Ways to Promote Your Business Online

Marketing moves at a breakneck speed. Since innovation in this industry occurs on a weekly basis, navigating it without properly filtering news from noise can be intimidating, distracting, and even lead to costly mistakes.

When you try to do this alone, it’s easy to fall victim to every small update and obsess over new, shiny software even when it may not be immediately relevant to your business. If your goal is to use technology and online promotion to grow your business significantly, the most important thing to do is figure out what to focus on and double down on it.

To help you avoid tool-fatigue and burnout, as well as alert you to things that may lead to nowhere, we’ll outline 5 ways you can effectively promote your business online by leveraging the power of technology.

Create And Publish Content Regularly

Consumers are far more cautious than 10 years ago. They take fewer leaps of faith with brands they know nothing about and that don't provide enough value. Because of that, businesses have to earn the trust of consumers well before they purchase products and services.

The best way to provide value and earn trust as a company is by positioning yourself as a thought leader in your field. This can be achieved by regularly posting content aimed at educating and providing solutions to your target customers’ problems.

This content, which can range from blog articles and podcasts to short and long-form videos, should be posted on platforms with high user traffic, optimized for SEO, and curated on your website using a Content Management System (CMS).

Over the long term, curating a content library using a CMS increases the organic traffic your business gets and makes your products and services more discoverable for your target audience.

Develop Multiple Sales Funnels

When promoting your business online, it’s important not to rely only on one sales channel, but instead, diversify your sales funnels to protect your business from seasonality and dry spells.

Social media lead generation is one such alternative funnel. It consists of publishing your brand’s content on sites like Youtube, Instagram, and TikTok to take advantage of their organic traffic in order to drive their users to your products and services.

You can create another valuable funnel by capitalizing on the existing user base of online marketplaces. Platforms like these focus on generating traffic and getting buyers on board while allowing individual entrepreneurs and businesses to offer products and services through them in exchange for a commission fee (often between 10-20%).

For example, if you happen to have a software development agency, you can join Pangea.ai as a vendor to promote your services among the thousands of visitors and potential buyers who visit daily, and are looking to hire software developers for a wide variety of projects.

Grow An Email List

While leveraging the user base on other sites is fundamental for any growth strategy, nothing is as effective in promoting your business online as direct outreach, or contacting your customers directly through personal means (most commonly, by email).

To be able to do this, customers must give you their emails first as a sign that they’re interested in your products in the first place. One way to make this happen is by providing them with free value, often in the form of a lead magnet or a special discount in exchange for their contact information.

Having your customers’ emails allows you to add them to your email list and pitch them your products and services in their inbox, something you can operate with the use of tools like MailChimp, Klaviyo, or using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

These tools allow you to segment your potential customers into separate audiences based on things such as location and behavior (which emails they open, and past purchasing behavior) so that you can design specific messages catering to each of them. This is important since adding personalization to your emails in the form of dynamic titles, headlines, and CTAs can increase click-through rate and conversion up to 78.5%, according to iMPACT.

One last thing to note is that the conversion rate from email marketing campaigns tends to vary, and your results will depend on the quality of your leads, pitches, and products. Anything between 2-5% is considered a healthy conversion rate, according to Mailchimp.

In-App Advertising

A growing trend you should consider is promoting your business using ads placed within popular apps. Companies like Tinder, Spotify, and more have been selling ads for years since it’s attractive for a lot of businesses to advertise their products to their 66 and 345 million monthly user bases.

While in-app advertising is not new, more and more companies with freemium apps are toying with the idea lately to increase revenue in times of economic downturn, with Netflix being one of its latest practitioners. And its adoption will only continue to grow along with the number of smartphone users and usage.

In-app ads even show signs of greater effectiveness than mobile web ads, currently championing a global click-through rate (CTR) of .56% against the latter’s .23%.

To profit the most from this form of marketing, it’s important to figure out which apps have a user base similar to your target demographic and implement an appropriate retargeting strategy to follow up on the leads gained from these apps.

Go Global With Multilingual Content

One of the most underrated ways to scale your business’ online reach is by making your site, content, and services available in multiple languages.

Translating and localizing your existing content takes half the effort of creating new content from scratch. After all, you’re just repurposing assets you already own so that a wider audience can get exposed to your business.

If you’re interested in going global with multilingual content, you can do it by either hiring a professional translator or by relying on startups such as Weglot, who use AI to automatically translate the text on your web content into multiple languages.

Once you translate your content, you’ll be discoverable in the search results of queries made in different languages, which will inevitably bring more traffic to your site and with that, more potential customers.

The effectiveness of this strategy depends heavily on the nature of your offer. For example, businesses dealing with logistics and supply chains in the manufacture and shipment of goods may have a harder time profiting from this than businesses offering online services and digital products.

Another advantage of translating your marketing content into different languages is that you’ll be able to gauge the demand that different markets have for your products, which can be a good indicator that it’s time to expand geographically.

FAQs:

Q1. How can technology be used for promotion?

To utilize technology for promotion, you can create multiple sales funnels for your business within different platforms and apps to drive new leads to your site. You can also provide a valuable freebie to your visitors (like a catalog, an ebook, or a special discount) in exchange for their emails, which allows you to send them exclusive content and special offers using email marketing tools.

However, there are endless ways to promote products and services using technology.

Q2. How is technology used in advertising?

For starters, you can use it to segment your audience based on gender, age group, country, preferences, and more to create unique ads that specifically cater to different groups. You can also add personalization to your content to make potential customers more likely to engage with it.

Another example is that it lends the ability to design dynamic ads that appear to different people based on their online behavior, recent search history, or in which step of your marketing funnel they’re currently within. Thus, technology helps advertising become more sophisticated and efficient.

Q3. What new technologies are used in marketing?

Right now there are over a dozen promising technologies continuously evolving that may change marketing as we know it – among these are:

• Artificial intelligence
• Chatbots and machine learning
• Blockchain
• Internet of Things (IoT)
• Big Data & Data Science
• Virtual reality
• Augmented reality
• The Metaverse

Marketing is one of the fastest-evolving industries in the world because it adapts to the changes in people’s interests, habits, and behavior.