Social media strategists are often separated from the SEO and web teams. This is unfortunate because they seek the same goals — awareness of the website and engagement with the audience. SEO has evolved as a sophisticated but largely separate discipline from social media and community development. As a result the social media strategist is often left out of the loop when it comes to SEO best practices.
To remedy this problem we’ve put together a list of basic SEO concepts and how they are impacted by social media. Incorporate these simple concepts into the fabric of how your social teams work. Make sure your SEO teams understand why the social teams are interested in their work. They’re not looking to take over — they’re looking to boost the effectiveness and output of SEO.
If you are trying to figure out how to promote your business, you’re in the right place. In this article, you’ll learn the most effective ways to advertise and promote your small business online and locally.
Before we proceed, let me briefly tell you about these things.
An Image is Worth a Thousand Keywords
Pictures = good. Social strategies for boosting site rank can significantly benefit from having others doing the work for you. Create incentives that engage and entice customers, employees and business partners to generate unique content. Images and snapshots work well. They’re easy to take and upload with the hyper-ubiquity of phone cameras.Create an easy way for users to upload and share their images of them doing stuff with your product to your site.
Free and cheap examples include promoting a Twitter hash tag (e.g., #bloomthink) for user photos or encouraging photo sharing via Facebook and your company tag. More advanced examples include soliciting customer or partner photos uploaded to your website. Then have a gallery where users can view their pictures and those of others.Yes, make sure you have someone responsible for curating those photos. That is simple common sense.
A Strong Relationship is Worth Even More
Create a zone of exclusivity where influencers and experts are incented to share their thoughts, designs and advice with your audience on your web property. Social is sharing. And sharing is two-way. Make sure that the incentives you provide are real and impactful. They don’t need to break the bank, but they should be note-worthy. When you are remarkable, people tend to remark. That is exactly the behavior you desire. When you engage users and influencers, you spur their promotion of your site as well.
A word of warning here is to keep it unique. Buying into the whole content farm concept can be a risky proposition (content farming is the simple aggregation of buzz-wordy artifacts like blog articles, images and tweets. No unique content or value was created). It worked for a while, but search engines got wise and changed up the algorithms to prioritize original and unique content over content farms. Ideas on how to do this abound online.
Gamification — a recent social buzzword — has a big role to play in this space. By providing incentives — whether credibility ratings, badges for collection, points that can be redeemed or peer accolades — you spur engagement.Hotels and airlines have been doing this for some time with their points-based loyalty programs. By providing that incentive, outlining the path to achievement and explaining the rewards, they not only gain the loyalty of a customer, they also foster a relationship that extends their reach and provides valuable constructively critical feedback when things start to go wrong.
How to Advertise Your Small Business Online
Build a website
A website is a necessity for advertising your business. It acts as a promotional tool that reflects your brand’s personality and distinctive attributes, provides your business contact information, and tells the unique story of your business and what it offers.
Potential customers are likely to visit your website even when they’ve seen you on Google listings and social media. A good business website adds to the credibility of your business and showcases your product offerings in detail.
Having a website is vital for assessing and enhancing the effectiveness of your other promotional strategies. Every ad you run online and every content you share on your social media platforms should connect to your website. Doing this will give your website access to your marketing channels, allowing you to use analytics to determine which strategies are most effective and learn important details about your audience.
Integrate search engine optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) raises the visibility of your website in Google search results. The likelihood that customers will find your website when they search online for businesses like yours is increased when relevant keywords are included across your business’s web pages and blog posts.
More than including relevant keywords in your web pages and blog posts, SEO involves a combination of strategies that helps your business comply with Google’s ranking algorithm. These strategies include using relevant industry- and location-specific keywords in strategic positions on your website, creating regular and original content of the finest quality with tagged images, and maintaining both security and quick page loads.
You’re not just advertising to anyone when your business ranks high in search results but to those who are specifically looking for what you have to offer.
Create interesting content
Creating engaging content is the secret to building brand recognition and connecting with your target market. Since content is such a significant factor in SEO, as mentioned earlier, it deserves special attention as one of the key marketing strategies.
You can create content through a blog, video tutorials, or infographics. While you can choose to create content about your business milestones and events, a successful business blog produces interesting and educational content in your brand voice around queries and terms your ideal customers are searching for on Google. For instance, you can share posts with instructions, how-tos, and strategy guides; a written Q&A or interview with a subject matter expert; thought-provoking articles; templates; guest posts; case studies, client reviews; and periodic postings.
Engaging content can demonstrate your subject matter expertise and win over your audience’s trust.
