3 tips to increase the visibility of your small business
What's the one thing you want more than anything else as the owner of a small business that thrives online? Isn't it to increase your visibility in order to attract more of your customers organically? If so, you can't do it without mastering a few simple inbound marketing techniques. Organic marketing (or inbound marketing) is a strategy that aims to create digital content that continuously brings you new client leads. Even more so, qualified leads or people already interested in your offers. You become more visible to the right people and you can say goodbye to prospecting or paid advertising. Isn't that just great? So let's get started! Here are our top 3 tips for increasing your businesses online visibility organically:
1. Differentiate yourself with your brand strategy
2. Optimize your website’s user interface (UI/UX) for greater visibility and appeal
3. Create valuable content for your target audience
1. Differentiate yourself with your brand strategy
To increase your visibility among your ideal customers, you first need a strong brand. A brand that clearly communicates who you are, why you're different and how you can help your customers. Here are the 3 key areas of your brand strategy that you can work on so that your brand brings you more of your best customers organically: your core values, your brand positioning, and your visual identity.
Determine your business's core values
What are the things that matter most to you as a small business owner? What do you stand for? What do you believe in? How do you want others to feel when they interact with your brand? These questions will help you identify the core values at the heart of your business.
For example, if one of your core values is respect for the environment, this may be reflected in the degree of your office's ecological awareness (and energy efficiency), the amount of recycled materials used in your products or services, and the care you take in sourcing materials from local suppliers.
Identify your unique market positioning
Once you've identified these core values, it's time to think about how your values apply to your unique market positioning.
Think about how you want to position yourself in relation to other companies in your industry. Do you want to be perceived as innovative or traditional? Modern or old-fashioned? Affordable or luxurious? What will your brand’s tone of voice be? Conversational, warm and engaging? Or more serious and professional? All these choices have an impact on how people will perceive your business.
If there's one thing all small businesses have in common, it's that they need to stand out from the crowd to attract the right people to their product or service offering. And it's the positioning of your brand, the impression you leave, the visual universe you create around your business that will make the difference between you and the next guy!
Create an aligned visual identity
Once you've defined who you are as a company and what impression you want to make on your potential customers, you need to align your visual identity with these pillars of your marketing so that it conveys these key elements.
The 4 key elements of your visual identity or branding are: your logo, your color palette, your fonts and your photographic / video style. To find out more, take a look at this blog article on how to create powerful branding and the 4 golden rules to follow in order to succeed.
These elements need to be consistent across all platforms, whether it's your posts on social media, your email newsletters or your print materials... Everywhere and all the time, your business's DNA will be communicated at every point of contact with your potential customers.
2. Optimize your website’s user interface (UI/UX) for greater visibility and appeal
The primary objective of your website is to gain visibility on Google. Do you want to attract and convert more new customers to your business continuously, 24 hours a day through your site? This is achieved by optimizing the content of your website!
We live in a world of instant gratification and short attention spans. If your customers click through to your website from Google but you lose their attention or contact, you won't see any concrete results for your business.
So here are 3 simple steps you can take to optimize your website and convert more of your visitors into leads, and then into customers for your small business.
Optimize the user experience on your website
The first step is to optimize the user experience on your site. You want visitors to have a positive experience on your site - quality web design and simple, intuitive navigation will help them find what they're looking for quickly and easily.
We recommend making your navigation bar as simple and easy to understand as possible. An easy-to-navigate site means satisfied visitors who quickly find what they're looking for... and discover other products or services that may be of interest to them.
Improve your site's loading speed
The second step is to ensure that your website loads quickly. Studies have shown that people expect websites to load in under three seconds. If yours takes longer, you'll lose potential customers before they even have time to see what's available on your site!
We advise you to test your site's loading speed with this free tool that we love: GT Metrix. If your results are below 60%, you need to lighten your website by reducing the size of all images and videos, or even better, host your videos on a website like YouTube or Vimeo and using an embedded link instead of uploading large video files directly to your website’s back-end. Also be sure to delete any unnecessary pages or media files for example.
Place clear, attractive CTAs on your site
Thirdly, you need to include buttons with clear call to actions (CTAs) on every page of your website. You want to encourage your visitors to take action on your site, so you need to help them do what you want them to do, such as place an order or sign up for your newsletter! This can be as simple as a button or link indicating the action to be taken, or as complex as a contact form.
You can use short, punchy phrases that resonate with your target audience, directly hitting their pain points and prompting them to take immediate action: "get more of this" or "start your new life" instead of simply "buy now".
3. Create valuable content for your ideal clients
Create useful & valuable content for your target audience
To increase your small business' online visibility, you need to create useful, high-quality content that clearly meets the needs of your target audience. Use a variety of formats such as videos, infographics or podcasts, as different formats attract different audiences.
You can write blog posts, share guides or tutorials that address your audience's needs, answering questions they may have in your area of expertise. Explain how the tools you use work and why they're useful in solving their biggest problems. Your goal? Reach more people who like to learn new things in your field. Still sounding a little vague to you? Discover the 7 steps to using content marketing in your business.
Be transparent and authentic
Your small business needs to be transparent and authentic in its communications. In other words, create a bond and generate emotion. Since there isn't necessarily direct contact between you and your customers online, you need to recreate this closeness with your content.
To stand out from the crowd, rely on authentic interactions through storytelling. Don't just try to sell with your digital content: share personal stories about yourself or your customers with transparency and honesty, recounting your ordeals, your successes, your discussions...
Build trust with your audience
Trust is the basis of a healthy business. It's linked to human psychology: we want to know who we're dealing with, so we can trust them and then go on to buy. So your content - and, more generally, the way you communicate - should aim to establish a relationship of trust with your target audience.
To do this, simply remember to reply politely to all your comments and messages, interact with your subscribers by asking them questions and taking an interest in them, and regularly offer them free advice and services via your newsletter or available resources (lead magnets).
And there you have it, you now know what to do to increase your small business's online visibility. If you apply these tips you'll start to organically attract more and more of your ideal customers through your online content. These tips are based on the techniques of attraction marketing, our favorite subject. Want to find out more? Sign up for our 100% free on-demand training in an exclusive workshop: get immediate access to a 30 minute training to discover in detail the exact method we use to attract more customers without prospecting!
