Want to market your new business? Here are 5 important ways to do it!
Define Your Target Audience
The first rule of marketing any new business should always be to define your target audience. This is essential for planning how and where to market your business. It’s important to describe your ideal customer – considering factors like their age, gender, location, career and hobbies.
All these considerations will influence which channels you should use to market your business and what type of content to serve them – based on where your target customer ‘hangs out’. You can then consider what problems you’re solving for them, the expertise that you can offer and some competitor analysis.
Set Up A Google My Business Profile
Once your website is live, it’s a good idea to set up a Google My Business Profile. The good news? This is completely free and remarkably simple to do.
A Google My Business (GMB) profile will help people searching for your business to find your website and contact details quickly. Just create an account to get started and a verification code will be sent to your business address. From there – add your services, contact details, opening hours and some images. You can also ask your customers to review your business via GMB which will help boost your ranking in the search results.
Optimise Your Website’s SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) sounds overwhelming, but there are small things you can do to optimise your website for Google without hiring an SEO specialist. Firstly, make sure you add meta descriptions for each page on your website. These will appear alongside your website in the search results and can directly influence whether people click through to your website. Meta descriptions should be anywhere between 50 to 160 characters long. There’s a great guide for writing meta descriptions on Moz which explains more about the how’s and whys.
Another way to boost your site’s SEO is to put some time into researching keywords that relate to your brand, product or service. Google Trends is a good place to start. Just make sure you set the search to the country where your business is based or targeting customers before searching. Simply type in a keyword that your customers might use and Google Trends will show you the search volume for that word. It will also churn out related topics and queries which you can use.
Ideally, you want a good mix of high and low volume keywords throughout your website. When writing your website content, use these keywords where they fit naturally and this will go a long way in helping to improve your SEO.
Create Social Media Templates
Keeping your social media content flowing takes a lot of effort. But don’t fear, there are shortcuts you can take to make it easier. Use a free design website like Canva to create social media templates that you can edit and reuse every month. For example, you could create a template for quotes, one for customer reviews and another to showcase new products or services.
No design experience? No problem. Canva is loaded with hundreds of ready-made templates that you can use and edit in just a few minutes. Make sure you include your logo or website address on these so other companies can’t steal them without crediting you.
Blog Your Heart Out
Google loves fresh content. It’s as simple as that. Creating regular, relevant and good-quality blog posts on your business website (incorporating your keywords), your search ranking will improve. Try to make sure that your blog posts are both engaging and providing helpful content to your target audience. Blogging won’t improve the domain of your website overnight, but consistency is key with this one. Stick at it and you’ll see an increase in traffic to your site.
Bio
Sophie Marsden is the Founder of LIT Communication – a Yorkshire-based marketing agency providing bespoke content, PR and social media support to small and independent businesses. Sophie is a marketing and communications specialist with a degree in International Journalism and over seven years’ marketing industry experience working for the likes of Haymarket Media Group, Cox Automotive and Volkswagen Group. Find more marketing tips over at www.litcommunication.com
