Are you a young SME looking for actions to improve your visibility with a controlled budget? This article will interest you.
It’s not easy being a businessman, and one of the main challenges is definitely to raise your company’s exposure. Indeed, companies are sometimes powerless in the face of competition or giants established in the same sector.
To find a place, some multiply actions in the hope of attracting the attention of their prospects to them. But before investing large sums in marketing or communication, let’s start by observing the means at your disposal to make yourself visible and check if you have already put them in place.
Indeed, you can have the best product in the world; if no one finds you, you will never sell it. But like many young (or old) entrepreneurs, you think that communicating well will cost you too much. In that case, here are ten marketing actions you should use to market yourself while optimizing your communication budget.
1. Have a website
When nearly 90% of the buying journey takes place on the internet, it is no longer negotiable to have a website that offers potential visibility 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and worldwide. But be careful, if what they find – if they find it – is confusing or uninteresting, your visitors could leave just as quickly. So, to offer a site, yes, but without doing everything and anything.
To get your first steps on the web, you can use online website editors like Wix, which is certainly the most used and well-known. Just like Webs, Weebly, WebMode, Jimbo… this web editor allows you to create your website quickly, inexpensively, and without programming knowledge. Indeed, a showcase site will cost you only about fifteen euros per month. Another strong point of these tools is the diversity and choice of graphic themes offered, mostly adapted to your activity sector.
Obviously, like everything “apparently free”, these web publishers have drawbacks (you can imagine that they have to make a living). Still, I will not discuss them here because it is not. Is not the purpose of this article.
If you have a larger budget or do not have the time to take care of it, you can also entrust the creation of your site to a professional. The Growth-Driven Design method will also appeal to growth-oriented companies.
If we have any advice for you, invest in your marketing as a priority, aiming to create and meet demand rather than on the site.
At first, a web platform that includes the basic functionality will be sufficient as if you want to achieve long-term results, you will need to add more as you study the feedback of your users.
2. Define your target
Did you know that more than a quarter of companies set up marketing actions without knowing their targets and without really worrying about their expectations?
If a business has no idea what its potential customers expect, their needs, or their motivations, how can it expect to successfully market its products or services?
Thus, to communicate effectively, the priority lies in determining the typical portraits (or buyer personas) to whom we wish to address.
Whether you are advertising on Google Adwords or Facebook, SEO, content marketing, or any other action to boost your visibility, increase your traffic or achieve another goal, it can be expensive if you failed to define upstream your personas.
Indeed, knowing in detail the profile of its targets and fully understanding their expectations depending on the stage of the purchasing journey in which they are located is essential since it will allow you to target the right people at the right time so that your actions are successful and avoid wasting too much budget / unnecessarily while maximizing your profitability.
3. Work on your SEO
An emblematic lever of traffic generation, SEO remains an important opportunity, which helps position itself at the top of search results. However, a well-placed site has every chance of being visited.
Plus, optimizing your website for search engines is a free solution, unlike advertising (if you decide to do it yourself).
However, working on the SEO of your website requires time and skills that you often do not have in-house. The help of a professional in the visibility of businesses on the web can greatly benefit you.
4. Create a blog
Another marketing technique to boost your online visibility at a lower cost, provided you take the time, is to offer targeted and relevant content to your targets via a blog.
Do you know that content marketing is sixty-five percent less than outbound (online and offline advertisements, email camps, SMS…) and is a part of inbound marketing strategy?? Do you know? You may take the opportunity to save money as well.
Creating a blog can position you as an expert in your chosen fields, enhance your image, attract your prospects and improve your SEO.
Here are some tips for writing your blog posts:
- Post regularly
- Choose the keywords according to internet users’ requests
- Your content must be optimized with your keywords or phrases but also relevant and qualitative
- Promote your blog content on social networks, in your newsletter, to those around you …
- Talk to your targets
As you will have understood, content marketing will require a strong investment of time when writing and promoting content, but the game is worth the effort.
5. Use social networks
Being present on and communicating on social media is a great way to be visible and benefit from these many benefits. Multiplying your presence on social networks is useless.
Creating a profile or a page on these networks is free. To develop your presence on the web, I advise you to go even further and relay the articles of your blog, your company’s news, your events, or your promotions … Once again, this will not cost you anything, only not much time.
6. Create a My Business page
To improve your visibility at the local level, a completely free and easy to implement solution exists Google My Business.
In just 10 minutes, you create a Google My Business page, and you can enjoy its benefits.
This tool, intended for VSEs, SMEs, and all types of businesses mainly with local activity, makes it possible to have an online presence on Google: the insert on the right, between advertising and natural results (for local queries) + and Google Maps.
7. Participate in events
Promoting your SME in your city, department, or district to reach people who live nearby by participating in local events is a good solution.
You must be present at a community gathering at a local fair or trade show through your sales representatives to improve your business’s visibility.
Participation in events allows you to make yourself known to potential clients and journalists who can get people talking about you in the press.
Even with a small budget, this type of event is accessible.
8. Create a competition
Offering products through the organization of contests is a good way to increase the visibility of your business. This marketing technique helps to boost your notoriety but also to attract new customers.
The online contest via social networks has been very fashionable in recent years. In return for their participation, ask Internet users to like your Facebook page, write a comment or share your publication dedicated to the competition.
This low-cost action promotes viral word-of-mouth and allows it to reach Internet users who did not know you before.
9. Use press releases
Appearing in the press or on blogs related to your activity field improves your SME’s visibility and enhances your image.
To do this, create a file of journalists and bloggers and then contact them to present your company, your news, or news that may interest them. Organize meetings in the form of press breakfasts or use press releases to tell them about your news.
You can hope that journalists will talk about your business in the press and bloggers on their site, your visibility will be boosted. This marketing practice can make you big money without spending too much money.
Bonus: Seek advice from a web marketing consultant
We know that defining, organizing, and analyzing your web strategy through diagnostics, action plans, and monitoring of coherent performance indicators can quickly become a puzzle.
Calling on a web marketing specialist will be of great help to you.
Faced with your company’s diagnoses and ambitions, he will help you choose the various web marketing actions to undertake and ensure their execution.
Focused on the return on investment of the actions carried out, you make sure you benefit from the expertise that will benefit your growth.
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