14 Jul
Promotion is the key to success for most small businesses. Promote the product, it will bring you the right audience and sales. Unfortunately, most owners overlook promoting their business. They assume it’s expensive and time-consuming.
However, not promoting the business will affect the overall sales of the business.There are many promotional advice you will find recommendations for ads on Facebook, Instagram, or Google. Although there are many advertising and promotional techniques, you must try the best alternatives to run paid ads for your business.
You need to create a strong foundation for your online business and focus on quickly getting in front of the right people. This guide will focus on free and low-cost ways to promote your business with the correct examples and resources.
Ways to promote your business online
1. Guest post on blogs
By blogging you can drive traffic, but that takes time. While you grow your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Not only does this drive traffic back to your website, but the links to your site will help with search engine optimization.
All you need to do is to find and connect with the bloggers who have the type of audience you want to reach. Offer to write a guest post that their audience will love. Make sure the topic you write about is also related to your business or it won’t drive any traffic.
2. Get product reviews
Product reviews are a great way to promote your business. But instead of waiting around for someone to review your product, use a blogger outreach campaign to get it done for you. Contact bloggers with relevant, engaged audiences and offer to send them new products for free in exchange for an honest review. If you have a great product, they’ll love it and tell everyone.
3. Do an expert roundup
Indeed blogging is a great way to drive traffic, but it can be a lot of hard work. If you are not knowledgeable on the topic you want to write about, you can take help from other bloggers or experts.
Seek out experts on a topic and ask them to contribute an idea, such as a tip, recipe, or story to your blog post. Then, publish a list of all the responses you got back. You’ll be providing your audience with great content from relevant experts, plus the contributors will want to share the article with their own readers, increasing your own reach.
4. Find affiliates to promote your business
Affiliate marketing incentivizes other people to drive traffic to your business by offering a commission on every sale, similar to referral programs. Hence, if you want to take product reviews a step further and solicit even more people to promote your product, consider starting an affiliate program.
Finding your first affiliates can be tough if you don’t have wide brand recognition. Use an outreach campaign to find and recruit your first few affiliates and get the ball rolling. Look for affiliates who have an engaged audience and are already writing about your industry.
5. Get included in gift guides
Gift guides are a list of recommended products or gift ideas, typically centered around a holiday – like Christmas or a person – like your dad. Getting your product in the right gift guides can increase sales and traffic to your website.
However, inclusion in these guides doesn’t happen randomly and requires some effort. In many cases, business owners and marketers lobby to get their products included. Use outreach to contact gift guide publishers and ask to have your product included.
6. Invest in an infographic
Infographic is one way to drive traffic and potentially build backlinks, which are great for search engine optimization (SEO). The cost ranges greatly for quality infographics – depending on what you need but it can be well worth the investment.
Once you’ve chosen an idea, research the topic and identify the points that you’ll cover in the infographic. The message included in the infographic speaks to your customer base, but is also compelling enough that many blogs and even news sites might want to feature and link back to it.
7. Get press coverage
Get in touch with bloggers and journalists, instead of hiring a PR company who covers businesses like yours and tell them you have a great story or an interesting product that people will want to write about.
Make sure you target the right publications (i.e., don’t ask a tech writer to cover your clothing line), and offer them a compelling story to improve your success rate. When marketing a new business, press coverage is a good way to get your name out there.
8. Start email marketing
Email marketing is a great way to attract and retain customers as a small business. You can ask potential customers to sign up for an email list on your social media profiles or ecommerce store. Email is one of the most cost-effective ways to market a new business. Once they opt-in, you can send them promotions, product launches, or content to build a relationship and increase sales.
9. Get found in Google Search
When it comes to promoting your online business, SEO is one of the best ways to get traffic and sales over time. Research shows that online businesses receive 35% of total traffic and 33% of revenue from search engine results pages.
The goal is to get to position one, so when shoppers type in a specific keyword, they find your brand first. These shoppers are considered “high-intent,” which means they are more likely to buy your products compared to people who watch an ad or find you on social media.
How to promote your business on social media
1. Start a YouTube channel
Youtube is growing fast and a large number of users are taking advantage of this platform for marketing their business. A YouTube channel can help:
- Build credibility with your audience
- Create engagement and loyalty
- Increase your social media presence
- Drive traffic to your website
Compelling video content is excellent for attracting new customers and engaging with current ones. A basic YouTube marketing strategy will help showcase your brand’s identity and connect with your target audience in a fresh and exciting way.
2. Ask Instagram influencers to promote your product
Nowadays, social media is the fastest way to promote your business. It’s not necessary for a person to review your product. When you find the right match for your brand, a simple mention on Instagram can go a long way. This is especially true for apparel products, where the right mention or stylish photo can drive tons of sales.
Look for Instagrammers with audiences that would like your product and ask them to feature your product in a photo. Make sure you have your own Instagram account set up so they can tag you.
3. Post compelling content frequently
To grow your social following over time, it’s crucial to post content consistently. According to a study, audiences respond differently depending on your posting frequency. Hence, make sure you test to figure out the best cadence for your brand. You can also compare your posting frequency and engagement rates to your competitors.
On platforms like Instagram, you can post different types of content throughout the day. Numerous companies have looked into the optimal number of times to post on each channel, and it’s worth pointing out the potential appetite of users on each platform.
