Starting a company is hard enough; growing the company to a desired level and ensuring success is another.
CEOs, marketing managers, and staff members charged with the responsibility of promoting a company, always strive to look for different creative but cost-effective ways to get word out about the business and attract more clients.
One way more companies are looking to exploit lately is the internet. And you can’t blame them; the internet truly affords companies various opportunities to market and build their business.
In fact, it has become normal to see someone forming a company online – from scratch to completion to operations.
However, you must be wary of jumping online and trying all those many means of promoting your company online. It’s easy to waste time and resources online and still not get any positive results.
Here are 5 ways you can really leverage the internet in promoting your company:
1. Have a Functional Website
I know; this is stating the obvious. But you’d be shocked to know there still are thousands of companies without a website. I’m however not just talking about owning a website here; I’m talking about having a website functioning perfectly and geared towards promoting the company and increasing the bottom line.
A functional website is one that is live; and on which vital company information can be accessed easily. It should also host the company’s goods or services and represent the company’s values.
2. Have a Blog
Having a website isn’t enough; if you want to really promote your company online you need to have a company blog. That is, your website should have a section where articles relating to the company are regularly posted.
This has a lot of advantages.
It will first position your company as an authority in your industry, and then it can serve as an information hub for your visitors and customers.
The most important benefit is that the blog will help grow the company’s leads and customer base as a great inbound marketing channel…and ultimately increase the company’s profits.
3. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines.
As you can already see, there’s more to having a company website that just merely having it.
In order to be visible to your prospects and customers, and to position yourself strategically to be found easily when they’re searching for your products, you need to optimize your site to be competitive in searches.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a broad concept that can’t be covered entirely even in a whole post. If you’re unfamiliar with it, just know that it’s the process of tweaking your site to make it rank high in search engine result pages (SERPs).
4. Be Active on Social Media and other Online Communities.
I believe this is not something you still need to be told by now. If your company doesn’t have its own profiles and pages on the various social networking sites, and you’re not yet engaging with your prospects and customers on those sites, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Other online communities like industry forums and blogs are also great ways to promote your company online. Add useful comments to blog posts and forum threads related to your industry; make connections and find creative ways to refer people back to your site.
5. Take Advantage of Email Marketing.
In case you’ve never heard this before now: email marketing is the marketing channel with the highest return on investment (ROI). Nothing else beats email marketing; it’s cost effective but yet highly profitable.
It simply involves capturing your site visitors’ emails with a lead generation tool (or clients’ emails by simply asking) and keeping in touch with them regularly; offering information, offers, and company/industry news. If you have a good balance of all these, your promotional emails will always yield good results.
6. Try Paid Ads.
This is probably the riskiest of all, but if you have the know-how, and if you have a great strategy in place, you’ll find it just as profitable – if not more.
But without some good strategy, it’s very easy to waste money buying online ads.
Having a great offer is the most important part of buying ads from platforms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (great for B2B), etc. That is, having what your potential customers really want. The next most important thing is putting that (great) offer in front of the right audience – ensuring you find your customers wherever they’re hanging out.
Conclusion
These 6 ways are obviously not all there is to promoting your company online, but these are great enough, at least to start with.
In fact, it’s better to limit your online promotional activities to a few tactics, because it’s easy to get lost in the many possibilities available online. If you can get very good in just all the above 6 ways, then you’d be building some kickass company – with a kickass online promotion strategy.