5 Important steps small businesses can take to get their business noticed on-line

For many small businesses the challenge of promoting themselves and maximising the opportunity that social media and the internet presents to them can seem quite complex and daunting.

As more and more business is being conducted or facilitated on-line it is increasingly important for small businesses to participate and more importantly compete in the digital age.

The main barriers for many to getting involved tend to be lack of resource, experience and know how. Here are five steps that can be taken to get your business up and running on-line.

1. Website - There is no need to over complicate your website. By keeping your site light, fast and secure and with relevant content you are more likely to attract and keep the interest of site visitors. Having a website that is mobile friendly is also the way to go.

2. Regular Blogging. Creating new and fresh content for your blogs helps to improve your website’s search engine ranking. Website’s with regularly updated content will rank higher than a website with no changes. Blogging is also a great way to attract, connect and build relationships with customers. Remember blogs shouldn’t always be promoting your products or services. Your blogs should be informative about related topics aimed at your targeted customer profile.

3. Social media marketing. Use your social media channels to promote your regular blogs as well as comment or reference any holidays or events going on around you. Social media posts should be targeted to focused customer or market segments, so choose the most appropriate content for the right social media channel, be it Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

4. Effective E-mail Campaigns. The key to email success is:

• To define a clear goal for your email campaign. Do you want to generate leads, collect feedback, educate prospects of customers or nurture existing customers?

• Personalise where you can. Did you know that personalised emails improve the click through rate by 14% and conversion rates by 10%. It also helps to avoid the junk folder!

•Focus on engagement. Determine your audience by customer segmentation. This could be by geography, behaviours, company type. Emails sent to targeted audiences get 62% more clicks than emails sent on mass.

•Calls to action. Each section of your email should have a call to action button. Be it a link back to your website, or landing page to download some additional reading material.

5. Analyse. The analysis of any marketing campaign is crucial. There are many tools available such as google analytics or Mailchimp to provide stats on click rate, open rate etc. Knowing how effective (or not) each campaign is enables you to successfully plan your ongoing strategy.