You’ve decided to start a new business? Great! Obviously, these days you’ll need a website to go along with it. However, you don’t have to wait with marketing your business before the website is up.
There are some great ways to start building your audience even before the website you’re working on is online.
This can be very beneficial for you for several reasons – you gradually start building hype around your brand, people will flock to the website as soon as it becomes functional etc. You can use tools like CoSchedule and can organize all of your marketing in one place. So, let’s talk a little about these first steps you can make.
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Social networks
Right, this was probably your first idea, too. Creating a profile/page on things like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can help you start reaching out to people right away. You invite your friends, they invite theirs and pretty soon you have a very decent following.
Apart from that, you can regularly communicate with the followers there before the website is up and explain all about what you’re doing, what you’re offering or what your goal is. Not to mention that you can invest in ads on these networks, ads that can target the demographic you believe would be most likely to show interest in your product.
Read More: 7 Strategies to Start a Business Online [With SEO on the List]
One social network many people don’t think of instantly, however, is YouTube. If you’re at all interested in producing videos, you should go for it. This can give you an edge over the competition, plus you can even start monetizing the videos if they take off. Creating that type of unique content is likely to be appreciated by a wide audience.
Additionally, to increase effectiveness, create a social media report like you are preparing for your client. Include everything in detail and their results and focus on key points to shape your future strategies. Modification in strategies based on data can help you drive better results at a faster rate.
Email marketing accounts
There are plenty of e-mail marketing accounts out there that offer their services for free up to a certain number of emails and subscribers per month. But these often number in their thousands, so for a fledgling business, this is essentially not a limitation at all. Sure, it will take some time to set everything up, but since you’re not actually investing any funds, you can only profit from it. Things don’t get much more cost-effective than that.
People check emails consistently every single day, and if they like what you’re offering, they won’t mind getting promotional emails from you. As a matter of fact, they are more likely to act after receiving one of those than if they see a post on a social network because emails are much more personal.
Reach out to your potential clients this way and include a call to action by creating a unique signature. The results may surprise you.
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Notify people your website is coming
Even if you don’t have a website up yet, but you’ve created a URL for it and done everything that goes along with that, insert a link to that URL into your social network profiles.
Then, you can set up a landing page that will be shown to your visitors instead of the 404 error page (make sure they DON’T see this because the effect this can have can be very damaging). You can customise the landing page according to your upcoming website theme, adding a short custom video or a gif can be a nice feature.
Through your Coming Soon page, you can communicate with the visitors and input a call to action or even ask their email from them. Plus, the page you create can be aesthetically pleasing and give your visitors a clearer idea of what to expect when the site becomes fully functional. It’s a nice and subtle way to connect with people.
Try Pixpa for free, and create your portfolio website, client galleries, online store & blog. All in one place.
15 days free trial. No Credit Card required.
Research and analysis
You can’t just slap on a few pages these days and call that a website. Well, you can, but it won’t do you much good – it certainly won’t help you if you want search engines to rank you highly, and if the user experience is not good enough, you won’t be able to entice the people who do come and see your website to come back.
Therefore, some planning has to be made. Research the keywords you want to rank for and try to make them a bit more specific. Finding a niche in which you can operate can do wonders for your SEO ranking. Learn about the audience you’re trying to reach and try to speak to them as simple but as directly as possible. While planning things, communicate and exchange ideas with your marketing mentor to line up different ideas in case of uncertainty.
Also Read: Make your business cards for free
Also, try to organize your website in a sensible manner because you want people to be able to easily find whatever they’re looking for from whichever page they land on. If you think you will be adding new content on regular basis, consider going with cornerstone content. Of course, clear-cut categories will also help.
Do keep in mind that your pages have to load quickly when people are searching them, so don’t overload them with huge images or things like that.
Read More: Common Business Problems And Their Solutions In 2020
Don’t be afraid to invest
Sure, many of the things that you need for a website can be found free. Most of them you can probably even do on your own. But often small investments can go a long way, so don’t be a penny-pincher.
Maybe you do want that premium theme for your website because it will attract more people; you certainly want a pro website, and you really should consider advertising on social networks.
Also Read: Boudoir Photography San Diego Ca
You can also invest in a membership in an organization that operates in your field. If you do that, you will have access to a whole lot of people who are very likely to be interested in what you have to offer, plus you will KNOW they are willing to pay for it.
In addition, you yourself will be much more appealing to them once you get through the paywall because they will see you’re willing to put your money where your mouth is.
However, you don’t want to be a spammer in these groups or bore people to death with stories about your products. Rather, approach them in a helpful way and suggest that they check out what you offer. The chances are they will, at the very least, listen very tentatively to what you have to say.
