Small business owners typically have small budgets for marketing, which can make finding prospective customers a challenge. Luckily, there are many free and affordable options to expanding your presence that can help you build a customer base from scratch.
As you begin to establish a presence online, consider your new business’s persona. How would you like potential customers to feel when they read a post or see a photo from you, and how can you achieve that feeling? You can be both personable and professional, and doing so will help you grow your business through its early days and beyond.
Create Value on Social Media
Don’t use Facebook or Instagram solely to promote products and services. Showcase your personality, and use media to illustrate what values lie at the core of your business. The point of online marketing is to help you connect with your audience on a deeper level than you could just by showing off what you have on offer. Share stories, anecdotes, and even behind-the-scenes photos to give your business a more friendly and authentic appeal. Then you can promote your products as well, and your followers will feel less like they’re being spammed with sales offers.
Build a Local SEO Strategy
SEO content optimizes your website to show in search results. That means when potential customers are searching for your product or service online, your SEO-rich web pages are more likely to be presented on the first or second page of Google. Local SEO is a subfield of SEO that focuses on helping small businesses establish presence online in defined geographic regions.
Instead of trying to rank as the number one result for the entire world, you can concentrate your local SEO strategy on reaching customers in your area. If you don’t have one already, set up a Google My Business account. You can then create a local business profile that will appear to people searching for a business like yours nearby.
You should also optimize your web page for voice search, which has become extremely common thanks to smartphone and home virtual assistants, like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa. Information about your business, like your standard operating hours and prices, should always be readily available. Otherwise, potential customers are likely to leave, even if you have a great product or service for what they’re looking for.
Mention Your Location Strategically
On your company’s “About Us” page, make sure that you mention where you are located. It should be evident from the minute someone lands on your website where you are and what areas you serve. At the end of blog posts, use call to actions that emphasize location by mentioning the city name. People tend to google their city’s name followed by their state’s abbreviation, so keep that in mind and try to incorporate a mix of both shortened and longform versions of your location keywords.
As you work on building content to resonate with a local audience, be sure to stay focused on value over quantity. The best way for a small business to thrive is by concentrating on what the demographic closest to them wants and then building a strategy around it.
