The internet has enabled many small businesses and startups to gain visibility in a matter of hours. Since this lowers the barrier to entry, remember that all your competitors have these same capabilities. One important ingredient to success is knowing how to use the tools available online to your advantage so you can start interacting with your customers and building up your business immediately.

Be Present on Social Media

Go beyond merely creating social media accounts and start using them for social media marketing to get the message out to your customers that you’re open for business. To make better use of various social media accounts, research which ones will best target your demographics. What reaches one age or demographic profile effectively may not work as well for another group of people you are trying to reach.

Ask for Feedback

Use email or text messages to reach out to your customers or clients. Remember that you will want to invite new and old customers or clients to provide feedback. You can’t just rely on the few customers who will voluntarily provide feedback on their own terms. With the use of review automation tools, you can send friendly reminders to complete surveys, and you can intercept nearly all negative feedback before it ends up being posted against your business on the web.

Build an Email List

One clear advantage that email lists have over social media contacts is that you own your list of email contacts, which can be helpful in the event a social media platform closes down or decides to delete your account for some reason. The conversion rates for email contacts are higher than for social media, and you don’t have to pay postage for sending out emails. To be most effective at building your email list, you will need to include a sign-up field on your website. To maintain it for the long run, you should remind your contacts to update their email addresses in order to receive the latest news, information and offers.

Offer Promotional Items

When you run promotions or offer free stuff to your customers, you can help build up your base of loyal followers. Something like a free e-book can be very effective to attract new customers and give them an idea of what level of service you can furnish. Be sure that you require the customer to provide you with an email address in order to receive the gift or promotional item. In this way, you can build up your email list.

Simple but effective tricks of the trade like these can help you begin to interact with your customers today. Along with these steps, make sure that you implement the latest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to reach out to your customer base and keep attracting new followers to expand it. Many tools are available today that did not exist in the early days of the internet. When used properly, they can help your business interact with customers, and they can put you ahead of your competition.

For digital marketing that converts, trust Raine Digital!