I’d like to start this post with a question: what is it that makes people choose one business’s website over another? What is it about someone’s promotion that gets people interested in their product or service?
The success of one’s website boils down to a few key things:
- It helps alleviate people’s pain points
- While doing so, it benefits everyone rather than a niche of people
- It gets people engaged and talking about the business
- The product or service has a lot of heart going into it
This last point is especially evident when it comes to promotion. During this time of the year, everyone is promoting their business like crazy, whether it’s for local events or discounts on one’s services or products.
It feels like a Herculean task to promote your website sometimes, doesn’t it? Fortunately, there are ways you can promote your business without coming across as obnoxious, desperate, or as if you’re only in it for the money—even when you really don’t feel like promoting.
Here are some tips:
Offer discounts in a way that’s engaging, no pressure
One thing we did recently at V3 Media was ask people on our Facebook page what they preferred—Starbucks or Tim Hortons. The end result? A ton of engagement from our customers as well as a free gift card thrown into the mix from us to them.
This is a great way to promote your business online without having to go out of your way to pressure customers into thinking about you—by engaging with them on a human level the way you would in real life. It helps that we care a lot about what we do for our industry, as well as reach out to people on a local scale.
Speaking of, our next tip:
Touch base with your local audience
Obviously depending on who you’re targeting your business to, this tip may or may not be helpful. However, if your business is more on the medical, dental, or service-based side such as cleaning, touching base with the people in your local community is not only an option for your success—it’s absolutely necessary.
While we do serve out-of-town audiences outside of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, we’re very much in touch with our local customers too, as described on our about us page. If you have had achievements on a local scale yourself, let your customers know about it!
Remember why you’re doing this
Why did you want to start up your business in the first place? If the answer is ‘money’ you’ve gotten way off track. Our reasoning for why we continue to do what we do at V3 Media is because of our combined experience and our passion to build great websites. That passion extends to our brand, our logo, the content we create, the posts we add to our social media—you name it, you can see this passion in everything we do.
If this doesn’t sound like your business, you may need to reconsider your brand as well as rekindle why you set up your business in the first place. Consultation with a professional may be what you need if this sounds like you.
Have a budget for online marketing
This may surprise you but there are businesses out there who have little to zero budget in their plan for online marketing—or all marketing. This is a bad idea for a lot of reasons, the biggest one being that everyone, we repeat, everyone uses the Internet now for shopping, talking to others, and so on. To not have a budget for online marketing means kissing all your chances of getting new leads and sales goodbye.
All of the online marketing strategies we’ve talked about in our blog can help promote your website, but to ensure its success you need to have a budget in place. Search engine marketing can help, and now Facebook requires you to pay for online promotions if you want to boost your posts and gain more interest in your business’s Facebook profile.
A lot of the other strategies—SEO, keyword research, posting to your website’s blog, sending out e-mail newsletters, etc.—can be done at no extra cost, and all of these combined activities are must-dos when it comes to promotion. Which leads us to our most important tip if promotion is something you’re struggling with:
Give the task to someone else
This sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised as to how many people we’ve met with an I-can-do-it-all way of looking at their business. While many entrepreneurs certainly have this perception during their company’s start-up phase, things change and their staff may grow eventually. You may not have nearly as much time as you used to for focusing on promoting your website.
If that’s the case, it makes sense to pass on the task of marketing your business and promoting your website to someone else—so long as it’s not your accountant (big difference!). This is why we also highly recommend you have a budget in place for marketing.
Now, if all of this sounds like too much for you to handle—especially the online marketing activities, SEO, working on your website, etc.—let us professionals do the job for you. Contact us at V3 Media. Let’s get your website out there!