There are a few things that are essential when you run your business out of your home–a good ISP and lots of bandwidth, a dedicated phone line, a good space to work out of, and the usual office trappings.
A home business is unique in many ways, though, and one thing that you should get very good at is online marketing. You can promote your product extremely effectively online, and that doesn’t just mean taking out Facebook ads and then sitting back to wait for the revenue to roll in.
There are a variety of ways to market and advertise your home business online and gain multiple advantages while you’re at it.
It’s Great for Marketing on a Budget
Even more than other new businesses, your home business probably doesn’t have a lot of running capital to work with, or startup capital to spare as you make moves to get it off the ground and into the black.
Traditional marketing is always there, but even big companies are using those classic methods less and less because you can achieve the same results and more simply through organic content and a few well-placed PPC ads, if you really want to hedge your bets.
You can literally market your home business through SEO and SMM almost for free, and it can even be more effective than traditional marketing methods. There are plenty of free resources that you can find online, including a variety of instructional articles in this very blog.
Learn how SEO works, most importantly, because you can’t fly blind. Get good at it. Organic content marketing costs nothing but some of your time while boosting sales in a relatively short period of time if it’s well-organized.
You can also add paid ads through different channels to augment your efforts; however, that’s probably not even necessary.
Online Marketing is Critical for Any New Small Business
Home business or not, online marketing is something you can’t do without. As we’ve discussed in many of our posts in this blog, we now live in a time when your customers’ attention is mostly online.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, this is why you have to focus your marketing efforts online. The bottom line is that it works, and you’re going to burn through your budget pretty quickly on traditional marketing and advertising methods, with slow and unpredictable results, instead of concentrating on marketing your product using online tools.
This is exactly why you see content and social media marketing for small, very new businesses, as well as large corporations, across the board.
Grow Your Business without a Marketing Team
In the beginning at least, your home business might consist of you, the owner, and no one else. At this point, you’re probably used to doing a lot of things on your own; so, here’s how to execute one more thing that’s really going to pay off for your company.
If you want to add someone or a full team later on, then that’s great, but you can absolutely get a fully productive marketing campaign going without a team. Create original content, promote it, and manage it in a fairly limited amount of time (as a business owner’s time is such a precious commodity).
It’s actually not rocket science, and once you get the hang of it, you can do it almost casually, especially when utilizing social media channels. To get started, the best thing you can do is to start a content marketing blog for the business where you post about twice per week.
Write short, regular articles about topics or areas of interest to your potential customers related to your business or industry. Then, make sure you cross-promote all of that content in social media channels, along with posts on social for the business, just as you think of things throughout the day, as you would normally for your personal accounts.
This is not to make it sound like you can do online marketing in your sleep because there is definitely pointed strategy to it and a right and wrong way to go about it. This is just a starting point and general synopsis of what you would do to kick it off.
The point is that you can train yourself for it somewhat easily and execute it by yourself, without a team. See these additional posts about creating a marketing blog for your business, and related articles:
https://talkroute.com/5-formats-that-work-best-for-marketing-blogs/
https://talkroute.com/what-should-you-write-about-in-your-business-blog/
You Can Easily Do it from Home
The basic idea here is that there is an obvious and significant benefit with online marketing for a home business, as it can all be done from your home. Pretty much all you need is a computer, an Internet connection, and some knowledge of what you’re doing.
Again, if you like, you can start with this blog to see how to get it moving because we’ve published multiple articles about this subject, namely involving content marketing.
Every business is using it these days, so there are also a ton of other online resources that can be very useful. SMM (social media marketing) can obviously be done from home, too, or anywhere you happen to be, so you can literally always be promoting your business on social media outlets, which you should be because that is where your customers are increasingly placing their attention.
So, we have discussed all the ways that online marketing can be highly useful for your home business, but the fact is that it really is critical. In the challenging and many times uncertain phase when your business is just trying to stay afloat and gain some real traction at the same time, the advantage you get from online marketing can very well be the extra voltage that propels you forward.
It hardly costs you anything at all and, in case you have never tried this method, works far better than you anticipate it to do so when done properly. Start concentrating your promotion efforts into online marketing today. The results will surprise you.
What’s Next? Check out all of the articles in our series, Starting Your Home-Based Business:
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Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.