The Shop Window: Your business’ online presence

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By Heather Richards

When you start a new business, the hardest thing is to get yourself known and to get across reasons why potential customers should buy your product or use your service in preference to one of your competitors. Local adverts and recommendations can be useful, but these take time, and as a new business you will be anxious to get as many customers as you can as quickly as possible.

Technology Makes It Easier

Spreading the word will be even more important for new businesses that are based totally on the internet, such as an online casino, a gaming site, or any other business where all the transactions will be carried out online. Can technology facilitate the needs of the businesses of tomorrow?

In this technological age, it’s so much easier to achieve this aim if you have a good online presence from the start. How do you make this happen? You need to start by researching your potential customers to establish which digital medium will be the best for you. Knowing the most effective way to reach the market you are aiming for can help your new business get off the ground.

Contacting By Email

Email marketing can be very effective if the email has content that is interesting and gets the attention of the reader. You do not want to end up in their junk without the email even being opened, so always have a subject that will make recipients want to open it and read more.

The Explosion Of Social Media

It is not long ago social media was largely ignored by most businesses. Now most companies have a presence on resources like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These enable you to talk directly to anyone interested, although you should make sure your posts are more than just an advert for your company. Most users are on social media to interact with friends and family, and you need to become one of those friends without your posts being scrolled past as an advert.

If someone creates a post you like, don’t be frightened to say so. If someone complains about your product or service make sure you reply quickly and positively, as there could be thousands of people that see something has gone wrong, and you want to show you deal with complaints seriously.

Managing social media accounts can be very time consuming, but well worth the effort. Some businesses let their marketing company deal with it for them, and others have an employee dedicated to it.

Your Website – The First Impression

Your website could be the first time a potential customer comes across your company, so you need it to make a good impression. It needs to be unique, user-friendly and responsive. If your site is hard to use, or they cannot see it properly on their smartphone, it will not take them long to move onto a competitor. It’s estimated you have 2 to 4 seconds to grab the interest of the viewer, don’t waste it.

Now you have decided on the type of business you are engaging in, it’s time to start creating your online presence. It needs to be good to be effective, and there is no shortage of marketing experts to help you.

Picture: Dennis Skley via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)