8 Creative Ways to Increase Visibility for your Small Business Online

Your small business needs online visibility to do well online. This you can do in many ways aside from such common ways as your website, social media profiles, online listings, and ads. If you are already used to the common ways, you can now try these here eight creative ways to increase visibility for your small business online.

1. Make your Content Accessible to Everyone

This includes people with disability particularly sight impairments. You can attract more traffic to your website if you explore ways to make your website pages and emails accessible to people with disabilities. With about 25% of adults having one form of disability or another, using internet technology to market to this formidable group can help to dramatically increase your online visibility. If more people with disabilities have more and better access to your online content, it presents you a very valuable opportunity to expand your online visibility.

2. Be Sensitive to Diversity

This is diversity in race, gender, disability and peculiarities. Now more than ever before, incorporating diversity into your workplace and marketing material is more important than ever. This is the sign of the times to really embrace full diversity in your marketing activities. If you represent the diverse range of people within your audience in your online assets, you can get noticed by more people while also demonstrating social responsibility at the same time.

3. Seek Guest Posting

By exploring many ways to use guest posting to reach more potential customers, you increase your online visibility as a result. What you do is to deliberately search for any complementary businesses or local media outlets that have a strong online presence. Reach out to them to see if they’ll accept your guest posts on their website. If they do, you do not only get your business in front of their audience, but a link to your site from theirs can help to improve your SEO. You give out similar favors by accepting guest posts on your own blog. Both gestures help the online visibility of benefiting websites.

4. Leverage the Power of Videos

Your small business can tactically leverage the power of video for more shares and memorability and that is great for your online visibility. How-to videos are very easy to create and share too. Viewers usually retain over 90% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to about 10% when reading it in text. That is why videos are very effective marketing tools online. The shareability of videos is also very high particularly on popular social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the likes.

5. Content Sharing by Employees

If a small business owner encourages his employees to share his business content with their own social networks, the visibility therefrom is great. Content shared by employees usually receives more engagements than content shared by brand channels. Small business owners can always take advantage of this by sharing content particularly blog posts with their employees and encourage them to share it on their social media networks in particular. That helps to generate more feedback and user content which search engines notice. Such content can greatly help your ranking and visibility.

6. Build Beneficial Relationships

To seek online visibility, having a good relationship with many different people is hugely beneficial. Going about it alone as a business owner might be daunting at times but factoring in other people with whom you have a strong relationship can help you in a number of ways. Many of such people who have their own audiences and relationships they routinely deal with can be of great help. People in this category who easily come to mind are content writers, loyal customers, fellow business owners, reporters, vendors, influencers, celebrities, sport personalities and so on. A connection with these connections can introduce you to their own connections. The ultimate goal is to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships from which organic opportunities can arise. A hugely beneficial network grows from there and that is great for your online visibility. 

 

7. Use Mobile-Specific Marketing Strategies

Good news for small business owners! Google is now using mobile-first indexing for all sites on the web. By this development, if you have a mobile optimized website, it helps your online visibility. In addition, with more than half of internet searches now being performed on mobile devices, your website can greatly benefit from such huge search data. If your website is mobile optimized, it helps to make sure your website pages and emails render properly on tablets and smartphones. It also seamlessly leverages mobile-specific strategies like, podcast ads, SMS marketing, voice search, mobile search ads, local SEO and so on.

8. Intensify Email Marketing

The biggest advantage of email marketing is that email recipients have already opted in to receive your emails. Unlike social media followers who merely opted to follow you, email inboxes don’t compete for info from hugely crowded news feeds. Marketing by email can be specifically targeted in both messaging and timing and the marketing responses can be very great for your visibility. They help your business with lots of opportunities to get quality exposure. Once you take quality time to build an email list over time, segment the list, create quality and highly informative content for your emails, and optimize the emails well enough, they help your business exposure/visibility tremendously.

