Guest post by Michelle Strassburg co-founder of oak flooring sellers Wood and Beyond and a very busy mom herself.
The prospect of marketing your new business online can often look daunting at first. There are many online channels to market your business and some are more suitable for your precise product or service than others. The idea behind taking baby steps is to experiment with a particular channel, stick with it or move on to avoid disappointment. Here are couple of online marketing channels which are suitable for new businesses.
1. Register your business with Google Local – This free listing service from Google is very powerful for many businesses who depend on local web traffic such as a local electrician. When a user performs a search in Google together with a location keywords, the search engine will display results from its local listing next to all the normal results. It’s free and effective so register your business today.
2. Become an authoritative brand – This type of long term objective will transform your business from yet another brand to the leading brand, where users turn to and other businesses seek to copy. Although this post is titled ‘baby steps’ if you want to become an authority in your industry work starts from the day you go live. How you ask? start by offering something your competitors haven’t such as guides and tips. Consider turning your business into a hub of information and set the benchmark on the quality of your products or services.
3. Build a reward system from day one – Recommendations are a powerful tool which has the potential to grow your customer base without costing you a single penny. A rewards system which encourages recommendations is a type of loyalty program where customers are rewarded for referring others. By actively communicating its benefits and rewarding further referrals, new businesses are able to intelligently grow existing customer base.
4. Find another similar size business for joint marketing – Join marketing will give you the possibility to communicate your marketing messages to the customer base of a closely related site, and allow this site to do the same with your customer base. For example, you could look to exchange banners, exchange product promotions and even launch a competition together. To avoid disappointment look for another business which is similar in size and has closely related customer profile.
5. Harness the power of bigger sites – For most businesses the key is to reach as many customers as possible on the smallest budget possible. Side by side with having a functional website you should consider using the likes of eBay, Amazon and even Etsy to reach a broader audience. These sites already have huge numbers of quality web traffic and by harnessing their power you could grow your new business. Look for 3rd party sites which require low investment both financially and in terms of your time.
