It’s all very well starting a business, but if no one knows about it you’re not going to get very far – this is where marketing comes in. Marketing will establish your business within your industry, build brand awareness and, crucially, bring in paying customers. Over the last ten years a business’s online presence has become more and more important; here we have put together a few top tips to help you promote your business online effectively.

Making Goals

Starting any kind of marketing strategy without clearly defined goals will leave you without any direction and without targets against which you can benchmark your success. Goals should be measurable and realistic - setting achievable goals will make them much more useful.

Getting Social

It is now widely known that it can be hugely beneficial for a business to build a presence across social media. The type of social media platform you choose to make your focus will largely depend on the demographic you wish to target. Targeting younger audiences tends to lead to more of a focus on Snapchat and Instagram, whereas a company which is more B2B will want to focus on LinkedIn. If you are consistent in your social media strategy, cater your posts to your audience – ensuring not to just use it as a platform for selling - you will be able to build a captive audience aware of your brand.

Boosting Visibility  

Social media is one of the best ways online to boost your brand visibility. A great way to improve your visibility even further is to run competitions, offering prizes related to your company. Entrants can be encouraged to follow your page and share your posts, maximising your brand’s exposure.

Optimising for Search

SEO, search engine optimisation, is one of the most widely known terms from online marketing and involves everything from optimising onsite keywords, meta descriptions to building a strong backlink portfolio all in the hope of boosting your company’s site’s search visibility. Understanding how SEO works and implementing it effectively will help your start-up grow much more quickly.

Keeping Track

One of the great things about online marketing is that you can easily keep track of where your visitors are coming from, at what point of the customer journey they are dropping off and what’s bringing in conversions. Whether you are running paid online ads, social media competitions or implementing new SEO tactics, you will want to keep track of all the data to be able to measure your success. One of the best ways to do this is with Google Analytics – a free tool provided by Google which lets you track onsite activity.

Investing in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is often a smart investment for start-ups as it’s a great way to back-up and securely encrypt data without having to put a lot of capital into expensive IT infrastructure. Cloud computing also offers the flexibility for start-ups as they grow, making it easy to access more data as the company’s needs expand. This is also a great benefit from a marketing perspective; all the data, images, video, files etc you need for your marketing campaigns can be safely stored on the cloud, meaning you can access them and use them from anywhere in the world – giving you so much freedom to work. With many companies now investing in the cloud computing industry, the uses for this technology are only going to grow.