Effective Strategies to Promote Your Business Successfully
Success in business breaks down into two simple things:
- Can you supply something that people want at a price they’re willing to pay?
- Can you get your offer in front of those people?
Nine times out of ten, people start a business because they are capable, competent, or even brilliant at that first part. They know their industry and they are able to supply what people want.
The second part is where things get tricky. How do you get your offer in front of the right people? Or in other words, how do you promote your business?
Today, we’re going to be looking at # incredibly simple yet highly effective ways to promote your business. You can implement all of these quickly without needing special expertise or significant investment. If you’ve been looking for new ways to reach your target audience, you’re in the right place.
Key Takeaways
- Understand Your Audience: Knowing your target market is crucial for effective promotion.
- Email Signatures as Tools: Transform email signatures into marketing opportunities with CTAs.
- Leverage Google My Business: Enhance local visibility and SEO with a Google My Business account.
- Consistency in NAP: Ensure uniformity in Name, Address, and Phone number across all platforms.
- Joint Ventures: Collaborate with non-competing businesses to access new audiences.
1. Insert Calls To Action In Your Team’s Email Signatures
The average office worker sends a receives 122 emails per day. For a business with ten staff, that adds up to around 600 outgoing emails per day.
These emails are actually a tremendous promotion opportunity, but not using traditional email signatures. Nobody is going to take notice of your employees’ job titles or websites. Nobody cares about your favorite quote.
What CAN get attention is a big obvious Call To Action button.
Notice how well this CTA stands out and attracts attention.
When you view email signatures as a marketing tool, they become dynamic ways of introducing your products or services to potential customers.
For a single email, you can simply set something like this up via your email client, but if you are interested in rolling it out across your entire team (most beneficial), you’ll want to use an app like Sigstr, which will let you manage signatures and rollout campaigns across your entire team at once.
The best way to take advantage of email CTAs is to offer some sort of lead magnet or freely available offer that will interest your target audience and push them forward in your funnel.
2. Set Up A Google My Business Account
Google is not only a search engine, but also a small business directory. Take advantage of these tools. Setting up a Google My Business Account provides three major benefits for companies who rely on local business:
- Your local business is listed on Google maps and search.
- It’s good for search engine optimization, so that your business gets found easier by the people who are looking for the services or products you provide.
- It’s good for when your customers start adding reviews of your business; these reviews help Google display your business in their “3-pack”, which gives you free advertising at no cost.
Google My Business Reviews have earned these companies the top spots in Google search results.
Your GMB listing is the baseline for all your online citations and listing, and it’s important that every listing matches your GMB listing, particularly when it comes to your three primary pieces of information, known as NAP (Name Address Phone Number).
3. Audit Your Online NAPs
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number, also often referred to as citations.
Out of Moz’ top 6 “Foundational Ranking Factors, (for search engine ranking), 3 are related to NAP quantity, quality, and consistency, and out of the top 13 “Competitive Difference Makers,” 6 are about NAP quantity, quality, and consistency.
If you’ve listed your company on Google My Business, you need to make sure the details there are the same for all your online listings.
Image Credit: Moz
If any of the details elsewhere are not the same as it is listed in Google My Business, then you might not be “rewarded” by search engines and it could also damage your search ranking.
A suggestion is to keep an Excel spreadsheet of all your listings, to make it easy to keep them consistent.
Moz offers in-depth information about NAP audits and how to do them.
4. Set Up A Joint Venture
As I mentioned earlier, promoting your business is all about getting your offer in front of the right people. One of the easiest ways to do this is to find existing audiences filled with the “right” people and simply place your offer in front of them.
In some instances, that can be done via advertising, but an even better option in the short term is to partner with non-competing businesses marketing to the same people as you are.
Joint ventures are a brilliant way of getting more customers fast. Take Teachable, which was started in 2014 by Ankur Nagpal. He says that 6 months into starting the business, they had less than 20 active customers making money from courses. In 2015, they created a joint venture which gave them more customers fast.
Nagpal lists a few examples of joint ventures they’ve since used in their marketing strategies, one of them being a simple affiliate partnership with marketer Melyssa Griffin. Teachable gave Melyssa a unique promotional tracking link plus 50% commission on every sale.
