5 Expert Tips for Growing Your Business Online
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When it comes to growing your business, the internet is one of the most important tools you can use. It allows you to improve your brand awareness and reach so many more customers that you might never have reached using traditional marketing methods. But you need to know how to harness its power if you want to get the best results.
That’s why, in this article, we are going to look at some of the best tips and hacks for using the internet to grow your business and make it thrive.
Put time and effort into establishing brand authority
Brand authority simply refers to how a target audience perceives a business and its level of expertise in the industry. It is what can help a business to stand out among other competing brands in the same field.
It’s really important to establish brand authority in your field because it can help increase the chances of people automatically thinking of your business when they need products or services like the ones you offer.
There are several ways you can establish brand authority in your field. For instance, you could attend different industry events or you could apply to be a speaker at relevant conferences in your industry. Also, you can take advantage of the power of social media by creating a strong online presence using the platforms that make the most sense for your business.
Other techniques that businesses use to build brand authority include guest blogging for relevant websites related to their work, or by updating their own blogs with expert content.
You can use any or all of these tactics when trying to build authority for your business, and it won’t be long before you start to see the results.
Make sure you have a strong SEO strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing technique that’s really important for growing your online business because it allows you to improve your visibility on search engines.
There should be three main components to every SEO strategy: link building, content, and technical SEO. Let’s explore these elements further.
Link building
Link building involves securing links from other websites back to your own. This is really good for improving your SEO as, when you have quality backlinks, it tells search engines that you have trustworthy and authoritative content on your site. This can lead to better rankings, as search engines will feel more confident about recommending your site to users as a result.
Also, if you’re able to get links from relevant and authoritative websites, it could expose your site to new audiences and put you in view of potential clients so you can grow your business.
Technical SEO
When it comes to technical SEO, you need to make sure that your website meets the technical requirements that will allow search engines to crawl, index, and recommend it. Some best practices for technical SEO include optimizing your URL structure, improving your website’s speed, and other tactics that will prompt search engines like Google to rank you higher so you can reach your SEO goals, attract even more customers on search engines, and grow your business.
Content
Creating content is such an important aspect of any good SEO strategy. Publishing relevant and optimized content on your website makes it easier for your target audience to find you through search engines like Google. This is because it gives you far more chances to pop up in the search results when someone is researching topics related to what you sell.
Also, publishing helpful and authoritative content increases the chances of getting backlinks from high-quality websites, which will improve your backlink profile and cause search engines to rank you higher.
Like I mentioned earlier, you need to make sure your content is optimized if you want to get the full benefits of your SEO strategy. To do that, you’ll want to do some keyword research, as including the right keywords in your content will help ensure that the right people find you.
To conduct keyword research, you’ll need a specialist tool like Ahrefs’ Keyword Generator or Moz’s Keyword Explorer. You’ll then input relevant words or phrases about your business or niche. When you do, your chosen tool will give you a list of popular search queries that your ideal customers are already typing into search engines. Identify the phrases you can build useful pieces of content around, then work on weaving them into your copy naturally so the keywords are there but they don’t feel forced at all.
Use the power of content marketing to reach your target audience
Content marketing involves creating online materials like blog posts, infographics, or videos. It allows you to create different types of content that will attract your ideal audience, educate them, and motivate people to buy your products or services.
To ensure that you’re creating high-quality content that people will find useful, you’ll want to provide content on topics that your audience cares about. To find these, start by looking through the questions that people send to your customer service support team. It will provide some insight into the problems that your ideal customers are dealing with and this could help you in crafting content to solve those pain points.
Another way to identify relevant topics is by joining social media forums like Reddit or Quora and then looking out for discussions about your niche or industry. This will provide you with the relevant issues that people in your target audience are facing so you can work out what to cover.
Finally, you could also use the keyword research method that we mentioned earlier in this post. Once you’ve discovered what your ideal customers are typing into search engines, you can then work on turning those keywords into helpful topics that your audience will want to read about.
Now, let’s take a look at some examples of businesses that do a great job of creating quality content that is helping to grow their businesses.
Florin Roebig is a law firm that specializes in areas like personal injury, labor law, and medical malpractice. One of the valuable pieces of content on their site focuses on truck accidents in Florida, what can cause them, and the benefits of hiring a lawyer to fight your case if you’ve been involved in one.
The guide contains very useful information about the next steps that people who have been involved in a truck accident can take, especially if they want to claim accident-related damages. It’s likely to help their audience who probably have a lot of questions about this topic and who might find the company’s site while doing research with the help of Google.
If you want to do the same for your site, you could also try creating helpful pieces of content that explain how your products or services can help customers while making sure to include relevant keywords that will make your site visible on search engines.
FreshBooks is a provider of accounting software for small and medium-sized businesses. On their site, they’ve made a habit of providing valuable information that can help attract their target customers. Take, for example, this really helpful piece that teaches you how to write a winning invoice letter.
This post gives step-by-step instructions that can guide a novice through creating professional invoice letters to go with the invoices they send to clients. This is a very relevant topic, as there will be people in their target audience who are looking for this information, so publishing this post is a good move that could help them reach more ideal customers and grow their business.
On your website, you should also try to publish actionable information that teaches your target audience how to perform relevant tasks as this could help you attract more ideal customers.
