Igniting Business Blog

Promoting your business and products on social media sites means more than posting a few blogs with links to your website—it means having a comprehensive strategy.  An effective social strategy will enable you to create a bond with prospective customers based on empathy and an understanding of the problems they face and your company's ability to solve those problems.  That strategy must encompass a wide range of content, everything from informative articles and humorous anecdotes to credible product reviews and current customer testimonials. Your efforts will work best when you think outside the box.

Small businesses have a lot of risks. If your small business has an e-commerce website, it’s imperative your or your web firm performs adequate security on the website.  Here are three considerations to keep in mind when building up or maintaining your e-commerce site:

We are excited to announce Tyga McHenry has joined the Igniting Business team as a Web Specialist. Having graduated from the University of Missouri and University of Illinois, Tyga comes to us with experience working in web, marketing, advertising, and IT industries. Tyga uses her experience with the goal to help small businesses better assist their respective communities. She’s been involved in every step of the website design process from planning and mockups to wireframing and development. Serving on our web team, Tyga will play a role in the initial design of website and building out webpages. She’s excited to work alongside our clients to bring their design dreams to fruition on their final website.

One way to generate more revenue in your small business is to acquire more of your best customers.  Rather than continuing broad marketing activities that are not providing quality results, analyze who your best customers and tailor your future marketing efforts accordingly. 

Quite simply: Yes.  Customer reviews can and do affect your small business’s search engine rankings, especially for businesses that sell their service or product locally.  Many users routinely perform searches on local small businesses. One of the best ways for a search engine like Google to determine which organization should receive a higher ranking status is through evaluating the organization's quality and quantity of relevant customer reviews.  So, whether you own a small restaurant, a local plumbing business, or an auto mechanic's shop, if you want to place high on the list of (local) searches, you do need to pay attention to your customer review collection strategy.

Online advertising is constantly transforming. It started as text-based ads with hyperlinks, then became static, clickable images. Soon it evolved to videos, recommendations from trusted content creators, and reviews. The full range of what online advertising means is growing every day, and every avenue leads to more exposure and more recognition. If you have a small business and you're wondering if the time is right to start advertising, here are three indicators you likely should invest in online advertising:

Social media sites commonly make small tweaks and adjustments to their interfaces in an attempt to find the best ways to keep users engaged and scrolling. While these changes are usually geared towards revamping the user experience, these features can also help small businesses keep their followers engaged. Here are some recent changes Facebook has made to its News Feed that small businesses can use to keep up with their audience.

Making the choice to advertise online is a big one. You need to decide your budget, look for the right ad platforms, hone in on your targeted audience, and create effective campaigns that will get you the results you want. You also must consider whether or not online advertising is the right strategy for your business, which involves looking at your current sales, your profit margins, and your competitors through a variety of strategic lenses. Just as important, though, is doing the prep work on your own site so your campaigns direct traffic to a place customers want to go. Below are four areas to consider before deciding your small business website is ready for online advertising:

You can drive traffic to your site with good content. No matter what business you're in, every article, brief post, and description on your website gives search engines more information about your business and gives potential customers a reason to keep exploring your site. While originally intended for Google AdWords planning, Google's Keyword Planner can be a great tool for planning content on your small business website as well.

Social media pages are evolving to be a continuous, scrollable presentation of content. They're designed to always offer users something new to look at, so they pull from more and more sources to fill users' homepages and timelines. While that means you have a wider audience for your content, it also means it's easier to get lost in the mix and for users to scroll past your specific post.