Various Ways To Promote Your Business Online

The times are changing. Strategies that worked a few years back hold no relevance in the current scenario. Just as fashion trends, the trends of business strategies are also varying. To keep the fire ignited, you need to pick up on the trends. There’s no other way to beat the cut-throat competition.

The foremost requirement to keep a business going is to generate leads. It doesn’t matter what your service or product is, if there’s no market segment to purchase them from you, there’s no way you can continue doing the business. Therefore, you need to lay the utmost emphasis on generating leads. It doesn’t matter where they come from - you need to have multiple sources that help you generate leads.

Marketing and lead generation go hand in hand. Marketing may seem complex to understand. But at its core, marketing is all about speaking out loud to the world that ‘you exist’. When you consistently say and show to the world that you are ‘X’ and you do ‘Y’, chances are, you might get some traction which shall help you sell all that you have to offer.

Below mentioned are a few ways that help businesses to promote/market themselves.

The Conventional Way:

The conventional mode of marketing comprises advertisement via television, radio, newspapers, hoardings, billboards and pamphlets. It isn’t at all the case that all of these practices have vanished over time. They are still being practised in full swing. It is because people haven’t stopped watching television, reading newspapers, listening to radios and hey! Who doesn’t travel by roads?

Every time people perform these activities, the advertisements are bound to grab their eyeballs. The modern and emerging small businesses do not employ these techniques as they are quite expensive and have a quite low return on investment.

Then how do these small firms and individuals market themselves and thrive in this competitive era? Given below are ways by which even the smallest of firms and retail stores can market themselves and attract various prospects:

Influencer Marketing:

To understand influencer marketing one needs to know who or what is an influencer. There are a lot of individuals online who have a massive online fan following. The actions, interests and thoughts of these individuals heavily influence their fans; hence, they are called influencers. With the internet data plans being cheaply made available to the masses, the number of influencers has heavily increased during the past few years.

As to promote a product or service, one may reach an influencer in the related domain and ask them to promote your deliverables. This is the most sought-after way of marketing in the current scenario.

Advertising Across Various Online Channels:

Advertisements across multiple internet channels could be in different forms - image, article, video or a voice note(as the ones on Spotify). While this form of advertisement is considerably expensive(though not as much as the hoardings and the banners), it yields incredible results. To execute this, you are required to pay to the platform where you publish/submit your advertisement.

Affiliate Marketing:

This is a form of marketing wherein you can the bloggers, video creators and other content creators provide referral links for their audience to buy certain products. The product seller than provides a commission to these creators for every sale that takes place through their referrals. You may choose to employ this technique when you have high margins between the cost price and the selling price of the product.  It will just cost you a minimal percentage of the sale that you make.

Personal Branding:

It is hands down the most sought after mode of marketing a business online. It amalgamates storytelling, design and engaging with the online audience in the best possible way. Personal branding is not an overnight process. It demands consistency to gain ample recognition; so much so that the viewers may perceive you as someone authentic enough to buy your products or services. The idea behind it is to expand your reach and identity across various online channels by utilising different forms of media.

By now you know that the only way to do business online is to be ‘seen’ by others. If you don’t show up, no one shall ever know you and your deliverables won’t hold much value. People with ample awareness and funds have already shifted online and are attaining better results. The ones adversely affected are small retailers and local shop owners who lack resources for the online transformation.

Stor2u is a Goa-based firm that has come up with ways to help local shop owners and small retailers to be ‘seen’ online. Unlike other big e-commerce platforms that hide the identity of original sellers, the work process at Stor2u is quite transparent. The brand avoids being a middleman and seamlessly unites sellers and buyers.

A seller at Stor2u can showcase his/her products in the most detailed way possible, add a location of the physical store and benefit from the marketing team employed by Stor2u. The buyers are facilitated by the local products that are barely available on other easy-to-go eCommerce sites.