As the owner of a small business, setting yourself apart from your competition is vital if you plan on succeeding. In order to do this, you’ll need to take every opportunity available in order to build your brand and spread awareness of it. While most small businesses don’t have the budget to advertise on TV or in magazines, this no longer matters now that online marketing has become a much more effective and affordable alternative.
Just because you’re not working with the same budget as Apple or Coca-Cola doesn’t mean you can’t drive tons of traffic and grow your customer base. But where does a small business owner start with an online presence? With these tips personalized to small business websites and social media needs:
Invest In Quality Website Design
The design of your website is key to establishing credibility as a business. The layout should be easy on the eyes, pages should load quickly, and visitors should be able to navigate your site with ease. If you lack any of these elements, then visitors are more likely to leave your website without ever returning again. In order to make your website recognizable, make sure you add your logo to each page, along with your name, address, and phone number, and calls-to-action that incite your visitors to opt-in to an email newsletter.
Create Good Content
Content is what’s going to attract visitors and give them reason to return. Make sure your blog content is valuable and relevant to the interests of your potential customers. Don’t forget to write good content for your about page as well!
Go For Local SEO
Try to tailor your content to not just your target audience, but to the area your physical location is in as well. Locally-themed content that remains relevant to your brand will help your connect with your audience better and make it easier to rank for local SEO. Use local keywords, such as the city in which you are based in, to help boost local SEO rankings and expose more users to your website. Local keywords should be used in your meta tags, blog content, headers, and more.
Optimize For Mobile Browsing
Making sure your website uses responsive design so that it can be viewed on mobile devices is very important. In conjunction with local SEO, mobile optimization will help you reach consumers doing local searches on their mobile phones.
Use analytics tools
Tools such as Google Analytics can help you figure out any issues with your website by tracking metrics such as bounce rates, average session times, conversion rates and more. Knowing how your website is performing will allow you to fix what’s not working and focus on what is.
Build followers
Begin building followers by asking friends, family, and employees to follow you. When someone follows you and interacts with your posts, your company will be exposed to their social circles. Ask customers to follow you as well and advertise the fact that you are on Facebook and Twitter in your store as well as on your website.
Share content
Posting content from your blog will help drive more traffic to your website. It also makes it easier for followers to like, retweet, repin, or share content with their own social circles. This is often how content goes viral and is a great way to boost exposure.
Provide Great Customer Service
Social media can be used as another customer service channel. Because you can’t afford to lose customers, you need to make sure to address any complaints that are posted on your social media profile and to come up with solutions to any problems that arise. If you provide good customer service, it will help build your reputation as a trustworthy business that cares about its customers, which is what you need to survive as a small business.
Small business websites and social media can be extremely effective in increasing brand awareness and expanding your customer base. Now that you’re on a more level playing field with other businesses, you can be just as successful in your marketing efforts as larger companies if you leverage online marketing in the right way.