How to Promote Your Website like a Pro

If you have a website, and you greatly need to have one if you are a serious marketer, you must devise ways to promote it with a view to attracting traffic to it. You need very clear strategies to do so if you want your efforts to yield good results. What requires the most attention is how to use these strategies not just to increase the visibility of your site but most importantly to increase the quality and standing of the site. To promote your site like a Pro, you must do what the Pros like to do. Here are some of the strategies real Pros recommend particularly about design, layout, aesthetics, presentation, hosting and actual operation of any website meant for online business marketing purposes.

Make it simple to use and navigate

Depending on your type of business, simple sites always give better results than complex and complicated sites. The Pros always advise that such sites must be clean, simple, sleek, and very fast in loading time. If can avoid excessively large images and too many fancy features on the site, that can help a great deal on its navigation since large images and fanciful features tend to slow down navigation on any site. The easier you make it for someone to browse through your site, the better their chances of staying longer on the site or even winding up subscribing or making a purchase.


 
Have on it many channels of feedback and Interaction

In any business, a 2-way communication is very vital. The more and easier ways visitors can interact with your site, the better chances of your site becoming more and better known. The more you allow users to interact on your site, the more they will do so. The more they interact with your site, the more likely they are to become interested in it. How do you better enhance this interaction? Install on the site, email contact button, allow users to comment and even engage in conversations with some token moderation. Allow users to rank the site and vote on comments with likes and dislikes. Even sharing and live chat features on the site are helpful as well.

Foster an onsite community

Community is where group interaction and communication really takes place and works well. As you design and build your site, you must factor in and think of the type of community that you want to foster. By allowing interaction, responding quickly, and moderating the discussions onsite, you are, in essence, creating a community. It is not good for business to always push your product/service on everyone you come across. Pros advise that it is best to always create awareness first before you make your product/service available. Fostering and working in an onsite community of like-minded fellows enables you to do that fairly easily.

Be very liberal with visitors’ participation
 
If you want to sell and sell well, you must be ready to deal with people at all times taking into account the complex nature of every human being. In our complex world of today, most people not only want to be seen, they want to be heard as well. Everyone thus always has an opinion to express about any and every issue. You must therefore device ways on your site to allow visitors to interact freely with your site and with others. People always like to bring their knowledge and wisdom into any conversion. By allowing them to freely do so, a bit of moderation directly by you is of essence. Set and maintain boundaries by monitoring and moderating your site yourself. This type of check should not in any way be seen or construed as akin to command and control. Real freedom particularly of expression and choices is very good for business. So, you must allow liberal freedom to visitors to your website.

Respond to feedback very quickly

Quick response to inquiries is very good for business. Your site must be known by others as a quick response site. That notion helps to promote it a great deal. No matter the type of inquiry, even if it is mere commenting, filling out a form or sending an email, online visitors always want a quick response from a responsive site. The real reason you must make your website responsive and quickly too. Timely responses always manage to help move relationships forward while the interest therein is still keen and fresh.

Personally monitor and moderate your website 

Freedom of choice and decisions is very good for business. Allowing real time interaction onsite is crucial to a successful website operation. But, too much uncontrolled freedom is a danger to it as well. As the site owner, you must set boundaries for all your visitors to stay within. Adequate allowances must be made so as not to allow these boundaries to be unduly restrictive. If they are too restrictive, you may end up scaring away visitors you are keen on retaining. People tend to abuse excessive liberty online by spamming and being abusive. Both must be checked directly by the site owner who may need to invest a bit of time and energy to delete or moderate spammy and offensive comments. That is what the Pros do.


 
Integrate your site into larger online communities
 
To integrate your site into larger online communities, you inevitably must turn to social media. Because of their huge popularity and ease of sharing messages by millions and millions of users, social media is the best place to integrate your site and latch into the activities of a huge and very active online community. Social media sites are best used not only to draw traffic to your site, but to demonstrate how your site and eventually the community you desire to create on your site manages to fit into larger communities which online platforms represent. A very fitting and productive goal is to design your site with the social media features that allow for easy integration with these larger communities. That is what the Pros do and they highly recommend.

