When starting a small business it can be difficult knowing how to establish an online presence and get started with online services. This guide aims to help you get started online, covering website design, email marketing, and effective online marketing strategies. You’ll learn why an online presence is crucial for small businesses and how to use website builders to create a professional site. We aim to provide you with the knowledge you need to get started online and also to increase your visibility and attract more customers through digital channels.
Table Of Contents:
Key Points
- An online presence helps small businesses attract customers and compete effectively in today’s market
- A professional website builds credibility and enables businesses to showcase products or services 24/7
- Business email addresses with your own unique domain build credibility and build a sense of trust and confidence with prospetive cutomers.
- Email campaigns and social media strategies are cost effective ways to reach a wider audience
- Selecting an appropriate domain name and reliable hosting is crucial for establishing a strong digital presence
- Regular blog content can improve search engine rankings and establish businesses as industry experts
Why Small Businesses Need an Online Presence
Small businesses need an online presence to gain new customers, compete effectively, and build trust. A domain name and brand establish credibility, while email marketing reaches a wider audience. Online information and shopping options provide convenience, helping businesses expand their reach and increase awareness. This digital presence is crucial for growth in today’s competitive market.
Gaining New Businesses
An online presence, both a business website and social media helps to attract new customers. Your business being easily found online is key to gaining new customers simply because they can find your business when searching for a product or service that they need. Through search engine optimisation the visibility of your website can be increased with improved positioning in search engine results.
A well designed website serves as a digital presence or point of sale, allowing small businesses to showcase their products or services 24/7. This constant availability, coupled with effective search engine marketing, enables businesses to reach potential customers beyond their local area, expanding their market reach and increasing opportunities for growth. The easier your business website can be found, the more likely it is that potential customers will contact you enquiring about the services or products that you provide.
Competing for New Customers
It’s always worth considering what your competitors are doing to attract new business. Businesses that have a website, or an email address that mentions their businesses name, they’re more likely to be contacted by potential customers compared to a business that doesn’t.
Small businesses can compete effectively for new customers by having a website that can be easily found and is presented in a manner that instills confidence. Leveraging quality web design and content management systems like WordPress, to allow you to keep your website up to date will aid your online presence. A well designed website showcases products and services, while a robust content management system enables businesses to update information easily and maintain a fresh online presence.
Targeted advertising strategies, such as email campaigns and social media marketing also help new businesses to compete with established companies, simply due to increased visibility. They can be a crucial part of an overall strategy for small businesses to attract and retain customers. By utilising digital marketing tools and platforms, businesses can reach their target audience more efficiently and cost effectively than traditional advertising methods. The key elements for competing as a new business include:
- Professional web design
- Robust content management system
- Targeted online advertising
- Regular content updates
Giving Prospective Customers Confidence in Your Business
A professional online presence builds confidence through the use of business email address that use the company’s domain name. This creates a trustworthy image for the business, reducing the likelihood of emails being flagged as spam and enhancing communication reliability with potential clients.
Imagine two identical companies competing for business, and one’s email address is mikesplumbing@gmaill.com and the other is mike@mjsplumbingservices.co.uk which would you be more likely to trust? This simple difference can result in MJS Plumbing being asked about their services, instead of Mikes Plumbing.
Websites with high usability, that are laid out logically, are easy to understand and provide lear contact information further instil confidence in prospective customers. A website of this nature brings about a sense of confidence, as it implies the business is well organised and efficient. Small businesses can use their websites to demonstrate their commitment to a quality service and operating with transparency, encouraging potential clients to engage with their products or services.
Building Awareness and Reaching a Wider Audience
Small businesses can build brand awareness effectively through online platforms. By publishing a professional looking website a business can be easily found. Email campaigns and social media marketing can be used to showcases their products and services to potential customers.
The use of an easily found website helps you reach customers that are searching for a product or service, so they find you, rather than you having to find them.
Social media also provides a means to reach an audience of subscribers that are conveniently sorted in to geographic groups or demographics with specific interests. Leveraging these mechanisms can help you promote products or services to a local audience, or to people that already have an interest in your offerings or a need for your services.
An ongoing online presence, and regular social media updates can keep a business fresh in the mind of prospective customers. This can often make a business the first to be thought of when a product or service is needed by potential customers. Social media and blog posts can also be used to inform as well as market, building trust in your brand or business, through the promotion of knowledge.
