Growing your Minneapolis business is an ongoing process. You want to make sure that you’re putting your effort into the right places, especially if you’re a small business with a limited budget for marketing.
If you don’t know where to start, growing your business can seem like a daunting process! This guide will help you uncover the secrets to building your business whether you’re starting from the ground up or simply expanding your existing business.
Step One: Revamp Your Webpage
Web design is a critical part of the “public face” that both customers who are local to Minneapolis and those who are across the country see when they’re looking for information about your business. Your webpage needs to be neat, professionally designed, and enticing in order to convince interested customers to choose your business instead of your competitors’. There are several points that you’ll want to consider when designing your webpage if you’re ready to grow your business.
- Make sure your servers can handle an increase in traffic. This is particularly important if you’re going to be selling online, especially when you run big specials and other sales that will draw in high volumes of customers.
- Make your website mobile friendly. Local customers want to be able to find your business, contact you, and even place orders from their cell phones, tablets, and other devices. Not only that, Google and other search engines reward websites that are mobile friendly and penalize those that aren’t.
- Provide the content customers most need on your homepage and make it easy for them to navigate to other key information. A homepage that doesn’t tell what your business does is unprofessional and makes it difficult for customers to choose your business.
- Choose images with care. Stock images have their value, especially if you’re just getting started, but they’re also the same images that are seen by customers across the internet. If you want your business to stand out, your images should, too.
Step Two: Work on SEO
Search engine optimization is a headache for many small business owners, especially those who have no idea how to push their business to the top of search engine rankings. Is it really that critical to be in the top one or two? Just how important is that first page of Google search results? As it turns out, it’s becoming increasingly necessary to bring your business as close to the top of those rankings as possible. The first search result on Google gets approximately 33% of the search traffic. Only 10% of searchers will even go to the second page. That makes pushing your page to the top of those rankings pretty important!
Building SEO is an ongoing process. You’re expected to create content on a regular basis, updating your page frequently to produce new content. Not only that, you need a content library that addresses numerous keywords so that visitors will be able to find your site from a variety of sources. Take a look at the keywords your competitors are highlighting, but make sure that your focus is on the ones that are the most relevant for your business.
Step Three: Create a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising Campaign
Boosting organic search results is often a time-consuming process. Pay-per-click advertising, on the other hand, allows you to quickly boost your results: simply launch a PPC campaign on your search engine of choice and watch your site traffic increase. You can also design PPC ads that will appear in other locations. With PPC advertising, you pay a small fee every time someone clicks on your ad, whether they’re coming from a search engine or a webpage. Ideally, this fee won’t be an added expense, because the visit to your website will be worth more than you spent.
Make sure you manage PPC advertising carefully in order to ensure that it reaches the right people. Add negative keywords to more specifically target your chosen audience, research the right keywords for your campaign so that you’ll be more likely to bring in the right kind of traffic for your website, and monitor the campaign to be sure that it’s bringing in traffic that converts to increase your success levels.
Step Four: Grow Your Social Media Presence
These days, it seems as though everyone and their grandmother is on social media. With 1.94 billion active users in March of 2017, Facebook has become a force that marketers can’t ignore. Then there’s Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram–and those are just some of the social media giants. Your social media presence can help spread the word about your business–but only if you use it correctly.
- Choose the right social media platform. Understand social media demographics and determine which accounts your buyer personas are most likely to have.
- Post consistently and frequently, but not too frequently. Posting consistency can make a huge difference in the number of clicks per post, so make sure that each post you create is worth your while.
- Design posts that are intended to increase interaction. Ask insightful questions that matter to your audience. The more potential customers interact with your business, the more positive their opinion of you will be.
- Use your social media accounts as a platform that will allow you to listen to your audience. Find out what they really want from your business, then do your best to deliver it. Listen to their pain points, discover their needs, and position your business to offer them the answers to those concerns.
Growing your business is an ongoing process that requires a strong online presence. If you’re struggling to build your online presence or need help building a high-quality, professional webpage, contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your Minneapolis business.
