Sometimes in the cycle of a business, when all is not flowing as smoothly as you would like ideally, it is time to return to the basics of marketing.
That is to re-process the first stage of marketing for all businesses in any way, shape or form – creating visibility and awareness.
Without ‘being seen’ or made ‘aware of’, there is zero potential of progressing to the decisive business steps which you need to grow, sustain and increase your sales.
When your overly-creative and complex marketing techniques and campaigns are failing to generate the traction which you need, it can be time to take a break and go back to the core foundations of escalating your marketing cycle again.
This process follows the logical pathway of the following steps:
Identifying your ideal customer profile
Discovering where they are
Targeting them with a simple but effective content source
Constantly repeating the process to nail down the visibility and awareness
The following platforms are excellent opportunities to begin showcasing your business, each with their own unique twist or value –
Quora
Quora is a special and often underrated visibility platform for all businesses or anyone looking to generate attention or share some information/content / create traction.
You will most probably be aware that Quora is a question and answer website. But you may be surprised as to the activity, relevance and broad topic range covered on the site.
You really can find people asking questions about anything and everything. For personal use, general interest, social interaction, but also for business purposes. Directly and indirectly, the questions asked on this platform offer a direct channel to expose your own business.
Whether that be through answering questions on behalf of your company. Questions which relate to the industry or the exact service you offer.
If you are a food supplier and there is a question asking can anyone recommend a food supplier? Then the logical thing to do would be to have a presence in the answer thread.
That will notify the person who has asked the question and also give the potential for 1000’s of impressions, views and interactions from other businesses who have came across the question, through Quora or even from wider search engines driving them to Quora.
It is almost like an SEO within SEO. You may answer a question and nothing will come from it. But you will not lose anything. There is no subscription and the answer remains for life as a seed which can grow.
Google Plus
Google Plus is a social media alternative which is littered with communities of relevance to your business. People are posting throughout these groups and looking for information. Again, use a search bar and locate a handful or more of communities which are linked to your services.
If you have any unique content or articles you can share amongst the community, it gives you something to attach yourself to. An excuse to be visible and creates a relevance within an environment where you want and need to be seen.
Post consistently, engage and be creative with your presentation. There is a direct opportunity to drive traffic to specific landing pages.
LinkedIn is a professional social media hub where you can connect with other businesses and business professionals to create relationships and opportunities going forward.
There are a lot of complex advertising and marketing avenues through LinkedIn but at a basic level optimising your business page and creating activity through sharing posts in groups is a simple way to be seen.
Search Engines
We must not forget that the search engines are one of the most powerful tools at our disposal to generate awareness and visibility. Ranking for competitive search terms related to your business and industry is a direct way to be found.
The key to this is to firstly identify the keyword opportunities through search volume and relevance. AHrefs is a wonderful Search Engine Optimisation tool which you can use to discover all kinds of ranking opportunities and insights to your competition’s link campaigns.
You then need to have a content segment created for this keyword. Content of greater quality and variety will be easier to rank. Therefore the coding, length, style, and words used will all be taken into account. Further to this your Yoast settings.
Once your content is live and you have indexed it within Google, you will need to begin your link building campaign to achieve its deserved rank.
Encouraging traffic and shares through social is a great way to start the visibility cycle but the real effects will come with pure backlinks to the content.
You can email interested parties to encourage backlinks in exchange for a social share of their own content. Or you can start guest posting to link back to your own content. Either way, you will need the link juice to start climbing the rankings and gaining the impressions.