For UK businesses, it can be tricky showcasing your qualities on a highly congested world stage. The task of growing your brand and appealing to new customers can throw you out of your comfort zone, but the reward of building your reputation and catering to new audiences can help to skyrocket your conversions.
But how can organic growth be achieved? While there’s no magic formula for marketing success, there are many measures that you can take to help to build your business in a sustainable manner.
UK businesses are increasingly turning their attention towards digital marketing, with spending climbing to £25.84 billion in 2022, with annual growth rates outpacing many other digital industries.
So, how can your business grow your online presence in a sustainable manner? Let’s take a look at seven of the most effective ways that you can market your business to drive better organic traffic, generate more leads, and generate higher conversion rates:
1. Keyword research
The great thing about having a well-thought-out USP is that the chances are there are people already searching for your products or services online, and your challenge is to simply find them.
Whether you’re looking to showcase your business to a competitive or desolate market, it’s essential that you use the right keywords so that the right users can discover your brand organically.
To do this, you’ll need to conduct keyword research. If you’re a user of Ahrefs, it can be a great tool for discovering how to rank higher on Google and other search engines for the keywords you use in your on-site content.
By using Ahrefs’ keyword explorer, you can use industry terms to discover their ranking difficulty. Let’s imagine you’re a pet shop seeking to grow your online presence by adding keywords related to ‘pet food’. Ahrefs is capable of providing insights for the term as well as suggestions to help you to rank higher for terms.
One of the suggestions in this example, the question ‘pure pet food’ has a far lower keyword difficulty with a score of 2. This means that you’re more likely to rank higher on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) for anyone running this query.
The trick here is to find a low-difficulty keyword with a high search volume. This means that many people are searching on Google for the terms and only a few websites are in a position to offer suitable results–helping to pave the way for your brand to reach those all-important front pages of Google.
2. Prioritise quality content
While attempting to rank for low-difficulty keywords is important, so too is ensuring that your website’s content is good enough to keep visitors engaged in your pages.
Building an on-site blog can work wonders for your website. This is because you can rank for more keywords, give your leads more of a reason to visit your pages and demonstrate your value as an industry voice of authority.
But the information you share on your blog needs to be engaging and relevant. Try to avoid boring your readers or failing to offer any information of substance. Instead, create easy-to-follow insights filled with informative subheadings and images.
However, it’s also essential that you avoid misinformation or sharing your unfounded opinions with visitors. To grow your presence online, it’s important to shape your reputation as a source of reliable information.
There are many tools that can help you in terms of generating high-quality content from a readability perspective, and Grammarly is an excellent AI platform that can review your copy and make suggestions from a grammatical point of view to further optimise your writing for readers.
3. Guest posting
If you’re keen to grow your online presence as a UK business and potentially expand into international markets, there’s no better way to appeal to new audiences and generate organic traffic than through guest posting on high domain authority (DA) websites.
Guest posting is the act of creating content with quality backlinks linking to your brand’s website that can be published on an external site. This can be a strong source of referral traffic where browsers will read your content and subsequently click on your backlink to learn more.
So, how can you begin guest posting? Again Ahrefs has a site explorer tool that can show the backlinks of any website. This means that you can use the tool to discover which backlinks other websites in your industry have gained and seek to set up similar links on these sites by outreaching to their respective editors.
In addition to this, many high DA websites online have on-site guest posting capabilities that can help to generate significant new traffic streams back to your homepage or landing page.
Looking for quality guest posting but don’t have the time to create and outreach content yourself? Enlisting a specialist agency is a way to go. Solvid is a great option for running guest posting and blogger outreach campaigns. They’re the only agency that has the skill and industry pedigree to offer DA80+ and DR90+ placements.
Solvid enables businesses, agencies and personal brands to create guest posting orders based on a number of measurable criteria, like Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), Publisher’s Traffic, or a combination of these metrics and more.
4. Optimise social media
With Facebook’s monthly active users (MAU) totalling almost three billion people, it’s clear that social media is an opportunity that any ambitious UK business can’t afford to miss out on.
The task of optimising your brand for social media can be a difficult and daunting challenge. However, when your social profiles are set up, building a presence on these platforms can help you to communicate your brand values to followers and generate greater organic traffic.
With this in mind, there are plenty of ways you can optimise social media to grow your business, and these can include:
- Creating a Facebook group for your customers to build a community around your business
- Retarget users with Facebook ads
- Conduct social listening to create content that your target audience is talking about
- Optimise your socials for your industry i.e. using Instagram’s visual elements for a fashion business
- Establish yourself as a voice of authority by sharing your expert industry knowledge
- Start discussions by asking followers about divisive industry topics
As we can see from the above example from book retailer Waterstones, an image and a question asking followers to share their thoughts or preferences can generate strong levels of engagement that can help to foster more brand loyalty and a vibrant community surrounding a business.
5. Utilise video content
With technology becoming increasingly accessible to businesses, there’s really no reason to ignore video marketing.
Statistically speaking, 81% of marketers have acknowledged that video has helped them to increase their sales. While HubSpot data suggests that 39% of marketers agree that short-form video offers the strongest ROI and 68% believe that content focused on showing products and services offers the largest return on spending.
The great thing about video content is that it’s easier to rank higher on results pages as opposed to text-based content.
While a search for the term ‘pet grooming’ on Google returns almost 400 million results, it’s possible to significantly lower the competition you’re faced with in reaching the front page of Google’s SERPs with video content.
Here we can see that the exact same search for ‘pet grooming’ that returned 400 million results in total only returns 23.8 million video results–representing around 6% of the competition to rank.
By conducting some keyword research and planning out video content surrounding your chosen terms, your business can receive significant exposure by optimising video.
6. Never neglect testimonials
It’s imperative that you use customer reviews to your advantage if you’re seeking to grow your business online.
As much as 95% of customers consult online reviews before buying a product online, and it’s grown into a major selling element for brands on a global scale.
There’s no better way to inspire trust among your target audience than through the positive views of others. To ensure that you maximise your potential for leveraging testimonials, it’s important to ask your satisfied customers for their feedback.
Video testimonials from influencers can also be an effective way of inspiring more interest in your products.
7. Build a value-adding newsletter
If you’re not leveraging a regular newsletter, you could be at risk of failing to communicate effectively to your target audience. Email marketing can be a great means of generating a short-term urgency and aiding your leads to take action on their interest by signing up for value-adding content delivered to their inbox.
Email newsletters are great because you can drive limited-time offers, seasonal sales, or promote new products in a cost-effective way to an audience that’s already shown interest in your business.
Managing your growth with digital marketing
In a world that’s rapidly embracing digital transformation, growing your visibility online is an essential way of unlocking the potential of your business on a global scale.
To obtain growth as a UK business, content marketing can be essential in growing your reputation and spreading brand awareness throughout different markets. Although time is always of the essence for businesses ripe for growth, optimising your digital presence can be an unmissable stepping stone towards greater things.
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