Advertising your small business to increase sales

Advertising your small business to increase sales and interest in your product can is an effective yet generally very expensive venture. As social networking’s popularity has increased dramatically over recent years, and many companies are looking to take full advantage of the amount of available exposure through these social networking sites. The internet is connecting more people and creating more online groups and niches than ever before, this makes for the perfect environment in which to promote your business and spread the your message to as many potential customers as possible.

Paying to display a PPC (pay per click) linked advert on these huge social networks is considerably expensive are there is no real guarantee that many people will click it; this is why starting your own company profile is a superior method of reaching out to potential customers.

By running your own company Facebook profile you can take full advantage of the tools that the website provides you with, like a place to sell your products on Facebook. The first and most obvious way to reach more people through Facebook is to increase the amount of people on your ‘friends list’, this means every time you update your profile or release some news, each of the people on your friends list will see the update upon login. It goes without saying that you should aim to show these posts and updates to as many people as possible.

Next you will have to consider what kinds of incentives you are willing to offer to people. Does your company website offer promotional discount codes? Do you have a product that is appealing to a wide range of people? Let’s say for example that we own an electronics store; we do well locally but we’re looking to direct more traffic towards our website. A great first step would be to decide on an appealing prize that we can offer to anyone who comes to our electronic store’s Facebook page and ‘likes’ it. This is a great way of pulling in traffic that would otherwise not know about your store, as every time a person ‘likes’ your page, the people on their list are shown “Adam Smith likes Danny’s Electronics”. This may temp them to check out your page, and once they do they see “Enter our prize draw by ‘liking’ Danny’s Electronics for your chance to win an MP3 player!” Thy ‘like’ the page; and so on.

So, now our Facebook profile is ‘hot’ and booming with new interest, we can start posting fresh updates and news about our products and offers. Any news about sales, discounts or products should certainly be posted on your profile with a direct link to the relevant page on our site. E.g. “Save a massive 40% on all selected mp3 players” with a link to your mp3 player page.

Interact with anyone who decides to comment on your profile with updates and maintain a friendly, professional tone while sending any replies. This can help to humanize your brand and give your company a lot of likability.

Remember; be sure to quickly build interest to your website by giving an incentive to new visitors to ‘like’ your page. While your profile is gaining a lot of fresh interest drop well timed status updates and comments regarding news and products on your home website.

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