If you’ve just opened an online business, you’re one of over 20 million businesses that operate online. That said, with so many online businesses for shoppers to choose from, how do you ensure that yours stands out? How do you advertise your business online?

On this page, we’ll go over five of the advertising ideas that you can implement to drive leads and revenue for your business.

Read on to learn more, and then subscribe to Revenue Weekly for more digital marketing tips from the agency with over 20 years of experience!

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1. Website design and development

On the Internet, the stand-in for your physical store is your website. That’s why it’s important to have good web design and development.

What is website design and development?

Web design involves all the elements that go into designing and maintaining an online hub for your business. From the visuals to the layout, web design is meant to act as a virtual storefront that provides a fantastic user experience for site visitors.

Web development, on the other hand, is more technical than web design and has more to do with the technical side of your website.

You’ll need both a web designer and a web developer to make sure your website is fully functional and ready to accommodate online shoppers.

How do I advertise my business with website design and development?

While web design might not be a classic example of advertising, it’s the basis for nearly all the online advertising you do. When users find an ad for your business online and click on it, it should direct them to your site.

For that reason, your site must provide a near-perfect user experience. On top of making it look good from a visual standpoint, you should make sure it has fast load speeds — users expect website pages to load within two seconds.

You also need to make sure your website has a responsive design — that is, it’s optimized for both desktop and mobile formats. Google ranks your content based on its mobile format, so it’s essential that your site work as well on a phone as it does on a computer.

2. Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO)

One of the most reliable small business advertising ideas is the killer combination of search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing.

What is SEO and content marketing?

Content marketing is a form of advertising where you write pieces of informational content, post it to your website, and encourage people to read it. You can encourage users to read your content by using SEO to help it rank highly in search engines, posting it to social media, or sharing it in an email, for example.

SEO is the process of optimizing content to appear in search results so users will actually see it and click on it.

How do I advertise my business with content marketing and SEO?

To create a content marketing campaign, you must take the time to write informative content for your website. This content should meet two criteria: It should be relevant to what your business does, and it should be something that people will be interested in reading.

Once you’ve written your content, you need to use SEO to help it rank in Google search results. To rank highly organically, one of your most important strategies is keyword targeting. Keywords are phrases that people search for on Google, and by including relevant keywords in your content, you can help it rank highly for those terms.

High-quality keywords are determined by search volume and competition, so you’ll want to choose keywords that have a high search volume and a low competition. These are the keywords that you’ll be most likely to rank highly for — encouraging more users to click your content.

3. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

As amazing as SEO is at capturing Google traffic, there is still a possibility to win even more traffic. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great way to fill in the gaps.

What is PPC advertising?

PPC advertising is a way to display paid ads for your business elsewhere on the Internet, whether as banner ads on other websites or as ads at the top of Google search results. You only have to pay for these ads when people click on them, making them very cost-effective.

How do I advertise my business with PPC advertising?

To create PPC ads through Google, you’ll first need to set up a Google Ads account. Like SEO content, PPC ads target specific keywords. You can bid on your desired keywords in Google Ads, and whenever one of them is searched, Google will display the highest bidders’ ads at the top.

When someone clicks on one of your ads in the Google search results, it will direct them to the ad itself, in the form of a landing page on your website. For each ad you run, you’ll have to create one of these landing pages, making sure to apply good web design to each of them.

4. Social media marketing

The key to knowing where to advertise is knowing where your audience hangs out online. Online, nowhere matches that requirement better than social media.

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is advertising done through any kind of social media platform, from Facebook to YouTube. It can take a variety of forms and incorporate a variety of media types.

How do I advertise my business with social media marketing?

There are several ways you can use social media marketing to promote your business. To start, you can simply create accounts for your business on various platforms. You can use these accounts to post content, like links to your blog posts or infographics about your products.

There’s also some overlap between social media and PPC, as most social media platforms allow you to use paid advertising to target specific groups of users by factors like demographics and location.

5. Email marketing

Last on our list of small business advertising ideas is the strategy of email marketing.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing involves sending out advertisements to people that prompt them to visit your website or buy your products.

How do I advertise my business with email marketing?

Email marketing is advantageous because it allows you to harness the power of personalization. Users respond much more positively to your ads when you address them by name and speak to their personal interests, and you can set up your emails to do just that.

Emails also allow you to use remarketing tactics. Remarketing involves sending ads to users who visited your website but left without making a purchase. If you can get their email from an email capture form while they’re on your site, you can follow up their visit with some email ads.

Drive results with digital marketing services from WebFX

Now that you know how to promote your business online, hopefully you’re ready to go out and organize a killer marketing campaign. But if you’re still unsure of your ability to make it all work the way you want it to, don’t worry. WebFX is here to help!

We’d love to help you optimize your marketing campaign, from SEO to social media marketing. With over 500 client testimonials, we’re the digital marketing agency you can trust to drive results. Call us at 888-601-5359 or contact us online to get started today!