Melyssa Griffin, affiliate marketer and joint venture partner with Teachable.
Find out more about joint venture examples from the founder of Teachable, which now boasts a monthly growth rate of more than 20% in 2016, increasing its revenue tenfold in one year, with more than 1 million students.
5. Create An Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing is the cornerstone of online marketing.
From a technology standpoint, email has withstood the test of time as a communication channel. From a marketing standpoint, email converts at a higher rate than nearly any other channel.
As recently as 2016, email marketing was the leading marketing expense among global business leaders.
Email marketing allows you to nurture relationships with potential buyers over time. It allows to place visitors who aren’t ready to buy into a funnel that keeps them connected with your business instead of having them forget about you.
To begin taking advantage of email marketing, you’ll need to create something valuable that can be given away for free in exchange for a visitor’s email address. Digital info products are often best for this purpose.
Next, you’ll want to create a series of emails designed to introduce the new lead to your offer, establish your authority in the industry, and deliver educational value on related topics of interest.
To learn more, check out these fantastic email marketing examples.
6. Offer a Free Or Discounted Product/Service
In a similar vein to the lead magnets we just talked about, offering something free or at a discount is a great way to draw in new customers. Depending on your business model, it can even be effective to take a loss on this in order to pull in market share.
There are many iterations of this that can be used to drive leads, sales, referrals, etc. Ecommerce stores in particular have had amazing success with introductory discounts. Here’s an example from lingerie e-retailer Yandy.com:
Other possibilities include free software apps or free trials. For example, BuildFire allows prospective customers to create an app for free, allowing them
10. Do “It” Better Than Your Competitors
Business are often started as an attempt to do something better than the existing marketplace. The same mentality is true for promotion.
When it comes to any marketing channel, usually the top marketer or two in that channel will captivate 90% of the competition. Instead of being middle of the road on multiple channels, it’s best to identify a channel where you can “do it the best” and pursue that channel.
For instance, an online academic book and technology business in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, wanted to increase their website visitors. A consultant was brought in who compiled a report showing what the worldwide benchmark company was doing, and these are some of the findings:
| Company | Facebook Likes | Response Rate | Content Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Benchmark Company | 7,394,962 | 100% | Lots of content and customized product descriptions |
| Local Company | 5,839 | 0% | Limited content |
When analyzing the online activities of a worldwide benchmark company, it was found that their differentiating factor was lots of value-add content.
Next, they checked how their top local competitors were doing online, and found that if they were to implement a content strategy, they could whip all the others in their area.
What they took home from the analysis:
- The need to start creating Facebook posts that would attract their target audience, and to start paying for Facebook ads to boost their Facebook page engagement rates.
- The necessity of responding quickly to social media messages from their customers.
- The need to start writing customized product descriptions.
- The importance of website content.
16. Implement Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, mostly known as SEO for short, is a way to optimize a website for search engines and improve your search engine rankings.
The goal is that when people search via Google for phrases that are relevant to your product, your website shows up as quickly as possible.
Unlike most other promotion tactics, getting your site ranked for various keyphrases will result in increasing amounts of traffic over time, or at least for as long as people continue to use search engines.
| SEO Benefits | Other Promotion Tactics |
|---|---|
| Results in increasing amounts of traffic over time | May not result in long-term traffic increase |
| Traffic is free after initial ranking expenses | Often involves ongoing costs |
By incorporating an SEO strategy, Candoni Wines experienced a 70% improvement in organic search traffic within 6 months. In addition, their site ranks for more than 1000 keywords, and as a byproduct, 20,026 Facebook page likes were added throughout the initial campaign.
By implementing an SEO strategy, this website experienced a 70% improvement in their organic search traffic within 6 months.
- PPC ads
- Facebook ads
- Television ads
| Advertising Method | Effectiveness |
|---|---|
| Search Engine Ads | 64% rated as effective |
| Paid Social Ads | 59% reported as effective |
In 2015, the Content Marketing Institute, conducted a survey of 3,714 worldwide marketers, and found that 76% of B2C marketers use paid advertising.