Choosing which platforms to market your small business from should be written into your business and marketing plan. It sounds easy and obvious, but it isn’t. You need to stop and think about what best platforms for small businesses are available for your specific business and how to market on them. You might find otherwise that you waste a lot of time or money marketing to the wrong people. Or just that your target audience doesn’t use that platform.
This can be more complicated than you’d think. There are many online platforms for small businesses and choosing the best one for your business can be a daunting task. But, the good news is that you can narrow your choices and choose the one that suits your budget, requirement, business popularity, and service offering.
Here we have listed out some best business platforms which you can choose.
Online Shop
If you run an online shop you should be on Facebook and Instagram shopping. If your shop sells clothes, you might want to try Depop, or if you make items by hand, Etsy. Amazon Marketplace can be useful if you sell different items, but beware, it has a lot of issues. Unless you are certain you want to sell for Amazon, then try it on your own at first, before you sign up. Their customer service can be very hard to communicate with.
Create a logo and link it back to your website. It is so important to have a recognizable brand that you can use online and offline in your product packaging and design. If you don’t have a logo, you can design a free one here graphicsprings.
Having a website hosted through WIX can be a good option if you run a shop online but have a minimal budget. You can link to it through your Instagram and Facebook accounts.
Having a WordPress blog is also invaluable as you can create content and post it to your site.
Vlogs are the trending content creation of 2021, so if you are running an online shop without one, add it into your plan pronto. Even if you just make five thirty-second video clips per week and post them on YouTube with links to your other sites and content, you will get a lot of excited viewers.
Which Social Media Platforms To Use?
When deciding which social media platforms to use, do some research into the age group and popularity of the platform by country too. Different people in different places use different platforms. For example, many young people use Twitter, but so do a lot of celebrities and politicians. With this in mind, we can expect a much older demographic of people to move over to Twitter as the movement to online-based shopping and service providers increases.
Online Service-Based Business
For online services, you might want to go down a slightly different route. Set up a WordPress site for free at first so you can save money. Remember to link it to your Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
You might also want to sign up for LinkedIn as this is where a lot of professionals are. They will be open-minded about using an online service-based business.
Sign up for freelancer sites and earn backlinks to your website (some sites don’t like this so make sure to do it legally!).
Post your website in all your profiles and link to it in any way you can when promoting yourself on platforms. See which platform gets the most interactions and focus your marketing on there.
Add your logo to your sites and your posts and make it clickable. A logo is just as important for an online service-based business as a shop.
You join up to price comparison websites and on local pages promoting local businesses. The more reviews and certifications you acquire on different platforms, the more likely people will be to use your service-based business.
Conclusion
Deciding upon which platforms your business should be on is a continually flowing process dependent on what is popular, with who, at the time. Update your understanding of new platforms as they come out and read up on them using trusted blog sites like this one.
