Business promotion from scratch

Internet promotion can be effective without high costs. You can do a lot yourself, without advertising agencies and expensive specialists. We will tell you how to start promoting your business on your own and why the Online Business Promotion service is useful here.

What you need to promote yourself on the Internet

First, you need to choose the sites on which you will be promoting. The most common advertising platforms built into search engines are Yandex. Direct and Google AdWords. After registering, you get the opportunity to show your ads to those who are now looking for the same products or services that you are selling. Such ads look like small ads in ad units on various sites or as a line in search results in Yandex or Google.

You can also find clients through social networks - VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Facebook, Instagram. Here your ad will appear as news feed posts or ads to the left and right of it. It is worth choosing the social network where there are more of your potential customers, or advertise in all at once. At each site, you need to register, create special pages and understand the features of the advertising office.

Online Business Promotion works with all of these platforms and allows you to manage different advertising campaigns in one interface.

Secondly, you need texts with pictures - advertisements or posts for social networks. You can write them yourself or order from freelancers. Here it is important to ensure that the material meets the requirements of the sites and does not violate copyright. For example, you can't take the first photo you see from Google for your ad post.

The Online Business Promotion service simplifies the process - you get access to a bank of ready-made texts and photos. You can publish them right away or edit them first. If you need unique texts, the authors of the service will write them specifically for your business.

Third, you need money for promotion. Each impression or click costs a certain amount. The better your ad is tuned, the cheaper it will cost you to acquire customers. For example, in July, VKontakte recommended promotion to customers of the service with an average price of 50 rubles per click. But thanks to the service, it cost them an average of 13 rubles per click.

Now the service of our partners is undergoing a promotion - the company gives a bonus for the first replenishment of the balance when the service is connected. If you deposit up to 10,000 rubles into your account, you get twice as much for promotion. Well, if you deposit more, you will be credited with a fixed bonus of 10,000 rubles.

How to find your client on the Internet

Having a financially profitable idea and a clear plan is not always a guarantee that a business will be successful. The availability of start-up capital may not even help in this matter, however, its absence also does not play a decisive role. As statistics show, a fairly large number of entrepreneurs go bankrupt in the first year after opening. It was during this period that all the forces of a businessman are focused on finding new clients and promoting their business. Therefore, every entrepreneur faces an important question - how to promote your business from scratch. The competent organization of advertising campaigns can significantly help in this matter.

Nuances of business promotion

Determining the boundaries of financial investments is the first step that an entrepreneur must take. A businessman needs to decide on the amount that he is ready to invest in the promotion of his own business.

As a rule, a large business with significant investments requires expensive advertising. If there is a start-up capital, an entrepreneur has the opportunity to contact advertising agencies. Specialists of such firms usually post information about client companies at all available sites: in transport and on it, in various media, on the walls of buildings, at stands with announcements, etc.

As a rule, there is not enough money for expensive advertising of small businesses with limited start-up capital. Because of this, a businessman must think about how to promote his project on his own. Modern budget promotion methods are often very effective, you just need to use them wisely.

Promotion in the network

Now it is almost impossible to imagine one day without the Internet. He helps people in all areas of life. Currently, the Internet is also a powerful tool for marketing promotion.

Business promotion on the Internet begins with the creation of a website. Every entrepreneur should understand that an attractive website is practically the company's business card, its "face". It is in the interests of the businessman to ensure that the resource attracts attention, looks solid and inspires trust among customers. SEO promotion is a difficult task that, if you have doubts about your own abilities, it is better to entrust it to professionals.

One of the most effective ways to attract an audience to the site is to place banner or display ads. Brand awareness can be achieved with these same tools. The only thing worth worrying about is the intrusiveness of published advertisements.

Now more and more often the promotion of a business from scratch begins in social networks. Many entrepreneurs underestimate the possibilities of social resources, although it is there that you can easily find a significant percentage of clientele. It is enough to create a group or a public page, place there all the necessary information about the company and its services and start inviting potential buyers.

Another tool for online promotion is company directories. On these portals, you can register your own company for free, add basic information about its activities and advertise several products from the available assortment.

Other sites for advertising:

• thematic sites;
• forums;
• message boards.

How to promote your business for free

There are many ways to promote your business for free, be remembered by your client and take a leading position in your niche. However, they all require the availability of another key resource for the business - time. It helps us get to know our client better, evaluate different approaches and the effectiveness of the influence of promotional tools, and also achieve much more significant success in marketing, even with a limited budget. We will tell you about the most effective online and offline ways to promote your business on the Internet.

Using Blogs

Blogging allows you to implement a multitasking strategy: you can tell the client about your product, life and news happening within the company, create a humane and friendly image of the organization when communicating with clients, and also close the distance between the businessman and the client. There are many platforms you can use to promote your business online for free. For blogging, use free services such as WordPress or Tumblr, which offer convenient design solutions that are unlike each other (an obvious advantage over LiveJournal), and allow you to follow the multimedia path: upload photos, videos, illustrations, duplicate posts on social networks.

All entries in a business blog can usually be divided into several categories or headings: they either talk about life within the company, or about the product that it deals with. We have already written about what ideas for corporate blogging can also be used. Understanding SEO principles can help you rank well in the search engines by writing quality articles. Considerable attention should be paid to the design and writing of the title post. This will help people more quickly understand who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer.

