Even if your local business is currently successful, you can generate even higher profits by using advancements in advertising and technology. With the advent of the internet, your business can reach more than just people in your city. Now, you literally have a whole world full of opportunity.
In essence, then, what this means is that you just need to know how to market your business correctly to reach your niche audience anywhere in the world.
You Don’t Need to Be an Expert
One point of resistance people who have a local business about marketing their business online often have is that they don’t know how to start. When they look into it, they find that marketing online requires a diverse variety of specialized skill sets.
However, you can always hire experts to build your online presence. Here are some examples of the expertise you can outsource:
- Hire a website designer to create a fully-functional eCommerce website for you.
- Hire a copywriter to create marketing content for your website, like sales letters and landing pages.
- Hire a blogger to create informative posts to engage your audience.
- Hire a professional photographer if you have unique products that you want to sell online.
- Hire an Alternative Media Brokerage & Direct Marketing Agency to launch marketing campaigns for you to drive buyer traffic to your website.
What You Can Sell Online
Another common point of resistance local business owners have is how they can transform their existing business model to benefit from a web presence.
Here are four examples to show you how almost any kind of business can benefit from online marketing:
1. Information Products: If your business provides information products, then you can digitize the information for worldwide distribution via the Internet. For instance, travel brochures, regional maps, menus, classes, books, CDs, DVDs, and so on can all be converted into a digital format.
2. Consulting Business: If you are a professional in some field and earn a living as a consultant, then you can also consult online. There are many ways to do this with telecommunication technology. For instance, if you need to have face-to-face discussions with clients, then you could use video conferencing.
3. Retailing: If you’re selling physical products, like jewelry or electronics or kitchenware, then you can use drop shipping to deliver your products to customers across the world.
4. Services: You can still take advantage of the wider reach of the Internet if you have a service business. If, for instance, you have an ethnic cuisine restaurant, you can create an email list to notify people about dining coupons. You can even start teaching ethnic cuisine by offering video-based cooking classes or selling ethnic cooking recipe books.
How to Market Your Business on the Web
There are innumerable ways how to market your business online after you’ve created a website. You can either hire people to help you with these tasks or learn how to do them yourself:
1. Create a blog where you regularly share high-quality information about your expertise.
2. Develop a social media presence. Once you have a few blog posts up, you can begin to reach out to people via social media. You can use these platforms to share your latest blog posts or to just strike up conversations with your audience. After establishing a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google +, and Twitter, you can also explore platforms like Medium, Quora, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
3. Use Review sites. Local businesses can attract more people by using review sites. It’s a place where you can encourage your satisfied customers to leave reviews about your products or services.
Here are a few top review sites:
- · Angie’s List, where customers can share their experiences with your company.
- · TripAdvisor, where customers can leave reviews for travel-related businesses from restaurants to Bed & Breakfasts to hotels.
- · Yelp, where customers can recommend businesses that they used and liked.
- · Trust Pilot, which words in the same way as Yelp.
It’s a Work in Progress
Building any business is always a work-in-progress. A local business, for example, is always looking for ways to improve the quality of their offer. Similarly, developing an online presence is also a work-in-progress. As marketing online continues to advance, you’ll constantly find new ways to leverage modern technology to increase business success.