If you’re running a local business and trying to drum up custom, then there are few ways to get people into your store or restaurant that are more effective than setting up a website. This way you can help people to discover your business even when they don’t just happen to be passing, you can use a whole range of other online marketing methods and you can generally increase your brand awareness.
But for our website really to have that much of an impact you’re also going to need the right marketing strategy behind it to push you into the limelight. Read on and we’ll look at some of the best ways you can promote your small organisation online to increase sales…
SEO
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It means building your site and doing promotion in such a way that you bring your site to Google’s attention and help it rise through the rankings to appear at the top of the search results for your chosen search terms.
The best SEO for a small local business of course will be those that have a ‘local’ element as that will help you to reduce your competition. For instance, you’d never be able to rank for ‘Indian restaurant’ because you’d be going up against millions of competitors. However you could much more easily compete for ‘Indian restaurant in [your location here]’ and you’d find that the people who discovered your site were also much more likely to want to use your services.
AdWords
PPC stands for ‘Pay Per Click’ and is a form of advertising where you only pay out each time someone actually clicks on one of your adverts. That essentially means that unsuccessful ads won’t cost you very much and that you can monitor closely the success of various different campaigns.
AdWords is one form of PPC provided by Google that allows you to bid for adverts attached to search terms. In other words this allows you to ‘skip’ the SEO by getting your site immediately to the top of the rankings as a ‘sponsored’ link. This has strengths and weaknesses compared with SEO, but it is a particularly good strategy for local business owners (if someone is searching for a restaurant in their area they’re unlikely to care if the link is sponsored or not).
Social Media
Social Media is another very effective way to spread the word about a new restaurant or shop that takes advantage of the connected communities that exist online. Every small business should have a Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Instagram account and all the others as well. Using these you can then promote various offers and deals you have on and also try to create a buzz around what you provide.
A good example of social media marketing using these platforms might be to offer discounts to anyone who likes your Facebook page for example which can then help you to get more followers/fans to hear about future offers and discounts.
You can also read the article Few SEO Tips That will Help Your Business to Climb the Ladder to get clear idea about how to boost up your business using SEO.
Sponsoring
There are countless sponsorship opportunities online and this is a great way to increase awareness for your brand as well as to align yourself with the kinds of organisations that could enhance your image. Take a look on YouTube for instance and you will find that there are many channels there with thousands of viewers that would be very grateful for a sponsorship deal. For a relatively small amount of cash you could have them promote your brand to their audience and that could in turn help lots of people to discover you.
Press Releases
Simply getting written about online is of course also a great way to bring more customers to your store or establishment. Send out some press releases to local websites and you might be able to get some coverage that could lead to direct custom.