Communicate with customers through video

The best way to achieve multiple goals at once is to make a video about your business and post it on YouTube. It is not as difficult and expensive as it seems. You can shoot a video on your phone or ask your friends for a camera or camera, the main thing is to fill the video with interesting content. The basics of installation can also be mastered on your own if you have enough time.

Then post the video on Youtube, and if you are producing some kind of creative product, it is better on Vimeo. For example, the German headphone manufacturer Sennheiser shoots simple video reviews in which he talks about the features of different models and conducts a visual demonstration. Kiev store of Fotos equipment. a publishes reviews on all types of technology. Here, for example, is a video review of a Nikon camera.

You can go ahead and shoot an entire film or create a video blog containing regular releases, as the founders of the ComicZera comic book store in Orenburg did. They shot an almost half-hour pilot episode in which they talked about themselves, their readers and their favorite news.

Products designed for a specific or narrow audience are conveniently promoted through barter. For example, the musical instrument store SkifMusic has agreed with the famous musician Sergey Tabachnikov, who in his video talks about different models of guitars from this store, in exchange he can play them during performances. This promotion option can be successfully used for different types of business: produce creative dishes - negotiate with local restaurateurs or culinary bloggers, sew bags or accessories - make friends with fashion commentators.

How to Promote Your Business on the Internet with Photos

This method does not require any investment at all. Create an Instagram account and post just one photo every day. It can be anything: photos of a new product line, illustrations of everyday work, shots from production, changes in design, screenshots of funny correspondence.

Instagram has an amazing property: it allows almost everything to look more attractive than it actually is, but it does not require painstaking work on design. You can go further and use other services like Flickr or Pinterest. If you want something more, you can successfully use services that allow you to add text to a photo, that is, tell a story, for example, Exposure. The service allows you to create photo stories, has a friendly interface and a very beautiful design.

Website for brand promotion

A site is a platform that an interested client gets to. This means that each ad should be translated directly to your site by reference. The better its content, the more likely it is to interest the audience. The presence of reviews, an understandable and convenient catalog, a simple interface, descriptions, useful information encourage the visitor to take action - call, write, order.

The site should be easy to load from a smartphone, computer and tablet. For a small company, it will be enough to create a landing page. This is a business card site where all the necessary information about the company and the services provided is placed on one page.

For large enterprises it is necessary to create a full-scale multifunctional site with a specially designed structure.

Use of contextual advertising

The advantages of this method are:

• High speed of gaining new unique visitors. Their number instantly increases and does not decrease over time, but remains at a high level.
• If configured correctly by specialists, contextual advertising will work independently, without your participation.
• The costs of it are easy to control, the efficiency is easy and convenient to track.
• There are several different sites to choose from.

The disadvantages include cost. Contextual advertising is inexpensive, but for a small company it will most likely be unprofitable.

Contextual advertising is used for many search engines, but the maximum effect in our country is possible thanks to advertising in Yandex and Google.

Social networks as a tool for promoting business

Recently, Instagram has been gaining maximum popularity. It is here that it is best to promote goods and services for women - lingerie, clothing, cosmetics, perfumes, advertise to the masters of the beauty industry, because the main audience is girls 18-40 years old.

Small business, due to limited resources and specialized knowledge, often approaches promotion on the Internet haphazardly. Some create a beautiful landing page, others focus on the site, others, due to the lack of money and time to develop a website or a banal need for it, develop a group in social networks. Such a point approach is effective to a certain extent, but in order to uncover reserves, an integrated approach is needed - simultaneously involve different sites and different advertising channels. The question arises: will there be enough resources? The answer is enough. But only if you choose the right advertising tools and organize the work correctly.

Ways of organizing advertising for small businesses on the Internet

Small businesses face three challenges that prevent online advertising:

• lack of money (you constantly have to choose: promote the site or invest in contextual advertising; order high-quality texts on the site or improve usability; make flyers or hang a billboard around the corner, etc.) ;
• lack of staff (it is expensive for a small business to hire marketers, as a result, there is no one to advertise - the entrepreneur or a freelancer he knows has to do everything);
• lack of experience (the problem arises from the previous one - the entrepreneur has to to conduct advertising campaigns myself, but there is not enough knowledge and experience for this, as a result the budget is "drained").

It turns out that entrepreneurs cannot hire personnel due to high costs. There is no point in contacting agencies either - the minimum entry threshold here is from 40 thousand rubles, and the commissions reach 50%. It remains to conduct campaigns on their own.

There are two ways to go:

• Do everything yourself - optimize the site, write texts and creatives, select pictures, look for sites for advertising, negotiate prices and conditions with their owners, control the result. This path is suitable for those who are ready to devote time to training and further work in the direction of Internet marketing. But in conditions when it is necessary to conduct business in parallel, there is always not enough time for something and something remains unfinished.
• Connect to an automated advertising system. Such systems allow advertising a business "on autopilot" - with minimal participation of the owner. For work, you will have enough basic knowledge in Internet marketing, you don't have to dive into the process and engage in routine operations. As a result, time is saved and there is no risk of "draining" the budget. This option is most preferable for small businesses.

Small Business Advertising Tools

For small businesses, there are 3 basic tools: SEO, contextual advertising, and social media advertising. When used at the same time, it will be possible to quickly attract customers and increase competitiveness in the long term.

Important! It is recommended to start advertising on the Internet with SEO promotion. There is no point in attracting traffic without optimizing and improving the site or group in social networks. If the site is of poor quality, then visitors will not linger on it and place orders.

Promotion in Yandex and Google