creating content is an excellent way to market your business because it gives you the opportunity to share insight from your perspective. As people read your content, they will develop more trust in your brand.
6. Reward Your Followers: Once you build up your follower count, you need to do your part in nurturing them. The best way to do this is by recognizing and rewarding your audience. Keep your followers happy by running contests and promotions with useful incentives.
7. Create Videos: Google uses video as a ranking signal, and it gives the edge to video content. Creating videos is a great way to stay in front of your audience, provide them with engaging content and rank well in the search engines.
8. Claim Your Local Profiles: When you claim your business on local profiles like Yelp and Yahoo! Business, it helps people find you easier. Optimize your listings with a business description, hours, contact information and a few photos or videos.
9. Have a Mobile Friendly Design: Recently, Google rolled out the Mobilegeddon update that penalized sites for not having a mobile friendly design. With more searches on mobile devices than desktops, it’s critical that you have a mobile friendly web design that offers a positive user experience.
10. Pay to Play: You don’t need to pay for every post that goes up on Facebook or Twitter, but you should invest in a few of them. Organic posts don’t get the same exposure as they used to, so it’s possible that your audience will miss them. If you have something important to share, give the post a boost and use customized targeting.