The internet doesn’t have operating hours or geographic limitations. It’s always on, and it’s everywhere!
Getting Started With Your Business Online Presence
Establishing an online presence for a small business involves several steps. These include selecting an appropriate domain name, choosing reliable hosting with server capabilities, setting up professional email accounts, and creating a website that reflects the business image. This process requires some consideration and it’s generally advisable to start as you mean to. goon, rather than switching at a later date..
Choosing a Domain
Selecting an appropriate domain name is crucial for small businesses establishing their online presence. Once you know the domain you’d like to use, you can go ahead and register a domain name.
A domain is the part of your website’s address after the www’s and it’s also the part of your business email addresses that are displayed after the @ sign. The domain is really the “top of the tree” or “where it all begins” in terms of your digital estate and online presence.
An ideal domain name can change vary between different types of businesses. For example if you’re appealing to a local audience, you might consider including the town or city in which you’ll be operating within the domain name. You might also consider mentioning the nature of your business, or thre service you provide in the domain name. An example of this could be using a domain such as evchargingbrighton.co.uk should your business be based in Brighton, and you provide the installation of electrical vehicle charging points. Although some search engines pay more attention to your page content (Google) other search engines do take exact match geographical domains in to account (such as Bing).
The chosen domain should also be memorable for potential customers. It’s essential to consider how the domain will appear in social media marketing efforts and webmail addresses, ensuring consistency across all digital platforms.
It’s also advisable to choose a domain name that’s easy to spell, can be easily communicated verbally, and that doesn’t inadvertently imply something your organisation doesn’t provide or represent. For example, it probably wouldn’t be advisable for a PR company to use the domain whorepresents.com.
Once a domain is chosen, businesses can then begin the process of obtaining hosting which is required to be able to create email addresses and a website.
Choosing Web Hosting
Selecting the right hosting provider or hosting service is key to the foundation of a small businesses online presence and digital estate.
Many small businesses don’t have the capacity to employ dedicated IT staff when starting out, so obtaining a hosting service that’s both reliable and that comes with support is often a necessity. If you’d like to have a single point of contact for your digital estate it’s advisable to use the same company for hosting as you have for your domain name registration. Web hosting can be used to host both your website and your business email addresses, which you’ll need to do if you’d like to deal with just one organisation that hosts your digital estate.
A reliable host ensures the website remains accessible and performs well, which is essential for effective digital marketing and user experience. When researching hosting options, businesses should consider factors such as server uptime, storage capacity, if backups are included and bandwidth to support their website’s potential and future growth. Netnerd’s business web hosting service comes with unlimited storage, bandwidth, a 99.99% uptime guarantee, built in daily backups, and a resource set that ensures fast page load times. UK based telephone and help desk support is also included. At £13.99 per month, this hosting package provides a low cost, high performing resilient offering, with backups and unlimited storage to give you peace of mind.
It’s also worth considering that your business is likely to grow. It’s advisable to select a host that provides scalability, allowing the business to upgrade as its online presence expands and user traffic increases.
Creating Email Accounts
Once your domain name and web hosting are in place you can start creating professional email addresses. Once you’ve created an email address you’ll need to connect a device to it to be able to send and receive emails. The piece of software on the device that’s used to read and send emails is referred to as a mail client. Most phones and tablets come with built in mail clients, and free mail clients such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird can be used on desktops or laptops, and there are also paid for mail clients such as Outlook.
When configuring mail clients to connect to mailboxes, it’s strongly advisable to use IMAP rather than POP3, due to the differences in how these mail protocols function. When using multiple devices (such as a phone, tablet and laptop) to access your emails, if you configure all devices to use IMAP, the appearance of emails and mailbox folders will be the same across all devices. If you reply to a customer’s email on your phone, the reply is also seen on your laptop and tablet when using IMAP.
The additional advantage of using IMAP is that your emails are stored in your web hosting. This means that your emails are backed up by your hosting provider (as long as they provide a backup service). If you use IMAP and one of your devices fails, you can simply obtain a new device, connect it to your mailbox, and your entire email history will appear on the new device.
A combination of IMAP and backups being provided by your hosting provider are key for data integrity, resilience and contingency.
