The business world is fast-paced and if you aren’t keeping up with the crowd, you could find yourself falling pretty quickly. One of the most common reasons for start-ups failing within the first year is that they didn’t market their business well enough so though they had a great business idea, they didn’t allow that potential to grow.

Create an SEO Strategy

SEO is usually best considered a marathon, not a sprint, but there are aspects of SEO that can also bring you some more immediate results. For example, using local marketing techniques will help you to make your business more visible to the people around you and will also give you more opportunities to rank on search engines using more specific keywords. Similarly, adding a blog will give you plenty of opportunities to add lots more content and give you more varied options for what you share on social media to encourage clicks.

Maybe you find the idea of committing to an SEO campaign intimidating? We’ve all been there! If you’re a new business owner, or you’ve never run a website before, this is a huge task to suddenly take in hand. But that’s why custom seo services exist out there; you don’t often have to build your backlog alone, and there’s a lot of advice online you can put into practice as well.

For many business professionals, SEO is a completely different world and it does come with a whole language of its own. However, it is possible to pick up various strategies as you go along and improve your skill set as you improve your site. If you want to ensure immediate success, though, you are better off at least consulting with a company like Ignite Digital who offer comprehensive SEO services.

Sort Your Social

If you want to be a successful business, you need to have customers and to get customers, you need to get out there and find the people who fit best into your target audience. Years ago this would have meant putting flyers through letterboxes or giving out balloons in the street with a hopeful grin, but nowadays it’s all about creating a social media presence.

Social media is now so important that as a business you need to make sure that you maintain your presence and allow customers to see that you will engage with them as well as posting relevant links. Gone are the days of cold calling until you get a bite, now social selling is a far better prospect and when you compare the 1% success rate of cold calling with the 69% success rate of social selling, it’s obvious why you should put down the phone and pick up the keyboard.

The most successful brands demonstrate time and again why social media is such a great way to appeal to target audiences with refined ads, a social team who engage with users and plenty of content for users to click through. While you might not have the same resources to man the social fort 24/7, you can still do all the same things that giants like Coca-Cola and Red Bull, you just need to be creative and get your message out there.

Build Your Email List

You probably get at least 2 or 3 marketing emails a day from brands you like to follow. Maybe they are telling you about an upcoming sale or pointing out a new range of products. Perhaps they are asking you about your experience or expressing sadness that you haven’t visited their site in a while. Whatever it is, they are emailing you for one reason: to remind you that their brand exists, that you like it and that you should visit their website immediately. And you should be doing this too.

Creating an email list is one of the best ways to ensure that you have access to your customers and can pass on information to them about your business. The key to success here is making sure that all your emails are relevant to your customers and achieving that fine balance between communicating enough and going too far and becoming annoying. This is why so many companies send out monthly newsletters or email their customers to tell them about an upcoming sale: this information is valuable enough not to become irritating.

Setting up any business is hard and though you are most certainly relying on your own particular skill set to become successful, you will also have to learn more about marketing and SEO to reach your full potential. For many businesses, this side of things is better off outsourced to a specialist company, so while you should be aware of what is going on, this could be a good option for you. However, if you do have time, do research alternative solutions and creative marketing ideas – you never know what could be the next big trend and riding that wave is what business is really all about.

Keep a Tech Budget

Everyone knows about renting an office, owning and running a fleet and paying for storage space. That much anyone can work out when they are trying to boost their business. However, your tech budget is going to become a real factor when you consider expanding. This is because more employees often means more tech accounts on software and services. To avoid getting in over your head and spending your money wisely, a company like IT Ally LLC has great techniques to manage your tech debt and spending habits. No matter how much software you need, always keep in mind that it will cost more and more the more you ask of it.