When it comes to growing your business, it can seem like your work is never done. In a way, it isn’t. The following will explore a few key ways you can promote your business in today’s digital-analog hybrid ecosystem.
Of course, every business and industry is different, and this means that there might be standards you need to consider that are specific to your work or field. It’s a good idea to examine competitors who are thriving in order to see what customers within your industry have come to expect.
What Is Promotion?
Promotion refers to any activity that communicates a product, service or brand to a user. The goal is usually to raise awareness of what a business has to offer and encourage people to buy its product or service. Common types of promotions include press releases, discounts, contests, and press releases. Awards, discounts, incentive trips and freebies can also be considered promotions in the right context.
Get On The Lists
This is a broad topic when it comes to promotion, but it’s important in two different ways. There are a ton of locations—many of which are online—where you can list your business. You can list your business at InCityLife, various search engines, various review sites, and local business lists, to name a few. First, this increases your chances of someone stumbling across your business as they search these lists or find your work after directly seeking out the kind of products or services that you offer. Second, it gives you the opportunity to boost your domain authority, as websites that contain these lists tend to have high domain authority. Links from high authority sites tend to be worth more to search engine algorithms than sites that have lower authority. Make sure when you list that you include a hyperlink to your business website to take full advantage of this benefit.
Create Useful Content
If you’re running a business, you probably have a pretty good sense of your customers. Who are they? What do they need? What are they struggling with? Create content that helps your customer base deal with the things they need to. These might be how-to articles. It might be advice columns about particular issues. It might simply be you taking all your most commonly asked questions and turning each of them into a long-form blog post that helps people understand what they need to understand in order to work with you. No matter what content you develop, take the time to ensure that it is free of errors and is optimized for the location you intend to share it. If it’s an Instagram post, you want at least twenty hashtags. If it’s a blog post, you want to ensure that the headings contain key terms that people who are looking for work like yours might search for online.
Get Consistent
You’ve probably heard about the value of consistency when it comes to social media algorithms, but that’s not what this is referring to. You need a consistent voice for your brand and a consistent look. You want the images you share alongside your content to be edited in the same way. You want the same logo visible across all your online and offline work. This will allow people who have encountered you in one location to recognize you when they find you in another location and draw an internal connection between the different facets of your business.
Find A Cause You Love And Support It
Campaigns where your business gives back to society—in whichever way suits your work and values—can do wonders for drawing interest towards your work. People want to feel like the businesses they work with are good-natured, and this kind of campaign can show them this side of you. It can also help those in need. Consider participating in a co-op program so that local high school students or university students can gain work experience while they get credit. Donate a scholarship to the local high school; pick a relevant subject or a subject that you win and offer the scholarship to the graduate going to university with the highest mark in that subject. Consider donating a certain amount of the proceeds from a given product or service to a charitable organization. Join in the local earth day clean-up projects or enter into local marathons. Showing people what you care about is one of the fastest ways to create a bond. People like businesses they have a bond with.
The above information should have given you a few ideas of ways you can promote your business. While each of these tips works well right from the get-go, all of them compound over time, meaning the more effort you put into them across many days, weeks or months, the more impressive their results are going to be.
