Unless you are fortunate enough to run a business where everything works via word of mouth then you are going to certainly need to manage and monitor an effective online promotion strategy. The extent of this depends on what type of business you are running. It goes from simply being able to be found, this could be true for a business to business company where you have an established name and everyone in your sector knows exactly what you do to an online retailer or events company that needs to constantly engage with your potential customers and provide info of new products or events.
Assess Your Current Position
How is your online presence? Do you get a lot of business from online sources? How many queries come through your website? How many from social media? How many of each convert into sales and what percentage of your turnover does this account for? If you don’t know the answers to these questions then you need to find out before you do anything else. Your website will hopefully have Google Analytics or similar to track stats and all the social media providers give you this automatically as part of being a customer.
Get Followers
If you don’t already have some, you need followers on your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There's no point posting anything if it’s not going to be read. You can buy followers but this generally does nothing except boost your ego as you need real followers who can be converted into customers. You can pay to promote your page or account to relevant people and you can very specifically target these people. Also if there is a popular hashtag trending and you can come up with some engaging content you can gain followers this way.
Consider How It’s Managed
Do you have the time and skills to effectively manage your online presence personally? If the answer is no you can easily outsource it to an online marketing company. Even if this is too expensive there are online tools such as Collabstr where you can track and manage your accounts with ease.
SEO for your Website
Google is still where most people go first when looking for anything these days. So you must be seen on Google, and other search engines to a lesser extent. What you need is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to get you as high up these search listings as possible. The formulas used to determine who is top are long, complex and pretty much a secret. But there are some things that we know, the more good websites that link to you the better, longer-established websites do better.
Create Engaging Content
But generally what you want is good, clear and engaging content. The longer your potential customer spends on your post or website the more likely they are to buy something no matter how they got there. So getting customers is one thing, keeping them is key,