Finally, let’s take a look at Helix Hearing Care, a company that specializes in providing hearing aids and other hearing loss solutions. They sell a variety of hearing aids and, to help people take care of them, they have also created a hearing aid maintenance guide that explains how to clean your hearing aids, how to turn them on and off, and what to do when you want to change the hearing aid batteries or filter.
You’ll see that this guide incorporates the use of video content and written text, which could be really helpful for the visual learners in their audience. It also makes their content more accessible, which is particularly relevant considering what they sell. But, most notably, this guide offers a great way for the company to attract the interest of prospective customers who might be searching for information related to hearing aids through search engines.
You should also consider doing something similar for your site by creating guides that can help users to maintain your products. And, as you can see, you’re not only limited to publishing blog posts. You can also provide videos and infographics that will help attract and hold the attention of people in your target audience.
Focus on growing your social media presence
As an online business owner, social media is an incredibly powerful tool that you need to take advantage of if you aren’t already doing so. But you should also take note of one grave mistake that a lot of companies make, and that is trying to be on every social media platform at once.
Doing this is a recipe for disaster as you might not be able to dedicate enough time to each platform and this could have a detrimental impact on the quality of your content. It’s important to prioritize quality over quantity, which means you should focus on a smaller number of social platforms that you can use very well.
To select the most suitable platforms for your business, consider who your target audience is and try to think about where they’re likely to be the most active. For instance, if your brand is trying to appeal to a younger crowd, it would be better to have a presence on social media channels like Instagram and Tiktok, as these are two applications that are very popular among young people, and especially teenagers.
But, if your company focuses on an older crowd, or you’re marketing to professionals, it will make more sense to use a platform like Facebook or LinkedIn to reach them.
You can also research competitors in your industry and try to see which social media platforms they have a presence on and whether or not they’re getting good engagement from your ideal customers. Of course, what works for one company might not necessarily work for you, but it can definitely help to influence your decision on the best channels to choose.
When you’ve picked the most suitable social media platforms for your brand, make sure that you follow best practices for building a social media presence that will help grow your business. For example, you need to ensure that you consistently post engaging content that educates your audience and also prompts them to interact with your brand.
You could also try holding contests, giveaways, or other competitions that will require people to engage with your business or share your posts if they want to win. Not only can this help to greatly increase your social media following, but it will also help to improve the general awareness of your brand.
Develop lead magnets that are genuinely valuable
A lead magnet is an item or service that is being offered for free in exchange for a prospective customer’s contact details. Examples include free ebooks, templates, consultations, survey reports, or product demonstrations. Lead magnets are great for growing your business because they act as incentives that help you to easily generate and catch more qualified leads who are already interested in what you offer.
Before creating lead magnets, you’ll want to identify the pain points that your ideal customers are facing so you can solve those issues. To do this, you can use the techniques we mentioned earlier for finding relevant topics that your target audience would appreciate. So you can either look through customer queries, conduct keyword research, or check social forums your ideal customers are likely to frequent.
Once you’ve identified your customers’ pain points and created lead magnets to address them, we would highly recommend branding them with your company colors and logo to get the best results. This will help to keep you on your ideal customers’ minds whenever they take advantage of your free tools, so you’ll be the first business they think of when they next need products or services like yours.
And, once your lead magnets are finished, you also have to actively promote them to your target audience to increase the chances of getting more leads. One way to do this is by making posts on social media to tell people about your lead magnet and how it could help solve their pain points. You could also promote your lead magnet through email marketing by explaining its value to your subscribers, and including the resource or a link to it in your emails.
To give you some inspiration, here are some examples of high-quality lead magnets other businesses have created to attract their ideal audiences and make more sales.
Venngage is an online design tool that helps people create visual content like infographics, reports, or presentations. On their website, they have a collection of infographic templates and designs that their target audience is likely to find very useful.
To access these templates, you must provide details like your name and email address. This is a vital exchange when it comes to lead magnets, as having your ideal clients’ contact details provides you with the opportunity to stay in touch, show them your value, and nurture those leads until they convert into paying customers.
This is a tactic most businesses will be able to use. For example, an accounting company could create free invoice templates or a social media management platform could provide a free social media content calendar template.
Finally, Enlightened Landscape Lights is a company that sells professional LED outdoor lighting solutions for homes and commercial buildings. They offer a free design consultation that allows prospects to book a call with them to discuss their outdoor lighting needs.
As you scroll down the page, you’ll also see that they’ve provided in-depth information about what will happen on the design consultation call. This includes the provision of a personalized design plan and a property evaluation that will give their designers more insight into the prospect’s needs, all for free!
What’s impressive about their method is how they explain exactly what people can stand to gain from the consultation, so prospects will be motivated to sign up for the call. If you also want to offer free consultation calls for your products or services, you can learn something from the way they’ve created an entire landing page to promote this. It’s a great way to encourage your ideal customers to get in touch and will help you to grow your business.
Summary
In this article, we’ve looked at just some of the online strategies and tools you can use to grow your business. From content marketing to growing your social media presence and developing valuable lead magnets, these are all very effective tactics that you should start implementing as soon as possible.
By: Aaron Haynes is CEO and co-founder of Loganix.