The main goal of your small business is to make a profit. But how are you going to make a profit when nobody knows about your business? That’s why you must focus on increasing the visibility of your business. About 59% of consumers like to purchase products from familiar brands. While marketing your business can take up a large part of your budget, especially when you’re a new startup, it is a crucial part of your business. Fortunately, you do not have to spend a lot of money or time to increase your business’s visibility. All it takes is to be smarter with your decisions and select marketing strategies that will quickly increase awareness. Here are a few tips to help you increase your local business’s visibility.
- Take advantage of social media
Social media plays a huge role in creating awareness for your business. However, with the increasing number of social media platforms available, your social media marketing must be more strategic to reach the right crowd. Just because several platforms don’t mean you have to be present. Instead, identify the best social media sites that resonate with your brand. You should always ensure that your social media choices match the nature of your business. If your services are visual, Instagram or Pinterest might be more suitable options for you to advertise on. If your business is geared towards empowering people, Twitter is the best choice. When you identify the best social media platform for your business, you can have a more defined digital marketing approach, launch successful campaigns, and engage with the right audience.
How active you are on social media can also directly affect your business’s visibility. Depending on the nature of your business, you can choose to interact daily or select days for posting and sharing content. Staying active also means responding to followers’ questions and comments in record time to keep up interest.
- Give your business identity and personality
When you’re operating a business, the words, and visuals you use to represent your business play a vital role in giving it an identity. That’s why it’s important that you carefully choose how you want your customers and other people to perceive your brand. In addition to a unique business name, you have to create a catchy tagline that tells customers what your business is about. You should also use business cards and hand them out to potential customers and business partners. You should also have branded stationery for your correspondence and other business operations. These stationery items could be letterheads, envelopes, and pens.
Creating a brand from scratch is challenging, as it involves a lot of creativity and research. If you’re having any difficulties, you should seek assistance from a professional branding agency on how to create a brand name.
- Share promotional products to your stakeholders
Everyone loves to receive free things, and you can please your stakeholders by giving them promotional products and merchandise. This marketing strategy puts your business and brand in the spotlight while increasing its visibility.
Although there are tons of promotional items you can share, you must choose merchandise relevant to your business. For example, if you own a dental clinic, you can give your patients toothbrushes and other dental-related items. You can give your customers a thermal flask or coffee tumbler if it’s a coffee shop. Be sure that these gifts incorporate your business’s visual identity elements, including your logo, font, and colours. Gifting your clients and other key persons in your business network with branded products is a smart way to get your brand in circulation and helps people become more familiar with your business.
- Recognize your loyal customers with a loyalty program
If you’re looking to create a visible, attractive, and memorable business, you can start by creating a rewards or loyalty program that celebrates your customers. You must channel some of your focus toward customer retention strategies. This is because most of your sales and business opportunities will come from existing customers. There are various ways that most brands reward loyal customers. You can create a tier program to make your customers feel more accomplished as they shop with you. For example, if you operate a makeup store, you can create different tiers from “novice” to “makeup professional” as they purchase from you. You can also offer surprise gifts and rewards to your customers to make them feel valued and bring them back to your business. Some branding experts recommend making your customer rewards program more personal. Instead of generic messages, you can offer customers personalized discounts on birthdays and other major anniversaries.
You can reward customers with attractive discounts and offers whenever they refer your business to a prospective client. You can also reward them for actively engaging with your social media profile and leaving product reviews. Plus, customers pleased with your rewards program are more likely to recommend your business to their network.
- Network within your industry
Networking is essential in giving your brand more visibility as a small business. It provides you with amazing business opportunities, but it also gives you an idea of how your industry operates. Networking also helps you identify problems or issues within the industry that your business can solve. If you’re unsure where to start, you can begin building a network with other small businesses in the area where you operate. You can also get online and connect with other businesses within your industry. Industry-related events such as trade shows and conferences are also great places for you to expand your business network and give more visibility to your brand.
Networking also allows you to learn from other businesses when done right. It could eventually lead to successful business partnerships that can expand your customer base and give your business the visibility it deserves.
- Content marketing
As a small business owner, you may have recognized the value of promoting your products and services. If you are looking for innovative and effective ways to penetrate new markets, you should explore content marketing. This marketing technique involves sharing top-quality and useful content to your customers designed to help them solve any issues.
Content marketing goes beyond simply creating interesting content for your customers and followers. It is also important that you ensure the content is valuable to them. A successful content marketing project will help your audience build trust in your business, increase your sales, enhance your customer relations efforts, and be cost-saving. You can start as a guest blogger on credible blogs and platforms if you are completely new to content marketing. It would be best to focus your content marketing efforts on educating your audience instead of outrightly selling to them. If your target audience sees your content as insightful and valuable, they will be more willing to learn more about you and your business.
As you create more content, you will have wider access to more audiences, which will increase your business’s visibility in effect. However, content that does not add value will waste time and give your business a bad reputation, so keep this in mind.
With several businesses springing up every other day, your business must be unique enough to stand out from the crowd. You must focus on creating an identity for your business, and it should be one of your marketing priorities. Hopefully, these practical tips will help you improve your brand’s visibility and help you better connect with your target audience without exceeding your business’s budget.