IMAP access using transport layer security, or secure socket layers is a key consideration if you have to travel for business. The use of these encryption methods ensures that passwords aren’t stolen and that your emails aren’t intercepted or read, when using open WiFi in hotels and restaurants. Almost all email providers offer these encryption methods by default, but you’ll need to make sure you configure your devices to “use encryption” when adding mailboxes to mail clients make use of them.
Email deliverability records, such as SPF and DKIM that validate your hosting provider as a source of emails for your domain help your emails arrive in recipient’s inboxes rather than junk or spam folders. SPF and DIM records are deployed by default in Netnerd’s Business web hosting packages.
Creating a Website
Creating your own business website is a key step for small companies establishing their online presence. Whether it’s a website for a photography business or a local business website design, the process involves careful planning and execution. Small company websites should reflect the brand’s identity and provide essential information to potential customers.
There are many different methods that can be used to create a website. When making your own business website, consider either using user friendly platforms if you’d like to create and manage your website yourself, or obtaining the services of someone versed in website creation if you’d like to gain the benefits of experience. Whichever you choose, ensuring that the website builder you use provides responsive design, contact form functionality and a variety of templates will be jey to your online success. Local business website design should focus on highlighting unique selling points and providing clear contact information. For specialised needs, such as websites for photography businesses, ensure the design showcases visual content effectively and incorporates portfolio features.
One of the harder parts of creating a website yourself is the SEO (search engine optimisation) side of things. Effective SEO is key to your website being easily found in search engine results, so in many ways it’s almost as important as the website itself. Although SEO is covered in a greater depth below it’s worth noting that Netnerd’s website design service is both low cost (compared to many website design services) and also includes SEO and performance optimisation to ensure a quality user experience by default.
Online Marketing for Small Businesses
Online marketing is essential for small businesses to reach their target market and generate revenue. Digital marketing often involves multiple key strategies including search engine optimisation, email marketing, social media marketing, and possibly adding a blog to your website. These techniques, when used effectively together, expand customer reach in a cost effective manner.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is key to small businesses improving their visibility, by being easily found in online searches. By optimising website content and structure, businesses can enhance their rankings in search results, making it easier for potential customers to find them. Effective SEO strategies include using relevant keywords, to ensure that a website is found when certain search terms are used. Creating quality content, that keeps visitors engaged also helps gain better positions in search engine results. Deploying a proper, easy to navigate website architecture helps both website visitors and search engines understand your website.
SEO is quite an extensive subject, with subsections such as on page SEO (your website’s content and structure), off page SEO (other websites and social media that refer to your website), and technical SEO (which includes your website’s performance, and making things like site maps to aid crawlers tat read your website). The many facets of SEO, and respective resources have been collated on the learningseo.io website, which you might consider taking a look at. If you find yourself reading the learningseo.io website and thinking it’s a bit much, it would be strongly advisable to gain the services of someone who can undertake SEO work on your website for you.
The costs of SEO can vary depending on whether it’s being carried out as a one off job, or if there’s. an ongoing SEO effort, and if this also includes social media management. Netnerd include base on page SEO as part of their website creation service which would provide you with a search engine optimised website for £499. Many SEO companies that provide ongoing SEO services can charge anywhere between £1000 and £3000 per month. Although this seems quite expensive, you do need some SEO work carried out on your website to make sure it’s found online.
Many business owners who haven’t succeeded online tend to be in this position due to a lack of SEO being undertaken on their website. Search engine optimisation, in many ways, is as important as the website itself. As search engine optimisation can be a struggle or involve a lot of time, or perhaps be too technical in nature for some people, it can be advantageous to involve a third party with this side of things should you not feel comfortable with it yourself.
There’s no point in having a website if it can’t be easily found, and it’s for this reason that its worth investing in SEO.
Email Marketing
Email marketing provides small businesses with a cost effective way to reach customers on their mobile devices. It’s quite important that you only send emails to people that have opted in to receiving them such as your existing customers, and people that have subscribed to your newsletter or business email communications via your website. You’ll need a user subscription mechanism on your website to collect these email addresses.
To maximise the effectiveness of email campaigns, small businesses should focus on creating engaging content that prompts action, such as making a purchase using a debit card. By analysing open rates and click-through rates, businesses can refine their strategies and improve customer engagement, ultimately driving more traffic to their websites and increasing sales.
