The online environment offers many opportunities to small businesses. Opening new locations, reaching out to new markets, establishing partnerships, promoting your products and services, all of these can be done online faster, easier, and at a significantly lower cost than in the real world. There’s a lot of competition online, it’s true, but on the Web the gap between the big and the small is not as great as out there.

Start by Building a Nice Shopfront

Your website acts as your online shopfront. Even if you don’t sell products or services directly through it, people will still want to check it to see what’s new and to find out more information about your existing offerings. The design of your website is crucial, and a San Francisco Web design company can help you with that. The design acts as the foundation of your website, and if it’s bad or dull, it will have a negative impact on the SEO, social marketing, and advertising campaigns that you undertake online. 

Get Inspired

Nobody can give you a step by step guide to growing your small business, but you can let yourself be inspired by a few ideas that worked for others.

• Turn your website into an e-commerce one that directly sells products and services. While you focus on local customers, you can serve those in other districts or cities as well. This of course depends on what you’re selling. You cannot deliver donuts to another city, not effectively anyway, but you can certainly deliver pond equipment or computer hardware. Consider using professional San Francisco web design services to make the conversion.

• Use social media marketing effectively, focusing on the massive segment of mobile users, as these are particularly interested in small, local businesses. Maybe it’s time to hire a marketing expert? 

• Make sure you appear in Google Places and other local small business directories and that your location and phone number and email address are always updated.

• Offer regular discounts and promotions through email newsletters, blog posts, and social media websites. This is a strategy that, if well implemented, can work wonders.

• Sell complementary products or services. Are you a car dealer? Maybe you have a mechanic that doesn’t do much work. Why not hire another mechanic and start offering a local auto service solution? No need for costly print or billboard advertising – use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and other social websites for promotion.

In the end remember that the foundation of any strong online presence is a well-designed website. If your website is in need of redesign or simply of improvement, click here for a quote. The sooner you do this the better, because your website can grow more quickly.

If you found this article helpful, why not bookmark Leverage Blog? We are a small business blog that is dedicated to delivering insights, tips, and perspectives for startups, organizations, and companies. 

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LeverageBlog would like to thank the marketing team at Rolling Forward Sacramento, a leading web design and marketing blog for sharing their small business expertise. Rolling Forward is an amazing resource of business and marketing news and trends for startups, small businesses and organizations in the Sacramento Valley. Click here to check it out!