Two helpful marketing tools for scheduling future posts are Hootsuite and Buffer. You can integrate them with your browser and dozens of other apps to schedule posts and track engagement metrics for your social networks. These apps can help you cut down on time spent executing your online marketing strategies.
4. Automate word-of-mouth with social reviews
You can use product reviews and testimonials to create trust and gain insights into your products is a great way to increase online sales. Yotpo is a review app available for Shopify sites that encourages customers to leave reviews after they’ve made a purchase. The process is automated, so you don’t have to manually reach out to customers yourself.
Connect your business’s social accounts and post the reviews directly to your pages. These reviews provide fresh content and help drive traffic from social to your site, which in turn boosts online sales.
5. Create micro-content for social feeds
Consider the context in which most users are browsing social media. Maybe they’re on a mobile device during their commute, taking a quick break at their work, or killing time as they wait for their show to come back on after the commercials.
That’s why bite-sized content is an effective way to captivate your audience. This social media marketing strategy works particularly well on platforms made specifically for quick experiences, such as Snapchat.
For example, let’s say you sell products for soccer players. On your blog, you write an article titled “7 Training Exercises to Improve Your Soccer Skills.” You then repurpose that content into seven pieces of micro-content for use on social ones for each exercise. That would play much better than trying to cram an entire article into a much smaller social media experience.
6. Host a Twitter chat with your audience
A great tactic to grow your Twitter following and boost online sales is by hosting a weekly Twitter chat.
You can either co-host an existing Twitter chat or start your own. Co-hosting allows you to tap into an existing audience, while you’d need to do more work promoting it if you were to host on your own. Over time, others in the space will take part and you’ll gradually establish your brand as an authority in the space.
Tip: Pick a hashtag related to the Twitter chat and ask your community to use it within their tweets. This helps with branding, makes the practice familiar to those who choose to take part, and allows you to search the chat later for content and recaps.
7. Make it easy to share your products
Social share buttons are a key element to increase traffic to your website and boost online sales. Make sure the buttons to the popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest are easy for users to find.
To implement this social media marketing tip on your own online store, consider an app like Social Share Buttons and Popup, which has its own analytics and can help you optimize positioning and layout.
8. Be active on the right #hashtags
The hashtags makes it easy to join in on discussions and events by posting under the ones that are relevant to your brand. You can use hashtags on posts in your feed or on Instagram stories. A social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite can help you find, like, retweet, and reply to posts under several hashtags. You can use a tool like Hashtagify to find other hashtags related to the one you’re trying to target.
- Be careful not to treat hashtags the same on every channel. Here are some general best practices from various studies we’ve come across:
- Twitter posts with a single well-placed hashtag tend to generate more engagements than tweets with three or more.
- Instagram posts, on the other hand, see the most engagement when using multiple hashtags, even 10+ in a single post.
- LinkedIn posts do better with a maximum of five hashtags.
- Facebook posts do better without hashtags.
9. Create quizzes and other interactive content
Thanks to Buzzfeed, quizzes have made a strong comeback. This type of interactive content works really well on social media, if they can provoke quiz-takers to show off their results publicly. To do that, you need to create a quiz that tells people something about themselves or how much they know so they’re compelled to share it to reflect themselves.
If you want to try building your own, I suggest Playbuzz: a free and easy-to-use tool for creating interactive content.
10. Enable Shopping on Instagram
One of the biggest challenges for brands on Instagram is linking. And when the main goal is to drive traffic and, ultimately, sales, that can be a big hurdle. One way to work around this to boost online sales is to add products to your Instagram posts and Stories.
11. Test out retargeting ads
Paid retargeted ads on social media have become a crucial component to many websites’ marketing strategies. You also have more control over targeting who you want to see your content, as opposed to being limited to your existing audience for your organic efforts. The best part is, you can start with as little as $50.
When you run retargeted ads, you send ads to users who have been to your site. These ads can be personalized based on their behavior.
How to promote your business locally
Here’s how you can locally promote your business:
1. Create a Google My Business profile
It is an easy-to-use listing tool to manage your presence across Google Search and Maps. It’s the best way to promote on Google for free and get in front of prospective customers.
You can add photos and videos of your shop, and provide links to your website or appointment booking software. You can even give people a look inside your business to build trust and credibility with potential customers.
If someone decides they want to engage with your business, they have your contact information, website, and business address right in the listing. People can easily visit you online or in-person.
2. Join local events
Local events help small business owners meet customers one-on-one and create individual connections. People can touch, feel, and smell whatever you’re selling and interact with your products.
3. Offer local delivery
When a customer orders something from your online store, you can personally deliver it to their doorstep. Local delivery is a smart way to get your order delivered. Also, Data from Shopify shows that online shoppers spend 23% more and have a 25% higher cart size when local delivery and pick up are offered by independent retailers.
Wrap up
Businesses need low-cost and free marketing tactics to help meet their business goals whether it’s raising brand awareness, driving website website traffic, or making sales. You don’t need to use all of these tactics, you can start with one or two and see how they work.
Every small business requires extra effort to grow and reach the heights they have set for themselves, but with constant efforts and proper techniques, they can grow and establish their business in the industry.