Early in the lifespan of many small businesses, business owners make the mistake of overlooking one of the most important aspects of marketing: branding. However, thanks to digital media and the advance of social media, branding is more important than ever for businesses big and small.
For small businesses, building a brand is especially important because it not only helps to increase the value of your business, it also makes it easier to market yourself to others because, thanks to your branding efforts, they have a clear idea of the values and principles associated with your business. Let’s take a look at just four easy ways you can boost your brand and easily increase your customer base.
Become a Content Authority
One of the easiest ways to establish your brand is through the creation of engaging, authoritative content. Good content can help you define your brand and increase your online presence, but why is being an authority in your business sector important?
Having authority is a surefire way to stand out in a crowd and get your brand noticed. With the rise of social media, and its subsequent maturation, not only is putting out content important but putting out good quality content is key to catching the attention of online users and keeping them coming back for more. This content may be available through a blog, videos on YouTube, or some other format, but most importantly, it needs to be accurate, engaging and informative.
The best part about creating this kind of content? It’s cheaper than other forms of marketing and can generate thousands of impressions at a very low cost. This kind of content also has a positive effect on your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which means your brand will appear more often in other people’s blogs and posts, so you’ll also be increasing your website’s online visibility.
Use All Your Social Media Channels
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram; the list of social media platforms seems to be expanding by the day. This is a good thing for your business, as it means you have many avenues through which to reach prospective clients. Once you have decided on the right social media channels to use for your small business, it is important you use all these channels to share your content – don’t limit yourself by sticking to only one or two platforms.
Once you’ve posted your content, explore the additional marketing tools that these platforms have to offer. Platforms like Facebook Ads and Twitter Ads offer users an easy and affordable way to reach viewers they otherwise would not be able to, so take advantage of them while you’re trying to improve the reach of your posts. This will help give yourself a bigger audience who will hopefully share your content, which leads us to the next point – make sharing your content easy!
Sharing is Caring
So, you’ve created engaging content and posted it on all your favorite social media platforms, but your reader base isn’t growing. When it comes to content promotion, the easier it is for your readers to share your content, the more frequently they will do so, resulting in a cascade effect on your views. The easiest way to make your content shareable is through the addition of social media buttons in your content.
Is your main platform Twitter? Take some memorable extracts from your content and include them as tweetable content right within the piece so users can share your post on their own account with just a click. Maybe your business has a big following on Pinterest – why not include a Pin It button so your readers can save your post and share it with their followers with little hassle?
Create an Email Newsletter
Now you have all this amazing content, and you’ve shared it across your social media platforms, but what about the people that don’t use or trust social media, you ask? This is a real issue, as it is estimated that globally, only 41% of social media users trust the information they see on their feeds, so even if you have well-thought-out content, you may still have those people who refuse to read it on principle. This is where email newsletters come in handy.
While social media might be the in-thing right now, many people still prefer email. It was found in a recent study that email marketing is 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined. Creating an email newsletter to send out to your growing client base is an easy way to stay in touch with existing clients, and to reach new ones, and with a number of free email newsletter templates out there available for use, getting the word out to your clients has never been easier.
We’ve given you some of the tools to help you grow your brand, now the rest is up to you.
