How to: Market your business

1. The basics

Social customers love sharing their experiences and purchases with their friends, family and even strangers, on and offline.

They will often take a lead from others when forming their opinions and enjoy the sense of belonging they feel when talking to, or behaving in a way that's similar to others they like or feel a connection with or affiliation to.

Social customers love hearing the opinions and reviews of others before and after they buy - and as they will talk to anyone, you never know who they will recommend your products or services to. But be warned - if they are unhappy or dissatisfied they will also share that to the world.

2. Try and online advert

These days you don’t need large advertising budgets to get noticed. Social media platforms such as Facebook offer an ad service. And Google’s pay-per-click service is used by many companies to successfully improve their visibility on the search engine. Some ads only require you to write text (copy), others allow images and / or graphics. That’s why it’s important to have you brand basics established and ‘bank’ of suitable images and branded graphics that you may like to use.

Promotion: Promotion is two-fold. You need to think about all the different ways you can promote your business, e.g. where can you be seen and what can you feature on (often referred to as ‘brand awareness’). You will also need to consider what incentives you can offer, e.g. discounts, exclusive previews etc, these will help people move from seeing to buying. Take a look at Moo for printing or Canva for designing materials for online use.

Tips

Many website, such as Linkedin, Yell.com and Gumtree allow you to advertise or list your business for free online. There are also sites which help you design and create your ad, postermywall.com or biteable.com for example.

Make sure you know who your audience is. There’s no point being on Instagram if all your customers are over the age of 65 (... or maybe there is)

Make sure your adverts and images are high quality and high resolution. If your design looks bad, people will might make an incorrect judgement about your business too.

Making sure you are featured in your Local Business Listings. All three leading search engines have these: Google: Google Places, Yahoo!: Yahoo! Local, Bing: Bing Places

What are your competitors doing? Is there anything you might want to copy - or do differently?

How are you testing to see if your advert is working as well as it could be? Find and try different ways to deliver your message so you can be confident you’ve found the best way to say it.

3. Email marketing

If you have yet to start collecting email addresses here are some tips and tricks to help you get started. If you already have a list it is important to work out what might be seen as ‘spam’ by your customers and what will feel like valuable or useful information. Aim to email your customer not more than once a month - and when you do, make sure you’re telling them something worth knowing. A new range, a time sensitive offer, so big news that they will care about? Make sure it is a useful interaction for them as well as you.

4. Review sites

Online reviews can make or break a business these days. Which is why choosing to be online can often feel intimidating. However, there are some simple steps you can follow to use reviews to your advantage and make sure you optimise your chances of gaining customers in the future.

Why do you want good reviews?

A staggering 88 percent of customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. So the importance of a good review is undeniable. Reviews on sites such as TrustPilot also show up in search results and can improve your search rankings [you can read more about SEO here]. This can ultimately attract more people to check out your business. TrustPilot is the leading review site, and TripAdvisor is also very popular for the hospitality / travel sectors and Yelp is also a renowned review site, so all well worth a look into.

Tips

Challenging fake reviews is not a perfect system and can be a difficult process. Fake reviews must be flagged. Here Google tell you how

Handling a negative review well will make that customer feel valued and can make your brand be seen more positively. Even if the individual never returns, the act of taking their complaint seriously means that they’re less likely to spread their negative feeling or experience