The 8 Best Ways to Promote Your Business
In order to survive and grow, your business needs customers. In order to get customers, you need to promote your business. In the good old days, this was a matter of deciding between a flyer, a brochure, a postcard, or an ad in the local newspaper. But in today’s digital world, the possibilities are endless (read: overwhelming). 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. 1. Create and verify your Google Business Profile Your Google Business Profile (Google’s term for your Google listing) is what allows your business to show up in Google Maps results, the local section of Google Search results, and also—when someone types in your business name (ideas for creative business names here!) and location—the right-side Knowledge Panel in Search results. As Google gets better and better at catering its results to the searcher’s location, this free directory listing should be a top priority. The key to using your Business Profile to promote your business is to verify ownership of your listing through your free Google Business account. Once you have ownership, you can optimize your listing to show up higher in search results and for more relevant searches. 2. Get a website A website is a must-have piece of marketing collateral no matter how old-fashioned your business or clients may be. Your website is the go-to for current and prospective customers. Even if they find you on social media or Google, they will 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 brand’s personality and distinguishing characteristics—but it is also essential for measuring and improving the success of your other promotional tactics. For example, when you run ads, you need landing pages, which live on your website. When you post helpful information on social media, it should link to its home on your website. With all of your marketing channels flowing into your website, you can use analytics to see which strategies are working best and get invaluable insights about your audience. Although there are completely free solutions to get a website in place for your business, almost inevitably you will need 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. 3. Implement search engine optimization It’s 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 has evolved to use machine learning and user behavior to produce the most accurate and quality results for searchers, optimizing for search engines is really just optimizing for searchers—particularly those searching for what you have to offer. SEO isn’t just one tactic, but many tactics that collectively work together to improve your rank. Also, because Google has superb location-based results, you have just as much of a chance as big retailers to show up on the first page of Google — without spending a dime! (With the exception of the costs to get a website, of course). 4. Create a business blog 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 promotional strategy. A blog is not LiveJournal for businesses. Sure, you can create some posts about milestones and events, but a lucrative business blog is one that produces educational content, in your brand voice, around questions and terms your ideal customers are searching in Google. These questions and terms are called keywords, and the more content you produce targeting these keywords, the more opportunities you create for your business to show up in search engine results pages. Great blog posts can be any of the following: How-tos and instructional posts Lists of strategies and resources (top 10, 5 best, 3 crucial, etc.) Q&A or interview writeup with an industry expert Thought leadership posts Example/template posts Guest posts Customer testimonials or case studies Seasonal posts (such as this one) 5. Share your content A blog that shows your expertise, approachability, 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 get noticed by other credible websites who will mention and link back to your site on their site or social media feeds—promoting your business for you. 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 your content gets delivered quickly. 6. Run Google Ads While SEO is one of the best marketing strategies, it is a long-term strategy that can take weeks, even months to start seeing results. For more immediate exposure, and if you have the budget, Google Ads is the way to go. Google Ads ads show up at the very top of search engine results pages, above organic and local listings. And of the search engines available, 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. Though mastering Google Ads takes some time as well as plenty of trial and error, an optimized campaign is far worth the investment. Advertising on Google can be done through text ads on the Search