Pay for Google ads
When it comes to search engines, Google is by far the most widely used. Google ads’ popularity has grown exponentially over the past ten years accounting for the lion’s share of search engine traffic. In 2019, Google recorded more than 160 billion searches each month. The search engine has a high level of flexibility, ad-building features, and comprehensive performance metrics.
Google ads appear at the top of search engine results pages above organic and local listings. There are two ways to advertise on Google: Pay-per-click ads, also known as the Search Network’s text ads, and Display Network’s ads, also known as branded banner ads.
Pay-per-click ad is a low-cost marketing strategy that draws in potential customers. You only pay when consumers click on your ads.
Run social media campaigns
Another option to promote your small business is via social media. It is one of the most innovative, widely used, and lucrative types of digital advertising available today, with a user base of over 3.6 BILLION . The most widely used social media platforms for businesses are Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. However, you should seek and only use platforms that are relevant to your industry.
Even though people may pass social media ads without pausing, the idea of seeing ads in their social media feeds has grown commonplace, which encourages familiarity. When done rightly, paid social media ads can effectively market your business to a particular audience that will convert to customers.
Start with Facebook. It is the biggest social network on the internet. It can be an excellent tool for brand awareness and business promotion. With Facebook, you can connect with current consumers and attract new ones. Depending on your sector, there are various ways to advertise your business on Facebook.
Facebook advertising lets you target based on user profile data such as marital status, occupation, interests, and more, allowing you to access highly targeted audiences.
Join and participate in online communities
One of the best ways to promote your business is to join and participate in online communities and groups on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook that are relevant to your business or industry.
You gain recognition in your industry by providing individuals with helpful tips and recommendations when they have issues or queries, as well as leaving comments on relevant sites and even expressing interest in writing guest posts. Keep in mind that while you are answering a single person’s question, a thousand silent others are watching you and taking note of your name and actions.
Participating in conversations helps you build connections with other members of the community. Doing this increases not only your network but the credibility of your business.
Partner with influencers in your industry
Influencers are people within your niche that are very popular, highly respected, and deeply trusted by your target audience. They have a sizable social media or blog following, so having your business recognized or highlighted by one of them can expose it to a wide range of prospective customers.
Influencer marketing requires careful consideration. Before contacting an influencer, spend some time getting to know their accounts on all social media platforms; comment on, like, and share their material; and make sure you have an explicit request and something of comparable worth to offer in return.
For instance, you could offer them a free product or service in return for a blog review and social media mentions. Alternatively, you could produce a valuable guest article for their blog that will benefit their readers and include a link to your website.
Blogging and Web Page Checklist
Every blog article or web page has a checklist. Here are some good metrics to consider:
- Understanding how important the domain is to SEO and social sharing. If it is fantastically unique but too difficult to remember or type into Twitter, then you’re not maximizing your capabilities. If the domain is highly ranked, do you enable social engagement everywhere? If you don’t understand what I’m talking about here, pair up with your SEO team. They know.
- Understanding how important specific pages are to your audience! If most folks are headed to one or two pages, make sure you’re making social engagement push-button easy on those pages. Segment your audience to really get to the heart of this item. If the majority of the public is headed to your job openings page, that is one thing. But if you segment out your customers — or IP Addresses coming from areas near your customer addresses (see why that CRM data is so important now?), you can see the pages your customers are interested in. I’ll bet your sales team would KILL for that information!
- Understanding specific metrics about where a link is going to be placed on a page. SEO the anchor text and title text (for images!) and make sure the content of the link itself is a keyword rather than a “click here.”
- Make sure all the other page content — especially links — are legitimate, useful and authentic. Those other ancillary links are the ecosystem in which your links and content live. If people land on a spam-full page, they are likely to have an unfriendly reaction. Even if you have a content gem — why surround it with a heap of ugly links?
- Understand what your competitors and partners are doing. Take a look at Compete.com or similar services. Use Hitwise to benchmark yourself and compare to industry trends.
Socially you want to measure fans, followers and friends. But more importantly, you want to measure the influence of those people. Then focus on engaging your most influential fans, followers and friends with incentives, special information or “backstage” access. They are your first step to engaging a wider audience and boosting awareness.
Wrapping Up
This article has covered various strategies for promoting your small business. Remember that you need to monitor your rates of return if you are paying for advertising. It’s essential to increase brand awareness, but if advertising doesn’t bring in profit for the business, it might not be worth it.
Running a successful business requires patience and constantly experimenting with new strategies. The goal is to get your target audience more acquainted with your brand with your marketing efforts.
The strategies in this article will pay off if you put them into practice, especially if you keep your plan under regular evaluation and revision.
