What are the best ways to advertise your business online? As a small business owner, what steps do you need to take to ensure that you are not missing out on any online marketing opportunities? How can you use the Internet to find more customers and make more sales?
As a business owner, it’s important you market your product and services or else, the business will remain unknown. Marketing is the business blood that sustains business growth. One of the major reasons why businesses collapse is the unavailability of paying customers.
The best ways to advertise your business online is to ensure your business is searchable. When your business in online your target audience can easily locate your business when researching online and this directories can get your business massive exposure.
For this reason, it is important to learn the best ways to advertise your business online effectively with low budget. High cost of advertising is one of the marketing challenges faced by most business owners everywhere around the world. So, for your business to be successful, you have to define who your prospects are and then iterate how you plan to reach them.
You have to figure out what’s the best way to advertise your business online and how you can market your business with low budget and the most affordable ways.
Best Ways To Advertise Your Business Online In Nigeria.
When using online advertising to create awareness for your business you automatically increase your reach and the number of possible sales conversion.
Therefore, These are the proven methods to advertise your business online effectively;
1. Get Official Business Website
Most businesses don’t have a website for their business, Unless you’re a small business owner who is not interested in growing your brand, you need to have a website.
Since the outbreak of Pandemic in, building website is a must because customers go online to find product and services. If you want them to choose your company, you need to be found online meaning you need a website. Having a website is one the best thing you can do in growing and advertising your business online. Building a website doesn’t cost much money and you don’t need any technical or coding knowledge to get your website running.
2. Use Email Marketing.
With the huge buzz around social media and its numerous platforms, I’ll forgive you if you overlook and underrate the power of email marketing. Email marketing still remains the most potent way of ensuring you are able to reach your customers directly.
It also ensures you have a unique opportunity to lead your potential customers through a lead management process that takes them on a journey from a simply interested person to someone who not only does business with you, but willingly share their experience with others.
According to research, 81% of small business owners say email marketing drives customer acquisition. And 80% of them say they were successful in using email marketing to retain customers. But your email marketing strategy won’t be effective if you don’t have subscribers.
3. Social media Targeting
Social media is not only a tool to gain exposure it is one of the best ways to advertise your business online effectively. Social media is now the necessary time investment for every business to make.
Social media targeting is a way of allowing your businesses to join social media conversations in an authentic and transparent way in order to build profitable relationships. Social media is a big deal right now because everyone is talking about it.
Social has shifted into the very core of business operations because it houses the digital clusters of the online community. You need to establish an active presence on many social media platforms as possible. Many local businesses right now round the world have increased their social media investment for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube.
4. Register Your Business On Google
Business registration on google with one of the googles program called Google My Business is a good and one of the best ways to advertise your business online. It enable your business to be searchable online. Google my Business is probably the most important thing to do for your business online.
Positive online reviews make 73% of consumers trust your business. That why you need to make sure your business is listed on google. For more information on how to add or register your business with google, Click Google My Business Signed Up.
5. Google Ads Advertising
Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. It can place ads both in the results of search engines like Google Search and on non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos. Although, is it not free but it is very affordable.
Google AdWords is a pay-per-click online advertising platform that allows advertisers to display their ads on Google’s search engine results page. Based on the keywords that want to target, businesses pay to get their advertisements ranked at the top of the search results page. Since the platform runs on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you have to pay only when a visitor clicks your ad.
The Google AdWords marketplaces work like an auction where people bid for clicks. However, it’s not necessary that the highest bid wins. Apart from money, Google also considers the quality score to ensure that the people clicking on the ads have the best possible experience.
6. Good Business Reviews
Having easy access to the web has radically changed the way people shop for almost everything today. It’s rare to blindly make a purchase decision without reading through several online reviews. In 2020, 90% of shoppers read at least one online review before deciding to visit a business.
For small business owners, the word “reviews” is a mixed bag. When someone is looking for a product or service provider, believe me, they want to be assured they are making the right choice.
One of the ways they gain that assurance is by looking at the reviews. This means that whatever your industry is, having a positive online presence gives you several key advantages, which is why it’s becoming a key part of branding. Understanding why you need online reviews will help you optimize your customer experience to help create a positive online footprint.
7. Use Referral Program
Referrals are one of the most valuable forms of marketing. Not only do most of us look to others for product and service recommendations, these recommendations come with a high level of trust.
If you want to get referrals, you have to first make sure you’re giving exceptional products and services. With these in place, your customers will be happy to refer you to others.
However, happy customers might not always remember to spread the word about your services without a prompt from a friend, family member, or colleague. If no one asks, they might never tell.
A strategic referral program can help any business get new customers at a very low price. By making use of your current customers to help spread the word, referral marketing has a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) than most types of marketing.
8. Prospecting
If prospecting is done right, not only to creates a pipeline of potential customers, it will helps to position you as a trusted advisor. It also helps you focus on the right accounts.
