One of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs usually face is gaining enough exposure for their businesses. However, the internet has made things a lot easier for businesses. Earlier, you could go for television and newspaper ads or even radio jingles, but those were significantly expensive. Putting ads on the internet is comparatively cheaper yet more effective.
If you want to establish your business as a brand, you need to have a comprehensive advertising and marketing strategy in place. While some strategies do require a lot of money for proper execution, you can also promote your business and gain more experience with smarter and cheaper ways.
- List your business on an affiliate marketing site:
Affiliate marketers are experts at lead generation. They help market another company’s products or services in exchange for a commission. In simpler words, these affiliate marketers promote a product or service on their platform and subsequently earns a piece of the profit from every sale they make.
Such affiliate marketers work across all sectors. You only need to find affiliate marketing sites that have a thriving affiliate ecosystem and enlist your brand there. In most cases, you only need to pay the affiliate marketer if the consumer purchases your product or service, making this a very cost-effective way of gaining more exposure.
- Leverage social media to grow your audience:
There are 2.7 billion monthly active users on Facebook. Instagram and Twitter have around 1.08 billion and 326 million active users every month. If you are not using these social media platforms to your advantage, you are actually wasting the opportunity to grow your audience. You can gain a lot of exposure for your business using these social media platforms without costing a single penny.
Before you prepare a strategy for social media marketing, it is important that you identify your audience and the platform where they engage the most. Then you need to prepare a content strategy for the specific social media platforms and post regularly. You can also use social media to share news, articles, and features published on your website and gain more exposure for your business. If you have the budget, you can also boost certain posts to highly specific demographics for better reach.
- Use content marketing to your advantage:
If I were to talk about content marketing, it would have taken an entire blog to discuss that one topic only. While content marketing is a vast category, let’s focus on the parts that can help you gain more exposure for your business. Start by developing an easy-to-access website with a proper landing page and a dedicated content library. The content library can help you quickly improve your ranking on search engines such as Google.
Post unique, authentic, and well-written content that is highly valuable for your audience and sees a significant improvement on where you rank on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). You do need to optimize the content for the search engines so that it appears higher on the SERPs. Add insightful blogs, success stories, news about your business, features, and interviews which you think will engage your audience.
- Sponsor events:
Sponsoring events, teams, and people that get massive exposure in the popular media can help you boost the brand awareness for your business among the audience. There is a misconception about sponsorship that only big enterprises can sponsor events that are significant. However, there are plenty of local opportunities as well.
Let’s say you have developed a platform that allows students to access study materials for college assignment help. You can consider sponsoring an annual cultural event at a reputed school or college. This will give you a great opportunity to drive awareness for your business and product among the people who will be using it.
Moreover, sponsorship is often a cheaper alternative to other paid forms of advertising and marketing efforts.
- Reach out to influencers:
Influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to gain exposure in your target market. You will be glad to know that 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity blogger. So, you can simply collaborate with a blogger or social media influencer to promote your brand or products and leverage their reach to gain more exposure.
You will, again, need a strategy to properly execute the marketing efforts regarding an influencer. But before that, you need to identify a blogger or social media content creator within your niche who has a significant number of followers on social media. It is important that you choose an influencer whose posts are in compliance with your brand’s goals so that when they promote your business, the posts do not look inorganic.
- Paid advertising and marketing:
While a majority of the measures mentioned above get your job done within a limited budget, you can consider making an investment in the paid advertising as well. As mentioned before, paid advertising and marketing can be quite expensive. But those things do get your business a significant amount of exposure. Consider spending on a double-page spread on a popular magazine in your industry or partnering with a popular podcasting platform.
Before you spend your funds on advertising, do some digging about your target audience and try to find out where they spend most of their time. If they do not read magazines or do not listen to podcasts, investing in those areas will be a waste of money. If they spend most of their time on social media, you can opt for paid advertising on social media pages as well. You can even consider the Pay-Per-Click ads on Facebook, Google, etc.
In conclusion,
It is important to acknowledge the fact that gaining exposure for your business and building brand awareness does not happen overnight. It is a continuous process, and it takes time to show results. So, if you are looking for quick success, entrepreneurship may not be the best place to try your hands. However, if you can put in consistent efforts and use the aforementioned measures, you are most likely to see a growth in the exposure your business is getting.
Author bio: Amelie Gruber is a senior marketing manager at a reputed eCommerce company in the UK. She is also a part of the team of experts at MyAssignmenthelp.com, where she offers computer science assignment help to students on their requests. She has also served as a guest lecturer in a number of B-schools in the country.