How to Build a Solid Online Presence for Your Small Business
You may have heard many brands in your local area and guess what? all of them are not old, not all of them has been around for years.
Have you spent enough time to research how the new businesses are making their mark in your town? how they are making their name as an authority in your city?
If you don't have time for such research and brainstorming, here I am with the top 10 ways to make a solid online presence for your small business so that you can survive last longer.
1. Design A Website
In the first turn and at first step towards your online presence, you have to create a website on the name of your small business and the domain name should be the same as your business name.Like if you are running a business with the name of "Yogurt and Milk" the domain name should be YogurtAndMilk.com or you can choose local TLDs like YogurtAndMilk.co.uk and others.
If you don't know how to design a website then you can hire a WordPress website designer from any freelancing website or test out the Google My Business web-pages.
2. Create A Goals List
In the second step, you have to set your business goals and have them printed out, write them on paper and have them on your smartphone, laptop, calendar, and even in reminders.To grow your small business into a big brand, this is the very first thing which you must do and leverage the time, do hard and smart work and potentially grow your business.
You can create a step by step goals-set and follow that timeline to easily do things in a proper manner which can help you work less and get more output.
3. Launch Your Online Store
Everybody is looking to buy things online, people are becoming too lazy and they want you to serve them at their doors. They want home delivery of every product.So, why not to give them the services they want? it's best if you can help them with your products and provide an online shopping facility.
As eCommerce taking the world by storms, you already have your own website, just install WooCommerce in your WordPress website and start adding your products, create an optimized checkout page and add payment options to get paid online.
4. Leverage Social Media and Google
Social media is everywhere, your customers are active on at least two social media networks whenever they enable data on their smartphones. You can reach them on WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and also other social networks like SnapChat and TikTok.You can advertise your business on these social media networks to easily get more customers from your town and this will cost you not more than a billboard at the roadside which is not showing you any ROI reports but these social media advertising campaigns will show you the exact numbers.
The same thing happens to Google, you can do SEO (search engine optimization) submit products sitemap and publish articles on your website, get an SEO agency or freelancer to help you rank higher in Google for particular keywords that can drive customers to your local business.
5. Help Readers To Convert Easily
There are some mistakes that you may make in designing your website or your eCommerce store. As you may have articles published, you should have the readers in mind and help them reach you easily.For this purpose, you should create a quick and easy way of making your website visitors/readers contact you. You can install contact us widget at the footer area, add a full address, give numbers and email addresses too.
Don't forget to publish a separate contact us page where you should have a contact us submission form so that visitors can easily make queries and ask you the questions they may have.
6. Join Relative Facebook Groups
Advertising on social media networks or having a profile on them is not enough now, you should join some Facebook groups with your business page and they should be relative to your business category.Like if you are selling skirts, you should join groups they are talking about skirts and other clothes. Almost every topic has some Facebook groups and luckily there are fans that create these groups and people really listen to the group members.
Don't worry if there's no group about your topic, you should create one and start adding your friends, ask them to add their friends and this will help you have your own Facebook niche group.
7. Have A Schedule
All of the above things need your time and your management skills will perform these things better. So try to have a schedule for doing all of the above things.If you will don't have a schedule, you will fail to manage your business and your online presence, so be consistent by having a schedule which is a useful way to satisfy your customers and grow your business on a scale.
8. Launch Some Discounts
Don't launch giveaways, don't sell things on road, don't let your old items go into garbage trucks. Instead, launch discounts and massive discounts on your website.Share that discounted offers on your social media profiles and create coupons for customers, tell them the discounts are available when they purchase particular items from your website only.
This way you will have a solid online presence and people will keep on visiting your website and social media profiles to check new discounted offers.
9. Keep Track of Your Online Presence
Don't just keep on updating your social media accounts and adding content to your website, you should get insights and check whether you are growing or not.Use Google Analytics for your website and set goals in that tool, use Analytics and Insight reporting tools of social media websites to know on which scale your online presence is growing.
If everything is fine and you are growing (no matter how much) then keep the things as they are, otherwise, you should try publishing different content and changing some strategies like tracking how people react so customize things according to that reactions.
10. Repeat
You may think that after creating an online presence for once is enough to have your brand or small business in front of online people. But, it's a wrong concept.You have to keep the ball rolling. You have to keep things fresh and update your online platforms on a daily basis which is the key to making a solid online presence of your small business.
Remember, you are not going to be that local business, you have the potential to go sky high and be an international brand. So work for it.
