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Effective Ways To Advertise Your Business – To survive and grow, your business needs customers. To get customers, you need to promote your business. In the good old days, it was about deciding between a flyer, a brochure, a postcard or an ad in the local newspaper.
So if you are struggling to figure out the best ways to promote your business; or even just what your options are, you are (a) not alone and (b) in the right place.
Effective Ways To Advertise Your Business
In this post, I’ll cover the 30 most effective ways to promote your business, whether you have no budget, a limited budget, or some wiggle room. We go over how the word spreads with respect to:
How To Advertise Your Business: 28 Ways To Get The Word Out About Your Firm
Using Google to promote your business is a no-brainer. Capturing more than 90% of the market share, it is one of the best ways to get in front of consumers who are actively looking for solutions. Here are the best ways to use Google to get your name out there:
Your Google Business Profile (Google’s term for your Google listing) is what allows your business to appear in Google Maps results, the local section of Google search results, and also – when someone enters your business name (ideas for creative business names here! ) and location – the right Knowledge Panel in the search results. As Google gets better and better at tailoring its results to the searcher’s location, this free list should be a top priority.
The key to using your business profile to promote your business is to verify the ownership of your listing through your free Google My Business account. If you own property, you can optimize your listing to show up higher in search results and for more relevant searches.
If you rank on Google Maps or appear in the Local Pack (as seen above) from regular results pages (this is very doable), your business is basically promoting itself 24/7. Even better, you can publish posts directly to your Google listing, putting attractive promotions in front of your audience at a time when they have high intent.
Effective Ways To Promote Your Coaching Business Online
For a deeper dive into this totally free, highly effective method of promoting your business, visit 13 Google My Business Optimizations.
A website is a must-have piece of marketing collateral no matter how old-fashioned your business or customers are. Your website is the go-to for current and potential customers. Even if they find you on social media or Google, they want to go to your website and, like your Google listing, it serves to promote your business around the clock.
A good business website not only serves as a promotional tool in and of itself – it tells the story of your business and what you offer, provides contact information and reflects your personality and distinguishing characteristics of your brand – but it is also essential for measuring and improve the success of your other promotional tactics.
For example, if you run ads, you need landing pages that live on your website. If you post helpful information on social media, it should link to your homepage on your website. With all your marketing channels flowing to your website, you can use analytics to see which strategies work best and gain valuable insights about your audience.
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Although there are completely free solutions to get a website in place for your business, you will almost inevitably have to move to some form of a paid website if you are serious about promoting your business. Having your own domain name, a professional look and feel, and the ability to scale and add features as needed are all essential for growth.
It is one thing for you to promote your business; it’s another thing for Google to promote your business. SEO is a set of practices that align your business with Google’s ranking algorithm. But because this algorithm was developed to use machine learning and user behavior to produce the most accurate and quality results for searchers, optimizing for search engines is really just about optimizing for searchers – especially those who are looking for what you have to offer.
SEO is not just one tactic, but many tactics that work together to improve your rank. Also, because Google has great location-based results, you have just as much chance as major retailers to show up on the first page of Google – without spending a dime! (With the exception of the cost of getting a website, of course).
For more SEO tips, check out this post on The Top 10 Google Ranking Factors of 2020 (+How to Optimize Them).
Effective Ways To Advertise Your Services & Products
If your business ranks high in the results, Google is basically promoting your business for you – and not just to everyone, but to the people who are looking for what you have to offer. Doesn’t get much better than that.
We just touched on this in the previous strategy, but content is such an important driver of SEO that it really deserves its own category as a promotion strategy. A blog is not LiveJournal for business. Sure, you can create a few posts about milestones and events, but a lucrative business blog is one that produces educational content, in your brand’s voice, around questions and terms your ideal customers are searching for on Google.
These questions and terms are called keywords, and the more content you produce targeting these keywords, the more opportunities you create to show your business on search engine results pages. Great blog posts can be any of the following:
A blog that shows your expertise, approach, and genuine desire to help your audience is the perfect promotional tool for a business. So don’t just publish posts – promote them! On social media, via email newsletters, or even turn them into downloadable guides to help you collect leads. Better yet, if you produce content with shareability in mind, your blog posts will likely be noticed by other credible websites who will mention and link to your site on their site or social media feeds – promoting your business for you.
How You Should Advertise Your Business
Just remember that the more traffic you get to your site, the more important it is to make sure your content loads quickly. For large and/or growing websites, a CDN can ensure that your content is delivered quickly. There are many options out there – for example HubSpot has a CDN option.
While SEO is one of the best marketing strategies, it is a long-term strategy that can take weeks, even months to see results. For more direct exposure, and if you have the budget, Google Ads is the way to go. Google Ads ads appear at the very top of search engine results pages, above organic and local listings. And of the available search engines, Google is by far the most popular not only because they control the largest share of search engine traffic, but also because of its high level of flexibility, ad-building features and detailed performance metrics.
Although mastering Google Ads takes some time as well as a lot of trial and error, an optimized campaign is well worth the investment. Advertising on Google can be done through text ads on the search network or branded banner ads on the display network. When you’re ready to get started, follow our step-by-step tutorial on how to run Google Ads.
If you’re already on Google Ads, see how your campaigns are *really* performing with our Free Google Ads Performance Grader.
Most Effective Ways To Advertise Your Instagram Business
Consumers regularly visit online directories to search for and vet businesses that fit their specific needs. These sites tend to be high-traffic, long-standing websites with high domain authority, so it’s not uncommon for your profile page or your business name to show up on the first page of Google through one of these domains. Online listings don’t take long to create and can help improve your online presence, promoting your business to nearby, high-interest customers.
Small directory sites pull data from larger ones, which means that by creating listings on the big sites, you’ll probably automatically start getting listed on smaller directories as well. Below is a list of the major directories to start with. All are free, but often have paid options for advanced features.
It’s one thing to create a listing, but it’s another to optimize it. By filling out every field in your profiles, adding photos and collecting reviews, you can improve your business’s appeal and rank above competitors in search. It’s also important to make sure your information in all of your listings is consistent with the information on your website. Inconsistency can cause Goog to raise an eyebrow about your trustworthiness. Finally, be sure to monitor your listing and fix any inaccuracies that may occur when listings are automatically populated. For more ways to optimize your listings, use the same post I linked to above (but I’m linking it here just because).
We just mentioned collecting reviews, but since reviews are so important to small and local businesses, they deserve their own section.
Small Business: 5 Cheap Ways To Generate New Business
Word of mouth is one of, perhaps the most powerful way to promote your business to the right people. Testimonials on your own website are great, but reviews on official platforms like Google, Facebook and Yelp are even better.
These websites can increase your exposure, and because they do
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