Therefore, another best way to advertise your business online is by focusing on how to find and develop your potential customers, which is called prospecting. Prospecting is an important part of the sales process, as it helps develop the pipeline of potential customers available.
9. Create “About Us” Page For Your Business
The “About Us” page is one of the most important aspect you should consider for your business. It is an opportunity to enable your visitors get to know more about you business and probably may have interest. This is a chance for you to introduce yourself and the kind of business you do. So you might as well make it great!
As visitors arrive on your landing page, they are hoping for a piece of introductory content, such as what/when/where/how details, which has to do with the About Us page. It’s a click away from the homepage, where it’s most required to make a quick impression.
10. Create Facebook Ad.
Creating your Facebook Ad basically involves choosing the right headline or text-copy, using the right image and providing a website URL (optionally based on your campaign objective) you will like users to be redirected to when they click on your ad.
To help you create winning ad creatives that will bring you clicks at a low CPC, keep your ads colorful so that they immediately catch the attention of your prospect audience, place your main value proposition in the ad image, so that people will read it right as they see your ad and lastly use the right image size (1200 x 628 pixels), so that your ad creatives look good on every screen.
11. Create Facebook business Page.
A Facebook business page is a free public profile you can create for your local business, brand, or product. Similar to your personal Facebook account, you can use the Page to promote your business or products by posting status updates, links, event announcements, comments, or photos and videos
If you don’t already have a Facebook business page, it is important to set up one for your business now as Facebook Ads can only be attached to businesses and not to individuals. Creating your business page on Facebook is free and easy to do.
12. Advertise on Twitter
Twitter allows you to communicate with your customers just like Facebook except it uses a short message format that allows you to send out messages (tweets) up to 140 characters long to people who subscribe to you known as your followers.
Your tweets can include a link to any web content (blog post, website page, PDF document, etc.) or a photograph or video. Adding an image to a tweet greatly expands what you can share to beyond the 140-character limit for tweets.
People follow (subscribe) to your Twitter account, and you follow other people. This allows you to read, reply to and easily share their tweets with your followers (retweet).
Main Benefits Of Having A Business Page on Twitter
- Increase customer satisfaction with better customer service. – Your followers on Twitter can follow your business updates and tweets in real time. If customers are unhappy with a promotion, you can immediately announce changes to the promotion on Twitter so your followers will see them in real time. You can also search for topics related to your business and join in on the conversation in real time. Thus, giving you more control over your customer service.
- Generate traffic to your local store or website. – Twitter makes it easy to announce online and offline events such as contests. You can hold contests and ask followers what they think of a new product or service you may offer. Make an exciting offer, and watch how it spreads instantly across Twitter.
- Brand Loyalty. – Once your customers see how you respond to customer suggestions, complaints, and comments, your customer loyalty will build itself naturally. Customers will stand by your brand/company knowing that they will get a response from you quickly in their time of need.
13. Instagram Business Account
Setting up an Instagram business account to give people more information about your products, service or business.
Creating your business account on Instagram allows you to add contact information, get insights about your posts, stories and followers, and advertise your posts to reach more people.
Get real-time metrics on how your posts, stories and ads perform throughout the day.
See detailed information about your followers and how they interact with your posts and stories.
Encourage people to get in touch by adding your email address, location and phone number.
Communicate directly with followers through Instagram messages, post comments and interactive stickers.
Be discovered by more people by paying to promote your post directly from the app.
14. YouTube Marketing
Upload videos on YouTube that have to do with how your business can adequately help your existing clients, prospective clients, and perhaps the general public.
Having this at the back of your mind while creating the videos will invariably go a long way in registering your brand in the minds of YouTube users.
Create a video that shows how your products work, its features, its advantages over others, its shortcoming and how to overcome them, and the pricing policy will make customers who need the product queue for it.
Send your video link to your friends and encourage sharing. Did I remember to tell you that having a YouTube channel is free? Yes, it is very free and you can reach billions of users internationally.
15. Use Power of Networking.
No single company has all the resources to pull up the goals and objectives of its marketing and sales team. Hence, the purpose of networking.
There are so many organizations that are in your industry, you can leverage on them for more clients and recommendations.
Network with others who are doing the same type of work you are. They can serve as a good source for referrals.
One thing about referrals is the ability to remain loyal to your business and also act as your unofficial spokespersons to other prospective clients.
16. Free Sign up Strategy and Giveaway
Loyalty is earned and most times you have to earn it by being generous to the people that you see as potential clients. You can improve your list of prospective customers through the use of free product giveaway in exchange of their email address mobile contact.
Give out free samples of your products to as many hands as possible so as to intently increase your chances of getting more loyal clients in the long run.
Free sign up strategy is not a waste of resources, it is a strategic way of winning prospective customers heart and at the same time gaining the avenue to have access to follow them up for ease of communication.nnn
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