There’s quite a lot of antispam methodology that reciepinet providers emply to prevent their customers receiving spam, and it’s quite important to ahdhere to this so that you don’t inadvertenely cause email deliverability problems for your domain as a whole. Many mailshot providers offer a service that’s designed for email marketing that adheres to recipient provider requirements. It’s a good idea to use an email marketing provider if email marketing forms a part of your online strategy. Examples of such email marketing providers are:
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing offers small businesses in the United Kingdom a powerful platform to engage with customers and build brand awareness. By creating compelling content and utilising platform-specific features, businesses can increase their online visibility and drive traffic to their websites. Effective social media strategies often involve sharing knowledge about products or services, while also addressing customer queries and concerns.
Creating business social media profiles, and then joining groups specific to your target demographic, interests related to your business activities or maybe local groups should you be appealing to a local audience is advisable. Posting on the respective social media platforms to the respective groups allows you to reach a wide range of social media subscribers without much expense or time overhead.
It’s key to add value when writing your social media posts, as other subscribers are more likely to pay attention to compelling content, or content they find of interest. Many social media platforms also offer methods to enhance, or boost your posts for your business.
Adding a Blog to Your Website
Adding a blog to a small business website can significantly enhance online marketing efforts. By regularly publishing relevant content, businesses can improve their search engine rankings and establish themselves as industry experts. This approach works well as it shows search engines that you provide fresh relevant content, and they’re more likely to list your website favourably in search in results due to this. You can also use social media channels as means to promote your blog posts and refer social media users to your website.
Many blogs offer the ability to comment on blog posts which provides a relaxed informal channel to allow you to engage with your website visitors and for them to engage with you and your business. A blog serves as a platform for building social proof and engaging with customers. Small businesses can share success stories, product updates, and industry insights, fostering trust and credibility.
A consistent approach to blogging and the promotion of your blog posts using other marketing channels helps raise brand awareness across a wide user base in a unified manner.
Conclusion
Establishing an online presence is crucial for small businesses in the digital age. From launching a website to implementing email marketing and social media channels, these steps enable businesses to reach a wider audience beyond traditional brick and mortar establishments.
These channels help businesses connect with customers and build brand awareness on the internet.
By embracing digital technologies and platforms, small businesses can compete more effectively in today’s market. Whether through a well designed website or innovative online marketing strategies, the internet offers numerous opportunities for growth and success.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can an online presence benefit my small business?
An online presence can significantly boost your small business by increasing visibility, reaching wider audiences, and enabling 24/7 customer engagement. It allows you to showcase products, build brand credibility, and compete effectively in today’s digital marketplace, potentially leading to increased sales and growth opportunities.
What are the first steps to establishing a business online?
To establish a business online, start by defining your niche and target audience. Create a professional website, secure a domain name, and set up hosting. Develop a digital marketing strategy, including social media presence and search engine optimisation.
Which online marketing strategies work best for small businesses?
Effective online marketing strategies for small businesses include search engine optimisation, content marketing, social media engagement, and email campaigns. These approaches help build brand awareness, drive website traffic, and generate leads whilst being cost effective and scalable for limited budgets.
How much does it cost to create a website for my business?
The cost of creating a business website varies widely, typically ranging from £500 to £10,000+. Factors influencing price include design complexity, functionality requirements, e-commerce needs, and whether you opt for professional development or use a website builder. Consider your budget and specific needs when choosing a solution.
What legal considerations should I know when taking my business online?
When taking your business online, consider data protection regulations, website terms and conditions, privacy policies, and e-commerce laws. Ensure compliance with copyright, trademark, and intellectual property laws. Implement secure payment systems and address tax obligations for online sales. Consult a legal professional for specific guidance.
Conclusion
Establishing an online presence is essential for small businesses to thrive in today’s digital landscape. By choosing the right domain, hosting, and creating a professional website, businesses can effectively showcase their offerings and reach a wider audience. Implementing strategic online marketing techniques, such as search engine optimisation, email campaigns, and social media engagement, enables small enterprises to compete effectively and build customer trust. Ultimately, a strong online presence empowers small businesses to expand their reach, attract new customers, and drive growth in an increasingly competitive market.
