Five ways to promote your business online

Designing and building a website for your business is only half the job.
Graham BuchananGraham Buchanan
Graham Buchanan

The other half relies on using digital marketing to promote your business online and ensure that it gets the attention it deserves.

Here are five common digital marketing methods that can be used to put your business website in front of the eyes of potential clients that are looking for your kind of services:

Design:

Before anything, make sure that your website looks good visually.

Don’t go overboard – keep it simple! Nice clear design, well organised pages, good images – that’s all you need for starters.

How you go about creating the website is up to you but believe me, in the long run, it is worth paying a bit more to get a good creative professional website design company to do this for you.

SEO:

Search Engine Optimisation can help you increase the number of visitors to your website. By using best SEO practices, your website will appear high in search results on the screens of your target audience.

Make sure that the content from your site contains the right keywords searched by your target audience. To find keywords that can help you increase your rank, start by coming up with a list of words and phrases that you feel are most relevant to your customers and their relationship to your company. Ask yourself a few questions about the words and phrases you’ve chosen and be honest about whether they’re the best choices. Better still ask others what they would search for as they are less likely to use jargon.

Again a professional SEO agency will do the research for you and ensure your website is properly set up for the best possible return plus advise on ongoing marketing to improve and maintain your ranking.

Content Marketing:

Keyword-rich informative, valuable, and consistent content will help you grow your audience organically thus advertising your business online in a more “natural” fashion. Remember, the goal is to educate and not to promote. Successful content marketers prefer to put this differently: “Teach! Don’t sell!” And this is exactly what content marketing offers.

The goal is to build an audience that regularly consumes and shares your content. But, how can content marketing work if there is no sales pitch whatsoever? If you write and share useful content to your audience, you will send a clear message that you are offering your knowledge and insights on the matter for free.

How to achieve this? When creating content to advertise your business website, don’t talk only about the things you offer and do. Instead, focus on examples – explain the benefits of using your services.

Social Media Engagement:

Social media platforms provide an opportunity for you to build your personal brand. The main goal is to utilise social media to position yourself as an expert in your niche. Before you start using social media to promote your business, make sure to update your personal profile to reflect the area of your expertise and to mention your website there! This will make it easier for people who are interested to find and learn more about your niche.

In order to increase social media engagement, you can adopt two strategies. One would be to start sharing the valuable content you have created on your official page. When doing this, make sure to answer any questions posted by your subscribers or followers. Engaging them in direct conversation is a great opportunity to help them by personalising the explanation. This builds trust.

The other would be to join relevant groups on social media and participate in public discussions. Try to remain as pragmatic and honest as possible. Help people by giving them information and valuable links (not only from your website, but from others too) and they will repay by following you.

PPC:

Inbound marketing can get you far, but it takes time. After you launch your business website, you can improve your marketing results and achieve them much more quickly if you use the power of outbound marketing. Paid advertising is a viable way for online promotion of any business. Many business owners are regularly using it, so why shouldn’t you?!

Set your budget for pay-per-click (PPC) ads and start by making a plan. The main aspect of this plan should be the optimisation of your PPC efforts so you don’t get your budget spent in under one day. Make sure not to choose wrong keywords. There are tools that can help you choose the keywords that have the advantages of a commercial intent, low competition and, of course, volume. If you are not familiar with the current keywords trends, low-hanging fruit and long-tail ones are quite popular these days.

You can also use paid ad campaigns on your social media platforms. Facebook Ads have an amazing interface that helps you target specific audiences. Just make sure to choose a social media platform where most of your target audience is. WSI is a digital marketing agency based in Eastbourne, generating business for clients for more than 13 years.

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