It’s 2022 so there really shouldn’t be a question of whether or not it’s important to take your business online. Everything is changing, the world is becoming more digitized and as such, you would be failing big if you haven’t keyed in yet.

So this blog is for those who have fancied the idea, understand the importance but are looking for strategic ways to build a very strong presence online. If this is you, you’re at the right place!

Here we’ll discuss 7 tested and proven strategies which you can use to boost your online presence and convert them into paying customers. And we’ll show you how you can rig your business for success online.

Ready? Let’s go!

Specify your Target Audience

The very first thing to determine when bringing your business online is your Target Audience. Being clear about who your ideal customer is from the get-go can save you a lot of time and resources.

You need to have a mental picture of who your ideal customer is as well as other details of their life.

If, for instance, you sell hair care products for black hair types, you already know that your target audience is black people – male and female, who want to maintain and grow their natural hair.

Knowing this, you can tailor your social media content and ads to target people in this specific audience by bringing things they already know and love to them.

Using our hair care analogy, you can establish yourself as an authority in the hair care field by making videos showing how your products can be applied to the hair and testimonials from satisfied clients among other things.

The more details you know about your target audience, the better your business can be positioned.

You can identify your target audience using customer profiles and customer segmentation. You can also issue surveys to your customers to know what strategy fits them best.

Utilize Organic Social Media

Now that you have discovered who your target audience is, the next step is to start connecting with them through social media.

Organic social media is the cheapest way to grow your business online as it is practically free to do so.

However, it is not an easy task and a lot of people have found growing their businesses through social media a truly daunting task.

With the insane amount of social media pages online, offering virtually every kind of product and service under the sun, where do you fit in?

Learning the art of positioning your business is something that could be difficult to learn but can yield big results for you.

Organic social media marketing is what attracts and keeps current and future customers glued to your business.

It is a way to hone your brand voice in a way that evokes strong feelings in the customer making them love to be a part of your community.

From the moment you specified your target audience, it’s already clear the kind of content that will resonate the most with them.

Instagram and Facebook work best with videos, memes and pictures, Twitter leans more on the short but precise text and images, and LinkedIn is great for articles. It is best to utilize the social media that can suit your purposes the most.

Your business can use organic social media to establish your unique personality online, keep customers engaged in every step of their buying journey and attend to complaints and requests.

Use Ads the Right Way

Growing your brand’s social media pages is a good start, but it’s just the beginning of the journey.

As of the end of 2020, the average reach for an organic Facebook post was 5.2%, meaning that you can’t just rely on building your business organically on social media.

But did you know there’s a right way to run social media ads and also a wrong way to go about it? Of course, there is!

All the social media platforms have their free and paid variations, and they are designed to bring your brand in front of many more eyeballs.

Ads are designed to look like a funnel: The widest part of the funnel is those that are not aware of your business, and they are made up of virtually anyone in the world.

However, your business is not designed for just anyone, so you need something a bit more specific.

Just after the “not aware” group are those that are aware of your business but do not have an immediate need for it.

This group of people can buy from you at some point in the future or not, but they are more valuable than those who do not need your services at all. They can be swayed by your ads.

The last category of people in the funnel is those that are aware of your company and have an immediate need for the products or services you offer.

This is the category of people your ads are designed to connect with to give you the best leads.

You can run your ads to connect with the customers based on age, country, product audience and many other parameters. You can tweak these parameters until you find one that suits you the best.

Have a Website

There is this long-standing debate among marketing professionals on whether a business should have a website first, and then direct traffic from social media to the website or first nurture a community on social media before investing in a website.

Whichever faction you belong to, the fact remains that a website is vital to growing your business online.

To start with, a website makes your business look more polished and professional. You can design your website from scratch to showcase details of your business to its best advantage.

Having a website also opens your business up to a whole new set of algorithms quite different from that available on social media platforms.

You can make your website fully optimized for the Search engine and make it easier for customers to find you. And yes, you can also run ads through your website to give your business a wider reach.

You can also embed a Google map into your website so your customers can easily find your physical location.

Similarly, you can embed your contact phone numbers and social media links so customers can easily navigate from your website to your social media pages and vice versa.

The most important reason why you should consider having a website is that 81% of customers first make research for products or services they need online, before venturing to make the purchase.

This means that if you don’t have a website, you would be missing out on a huge slice of that population.

Explore Email Marketing

What do you imagine when you hear of email marketing? Something reserved for only ‘big brands’ and the like, not a small business like you, right?

Wrong!

Email marketing is one of the super cool ways to make your brand unforgettable. Those big brands know it, which is why they invest their time and resources in building great email marketing strategies.

The superpower of email marketing is that it brings you close to the customers who care about you and is a great way to build a community online.

If you make your emails interesting, it can even be the high point of your audience’s day. It’s also a great avenue to boost your sales.

So how do you start? First, compile an email list through your website and social media pages. You can do this by making an offer to your customers, and asking for their email addresses in return.

Then you can start sending valuable information to them, with a strong call-to-action (CTA) that will encourage them to make purchases.

With email marketing, you can monitor the progress of your campaigns to know what works and what doesn’t, and tweak your campaign accordingly for maximum impact. I would suggest you  opt for a personalized email marketing format over cold emailing. It helps you connect better with your audience and build a relationship for better conversation rate.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is another excellent way to bring your business before a whole new group of potential customers.

Influencers already have a community of loyal fans/ followers so anything endorsed by those people is quickly adapted by their followers.

I know you may be wondering how you can afford to pay ‘big-time’ influencers for your small business. That isn’t something to worry about.

Truth is, most people are more influenced by micro and nano influencers and are more likely to purchase their advertised products than those heavy hitters.

Even more interesting is this statistic: About 47.3% of all social media influencers are micro-influencers, having between 5000 and 20,000 followers online.

This means that those micro-influencers control quite a huge portion of people online, so you have the double advantage of a higher probability of more leads through the micro-influencer and not having to pay them as much money as those mega influencers.

Give It Time

Having put the above strategies in place, all that remains is not actually within your control, and that is time.

Seeing real progress from taking these steps requires a certain amount of patience and perseverance.

Results definitely won’t come instantaneously, so all you need to do is keep providing value to your customers, and time will be your best ally.

Conclusion

There you have it! Building a successful  business online is possible, and in this article, I have explained seven strategies you can implement to boost your business online.

It’s important to note here that you do not necessarily need to implement all these strategies at the same time if you can’t afford to.

You can choose to take it one step at a time, knowing that you are on a journey and you can make it work. Also, if at some point feels overwhelming, don’t hold back in using the services of digital marketing experts to help you position your business where you want.

I’m rooting for you!