A Guide on how to Grow your Online Presence as a small business.

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A s a business, whether small or big, you need to have a presence in the digital space in order to draw in more customers. As a small business, the budget may not be there to hire a digital marketing company to help you out in organically growing your digital presence. So here is a guide of how you can get started on achieving organic growth in your business’s online presence, I’ve used some of these and they’ve proven to work.

• Do not buy followers.

Please do not buy social media followers, firstly it makes absolutely no sense and it is ingenuine but for the most part those are bots and not actual customers and at the end of the day, you are on the loosing end. You want organic followers who engage with your content.

• Choose an eye-catching logo and theme.

This may not seem as important but you need an eye-catching theme for not only social media feeds but for branding as well. For example pretty little thing has a color scheme of pink and white and when you see a pink background and white unicorns, you know it’s pretty little thing. So let us say I have a brand and my theme is green and blue, I would let that follow my theme for infographics or announcements on my page. You could use free photo editing software canva or photopea to help with following the themes and also adobe lightroom for free filters for your posts.

• Create social media accounts.

Social media is highly influential in marketing your business and directing traffic to your websites. This are the following relevant social media accounts to have to grow your online presences, that are worth your time.

• Instagram business accounts are amazing, it provides you insights on your posts and it’s required for making promotions on instagram. Instagram has a huge amount of users an
• Pinterest business account: This is an amazing tool, and later we will get into why Pinterest is good for promoting your brand and drive traffic to your website. Please ensure you create a business account to reduce the chances of getting your account suspended.
• YouTube account: This isn’t as popular among businesses but I believe it’s an underrated marketing tool. You could create youtube videos showcasing your products and how to use them. For example, if you are a fashion brand, you could do a fashion haul and post on youtube and help build your online presence. Also the monetization from the videos could add to your brands’ income revenue.
• Twitter account: twitter for promoting your brand maybe a little hard because twitter is whole other universe but totally worth it. For example, the Kai collective skyrocketed through twitter through it’s engaging content.
• Facebook business account: You need a facebook business account to pay for Instagram ads as well and you need it to create facebook pixels.
• Pay for promotions.

Let’s be real breaking into the digital space as a brand new/ small business is really difficult and you do need to pay for promotions to get people to know about you. Thankfully, facebook Ads, twiiter Ads and instagram Ads are affordable choices and you can choose who exactly you’re promoting your brand.

• Create engaging content and post consistently.

Create quality content that are engaging and not low quality, for example some clothing brands take pictures of the clothing on the floor or using the same pictures of outfits seen on other clothing brands’ pages. That is just wrong because it makes you loose credibility as a brand and potential customers. Try to create high quality content, and you don’t need to break the bank, you can use your iPhone to take nice shots of your products and use editing apps to make them look high quality. I also recommend making videos too, IGtv’s are really blowing up right now and you could make quick videos showcasing your products and how to use them. You have to post consistently in order to have the social media algorithm in your favor. Here are some free resources you can use to create quality content:

• Adobe Lightroom for photo editing (free on mobile phones)
• Photopea for creating infographics
• Canva
• Hitfilm express for video editing
• iMovie for video editing (free on iPhone and macbooks)
• Windows video editor.
• later (for planning your instagram posts)
• planoly (for planning your instagram posts)
• Influencer Marketing.

Influencer marketing are an amazing marketing strategy, because people look to influencers to get assurance that a product is good. So, the process includes giving your product to an influencer and paying them to promote your product on their social media or youtube channel. As a small business you may not have the resources to pay huge influencers like James Charles or Jackie Aina and it’s understandable, here’s a tip, gift your products to small influencers with high engagements as ‘ PR ’ if your business can afford to, some of the influencers may ask for payment and it’s not as expensive to pay for. Also patronize influencers who are in the same industry as your product niche, for example you can’t give a makeup influencer like James Charles, a marketing course to promote, because his followers are mostly interested in makeup and fashion.

• Do giveaways.

Doing giveaways are actually really good for getting YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers. So when you do a giveaway, you have to give certain instructions in order to gain followers. For example, you are giving away a bag or shoe or whatever product, this are the giveaway rules you could give:

• they should like the instagram post,
• follow your instagram business account .
• subscribe to your youtube channel
• tag three friends to follow your instagram account and like the instagram post.
• Share the instagram post to their instagram story (this enables you to get more participants).

The drawback of this is you will loose few followers after the giveaway winner is announced but at least you gained more followers.

• Pinterest for driving traffic to your site.

Pinterest is a search engine tool that most of us are familiar with, we go on there for fashion inspirations, recipes, etc. Now, Pinterest itself can be used as a marketing tool, because if users click on your pins and want to know more they can be redirected to your website. I advised a friend of mine to start using pinterest to advertise her bead bags and in two months, she gets over 1,000 monthly page views and it directs users to her instagram business account. I think 1,000 monthly page views is pretty decent for a three month old business. You can use tailwind to schedule your pinterest pins posts. Mostly bloggers benefit for using pinterest.

The drawback of using pinterest is that the users may not stay on the site for long and last for a couple of seconds on your website.

• Youtube for getting site traffic.

Now, using youtube to promote your business can be really hard, especially getting subscribers and a good amount of views that is worth the amount of work you’re putting in. I suggest you promote the videos on your instagram stories or posting trailers of the video on your youtube page. For creating youtube content, here are some tips:

• Have a posting schedule, I recommend posting once or twice a week in order for the youtube algorithm to favor you
• Create quality content: You should endeavor to create engaging content that stands out for your channel, you don’t need to break the bank to create good content, you can use an iPhone or a canon g7x to record content and a cheap microphone to get started before investing in an expensive set-up and you could hire a video editor on fiverr for a cheaper price.

The drawback of this is getting your first 1,000 subscribers and good views will take a while but with consistency it is possible.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as a brand you need to have a good online presence and with tools like social media ads and youtube, you can grow your digital audience, thereby promoting sales for your business. You can track your growth and numbers with tools like google analytics, instagram insights, pinterests analyitics, etc, in order to know which medium is bringing in the most traffic. Ensure that you are consistent and putting out good quality content.