How to Promote Your Business Online: A Business Owner’s Guide

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Christine Lee

April 1, 2021

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Marketing

Entrepreneurs and small business owners are always wondering how to promote their business online. These are the best tips for reaching new audiences at the right time on the best channels.

Growing your online sales takes a lot of research. First, you have to know your niche inside and out and the audience attracted to your products. These expert tips give you insights into earning more traffic and promoting your business online through different channels like social media and email.

Learn Who Your Buyers Are‍

"Target your customer" with a target on a human shaped paper

How close are you to your audiences? Do you know what terms they search for to find products like yours? It's important to always go through a buyer persona exercise when you're developing a marketing strategy.

Part of promoting your business is understanding exactly who your audience is and where they like to hang out online. If you promote your business on the proper channels where you're guaranteed to reach your ideal audience, you'll constantly attract customers interested in your products.

Your audience data matters, and you should be trying to create custom audiences and segment those audiences by demographics, interests, location, and shopping behaviors. You may even want to consider customer diversification.

Start Facebook Advertising‍

There is no better way to market your business online than with Facebook advertising. Targeting and conversion tracking are available through Facebook for Business and Facebook Ad Manager.

Though it takes some time to set up your first campaign, once you learn the ins and outs of Facebook advertising, you’ll see why so many small businesses and start-ups use Facebook for Business.

With targeting, Facebook ads access up to 3.5 billion users per month. This is why so many niche businesses can gain visibility and reach online even when going up against large corporate advertisers. In addition, with the power of targeting, you can use your buyer personas to set up custom audiences. This typically results in lower lead costs with higher-qualified leads. 

‍Create More Content‍

Laptop open with the word "Content"

If you want to be found on the internet, you’ll have to create lots of content. Even large corporations realize that they have to change up their content strategies. For one, people want the most relevant, the newest information on the topics they’re searching for.

If they’re searching for a product, they may look at the best or the top of the market, but they’re also looking for what’s cheapest and most valuable. So you have to determine what your audience’s search intent is to create content around topics that matter to them. 

Many tools can help you find your best keywords and blog topics, such as Ahrefs.com, which offers a robust keyword explorer, competition research tool, and content gap analysis.

Capture Email Data‍

If you already work in lead generation, you know how important it is to bring in new contacts every day. Your email program may not be set up correctly if you don’t see more sales from lead nurturing.

In many cases, a well-written and strategic lead nurturing email series turns your prospect into a hotter lead. You may even learn more about your lead by seeing what they click on or offering a promotion for their first purchase. 

By capturing email data, you learn more about your audience and create custom audience information to target on Facebook or remarketing campaigns in Google.

Interact with Influencers‍

Influencer recording herself asking for likes & subscribes

Today’s social media game is all about who you know. So when you make friends with an influencer, you partner with them on promoting your content, whether through a direct contract or offering free items in return for exposure. Most influencers can be found through Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Twitter,  but you may like using tools such as Heetsy.com to find relevant influencers in your niche. 

Are people engaging with your content? Do you have thousands of followers? If you’re not getting shares, retweets, and likes every day on your content, then you probably feel invisible and left out of the game.

While there are paid methods to boost your content and pay for your reach, you can also create more original content, post more videos, and track your interactions with a social media tool like Traject Social or Hootsuite.

Promote the Best Offers‍

Once you start capturing email data and targeting your customers with Facebook advertising, you should begin seeing which offers get the most clicks and highest conversion rates. 

It’s essential to pay attention to the channels, audiences, and ad creatives that you use with your best offers. Of course, these will be the campaigns that push your revenue up, but you’ll want to test and make tweaks to keep your audience interested.

Improve Your Local Search Marketing‍

Hand holding a phone with a search bar with the word SEO

Have you optimized for local search yet? Local SEO is typically associated with geo-based marketing, where you want to outrank your nearby competitors. For example, customers search for restaurants or spas nearby; you want your business to be in the first three results on Google. 

To do this, you’ll need to claim your business listing on Google if you haven’t already done so, then you’ll also want to optimize your Google My Business listing. 

Google My Business allows you to update your location, description, and questions to include keywords about your business. In addition, you can add images, videos, and other information to your Google listing that helps when customers search specific keywords when looking for nearby businesses.

Optimize Your Website ‍

There are several ways that you should optimize your website. For one, if you haven’t already upgraded your design to a mobile responsive site, then that’s the first place to start. Google ranks mobile-first websites higher than slower, non-responsive websites.

You can enhance your site with SEO by creating new content around keyword research and adding search-friendly technical markup to your pages. Backlinking is where you’ll truly shine if you’re able to get other high-ranking websites to link back to your content. If you haven’t done a content and SEO audit, you should spend time digging into what would make your content more engaging for your audience. 

Another popular way to optimize is to think about conversion rate optimization (CRO) and customer experiences. For example, is it super easy to find your products and purchase them? 

How much effort do mobile customers have to put in to get what they want? It’s best to go through a CRO audit and put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer as you move through your website.

Distribute Content to Important Channels‍

Mobile phone open with different social media channels

Much of these tips revolve around knowing your audience and understanding what they’re searching for online. However, it’s even more critical to distribute your content across social media channels and niche-specific websites that appeal to your audience.

You’ll spin your wheels trying to publish content to every single social channel. That’s why it’s so essential to research your audience and look at insights on your social posts. You’ll learn what content gets the most engagement, as well as what channels have the most potential to share and like your content.

Many businesses use social media management tools to distribute content across all channels evenly. While this works for a little while, your audiences will get bored with your lack of authentic engagement. People like to see companies reply to comments, messages, and tweets. So you’ll need to spend the most time on channels that reach your ideal audience and get constant engagement.

If you can constantly engage on all channels, you may want to invest in a social monitoring tool or even a chat messenger program that makes it easy to reply. In addition, you’ll be able to assign roles and keep track of all of your social interactions in one place. Traject Social and Sprout Social offer these types of tools.

Lastly, Change Up Your Strategy Now and Then‍

Laptop open with a video

The companies that get the most engagement and visibility online are always trying to impress their audience, whether it's with a new visually stunning video promotion or adding new features to their products.

To grow and survive your business, you should look to change up your promotions each quarter and join communities where you can post more information to your audience. You don't always have to promote your products to get the most engagement and even earn sales.

Facebook Groups, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora are great places to post informational content that improves your social score, so long as you don't get promotional and salesy. This organic content is often viewed more highly by customers who want to learn.

Need help with your strategy? Talk with an e-marketing company to get an expert marketing roadmap for SEO, online advertising, content marketing, and social media marketing.

Ready to Grow Your Business?