Last Line!

Aside from having interesting and entertaining content on your website, deploying the foregoing strategies will make it more attractive to others. Websites give better results if you use a format that works well on different types of media. For flexibility and versatility, your website should be readable and attractive to read on different devices like smart phones, tablets, TVs and desktops, irrespective of whatever operating system or browser used to view them. That is how the Pros get it done and they highly recommend too.

Why Your Small Business Needs Digital Marketing

 No matter the size of your business, to reach out quickly and efficiently to customers, you need digital marketing. That is because, digital marketing is one great way to enhance or increase the branding of your product in digital technologies on the internet along with smartphones and screening devices. You need digital marketing to boost or advertise your products/services in the electronic world by using different platforms on the internet.  It is one very good platform to connect with customers as well as for the company to sell its products and services. Digital marketing is getting increasingly popular among many small businesses nowadays. For that reason, the future of digital marketing is very bright. It is one good and very reliable platform new businesses can depend on to show their products and services to their target markets. The ease and convenience of operations in digital marketing in another boost since it makes uploading of pictures and videos, writing blogs and offering online services very easy chores to carry out daily if you know what you are doing.



If you run a small business, just push it out there via digital media marketing and the business will get the following advantages amongst others:

Faster and Better than Traditional marketing

No doubt digital marketing is faster and easier than the traditional option to market your products and services. It is also more convenient to use by way of banners and e-cards.  It is more advantageous than traditional billboards and more physical stuff which are costlier to install and maintain. It gets out the message faster, better and wider via the internet than traditional methods.

Narrows Gap in Communication

Operationally, digital marketing helps to bridge communication gap which usually exists between customers and organizations. With the use of the internet, you can quickly bridge communication gaps thereby making it easier and more reliable for the both; customer and company to engage positively. Internet has greatly enabled the rise of the smart consumer. Through social media channels, rating and review boards, and forums, consumers are now able to connect with other consumers easily. That connectivity empowers them to give their approval or disapproval of a product or service thereby influencing and directing the buying decisions of potential customers. Digital marketing enables consumers to easily connect directly with organizations and vice versa. By keeping in touch with customers through follow-up emails, personalized offers, and thank you letters, organizations now build relationships and establish a sense of community around their brands fairly easily. That helps to build good businesses no doubt.

Helps Boost Company Visibility
 
To enhance real visibility for your business, you need digital marketing. An increase in visibility on the internet market automatically helps to boost sales through technology. An organization can be visible to a large number of individuals through different social media platforms. Many of such platforms can promote your business even for free. Setting up a strong presence on the Internet through a website, a blog, paid marketing and web-based social networking is good for business.



Enables more Detailed Marketing Research
 
You can’t operate a business in isolation and expect to make it good. It pays to know what your competitors are up and what they are doing. Same goes for customers particularly customer behavior. Information is king and research on the internet is faster and more reliable for any business. With the touch of a button, the Internet makes available to you, a wealth of resource portals and tools that allow marketers to more accurately gather data on consumers and track their activities and preferences. Google is one good source and a sure bet for these resources and tools.

Highly Cost-Effective

The bottomline always matters when it comes to marketing. To compete favorably, any small business with an eye on profits needs to push up more money and other resources to market their products/services. Digital marketing easily helps such businesses with more resources to boost the business up and engage more customers even on a very cheap budget. Depending on what you want, you can choose your budget plans and make strategies to market your product with cost-effectiveness dictating the pace.

Better Returns on Investments
 
Aha!! Everyone who is in business always wants good returns on their investments. Easy and smart use of Google and other social media websites are another great opportunity for good returns on investment because they are largely free to use. You also have cheap access to tools for choosing your own location where you can engage the relevant peoples to which you want to market your services or products. A good use of web analytics helps many business owners to know whether their websites are providing optimal ROI. With that information, they can conveniently allocate their budgets efficiently by deciding on the investments to plan on every day. Very smart no doubt if you also have an eye on your own company’s ROI.