As a Kenyan business owner answering this question may mean being able to pay your employees next month and possibly opening a new location or laying off some of your staff. Is your business Digitally Fit? Research shows since the pandemic hit, over 79% of customers are making buying decisions based on online searches and social media interactions by different brands. This means if your business is not getting enough leads or making high volume sales you must be leaving money on the table for your competitors.

Do you run a local business and want to know how to make your business thrive online as well? Try these 9 tips and see how fast you can create your online empire by driving more leads and sales for your business.

1.     Create & Optimize Your Google My Business Profile

Your Google My Business Profile is an essential part of any business online. If your customers want to find your new opening hours or want to call you to inquire about your health and safety protocols, you can bet they probably aren’t going to crack open yellow pages. Instead, they’re going to Google your business’s name and check the right panel for the information they need. If not there they might look elsewhere for your service.

Make sure your profile is optimized so as not to leave opportunities on the table for your competitors

2.      Connect Your Online Business to Your Physical Business

If you’re new to SEO, you might ask the question, “why is local SEO important?”. There are a few reasons that illustrate the importance of SEO services for local businesses

If your town has a thriving nightlife, or if your business is popular, you’ll benefit from connecting your online business to your physical business. People like to exist in both worlds, and you can give them the best of both.

One way to accomplish this is by creating a digital loyalty program that can be presented in your business. For example, if you own a bar or restaurant, print a QR code on your coasters that prompt guests to sign up for your newsletter. Once they sign up, give them a discount code they can use immediately to save money on their tab.

There are other ways to connect your online and physical business. You can offer online ordering, online reservations, and anything else that will provide value to your customers online.

3.      Double Down on SEO

SEO is more than just a list of tasks to perform – it’s an ongoing complex marketing strategy that requires continual monitoring and adjustments to optimize results. You can’t really stop performing SEO because if you do, you’ll fall behind your competitors.

If you want your online business to thrive, you need to have an ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. SEO aims to optimize your content and website in order to make your web pages appear in search results. Ideally, you want your pages to show up on the first page, but you’ll still get some traffic if you don’t make it to the first page.

It’s important to hire a professional Digital Marketing Agency that understands your market and demographics, but when you’re a business with local patrons, you need an agency that understands the locals.

There are plenty of SEO agencies that specialize in local search, like OraDMA, for example. Not forgetting other companies like OraDMT who train you on how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for yourself. When you need to reach local customers, a specialized local SEO team will help you get big results.

4.      Hire a Professional Website Developer

When you think about hiring a professional website developer, you might first be concerned about the cost. Naturally, you’ll pay more for an expert, and it’s well worth the cost.

Think of your website as a revenue-generating asset rather than an inconvenient expense. When you create it correctly from the start, it will serve you in the long run and you won’t need to rebuild it over and over again.

You’ll find an endless supply of people online claiming to be experienced developers, but many are just winging it and only know how to use drag-and-drop editors.

To find the right developer, you need to ask the right questions. For example, Moz.com published a list of 20 questions that include the following:

• What industry sites and blogs do you read regularly?
• Do you prefer to work alone or on a team?
• Can you write HTML by hand?
• Can you write table-less XHTML? Do you validate your code?
• Can I see your portfolio?
• What websites have you built in the past?

These questions are important. You want a developer who stays up-to-date with the latest trends and changes, someone who works as a team and knows HTML inside and out. You also want someone who writes clean code and has a portfolio of websites that are still on the internet.

If a developer says all of their websites have since vanished, they either have no experience or they’ve only designed sites for friends and family who have abandoned their projects. It’s also possible that they were a developer ten years ago which means they probably aren’t on top of current coding standards.

5.     Allow Your SEO Agency to Suggest Content Changes

When you hire a professional SEO agency, they’ll get you better results when they can control your content. Ideally, your content should be written by professional writers. However, if your content is decent, your SEO team may only need to make slight changes to include important keywords and phrases.

Search engines determine the relevance of pages based on keywords and phrases along with related keywords and phrases. It’s important to have a variety of phrases in your content, but it must be done naturally.

Your SEO agency might also suggest making changes like writing longer blog posts (1,000+ words), posting content at regular intervals, and spending money on a professional content writer for your most important pages.

6.     Advertise your Business on Social Media

Did you know social media usage is one of the most popular online activities. In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide a number projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion in 2025. And out of that 74% of the people use social media when making a purchase decision? Social platforms play a critical role in helping people make decisions about what to buy and where to buy it. If you want to help nudge these people towards choosing your product or service, social media advertising is the solution for you.

So, why advertise on social media? Keep reading to discover six benefits of social media advertising and get four quick tips for getting started! For the latest tips and tricks on social media advertising and marketing your business online, subscribe to Digitally Fit Top!

Why Advertise On Social Media?

Advertising on social media offers numerous benefits for your business. Here are six advantages of social media advertising:

1. Your customers are on social

So, why advertise on social media? Well, your customers are there, and social media ads provide a prime opportunity for you to reach them. Your customers can be on numerous platforms, including:

• Palcity
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• And more

Just look at some of the stats that show how many people use social media. Keeping in mind that people are on these social media platforms to keep up with friends, family, and businesses:

• LinkedIn has over 830 million users
• Twitter has over 217 active monetizable users
• Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users
• Instagram has over 2 billion users

As you can see, social media platforms connect you with a lot of people. The fact that you have a good chance of reaching your target market is just one of the many benefits of advertising on social media.

2. You have more precise targeting

The importance of social media advertising lies in targeting.

Social media ads offer precise targeting that enables you to reach people more effectively, which helps you get the best return on investment (ROI) from your advertising budget.

With social media ads you can target people by:

• Demographics
• Location
• Interests
• Hobbies
• Buying habits and more

So, if you wanted to target men and women between the ages of 18-29 who enjoy hiking and outdoor adventure and who live in Nairobi Kenya, you could set targeting perimeters that let you target anyone who fits that profile. This advanced targeting makes it easier for you to target people most likely to hold an interest in your business. It’s a social media advertising advantage that enables you to reach the right people.

3. You increase brand recognition

One of the most frequent answers to “Why advertise on social media?” is that it helps you increase brand recognition. There are hundreds of people who haven’t discovered your business yet but have an interest in your products or services. Someone interested in your types of products or services, like import and export couriers, may be on the lookout to import products from United States of America (USA) or United Kingdom (UK).

4. You use your budget more wisely

One of the most valuable reasons to advertise on social media is that it allows you to get more from your budget. Social media advertising is extremely cost effective and enables you to stretch your budget.

Typically, social media ads run on a pay-per-click payment model (PPC). You don’t pay for people to look at your ad, but rather, you pay when someone clicks on your ad, though you can use an impression- or view-based payment model, which can come in handy for brand awareness campaigns.

5. Your competitors are already advertising on social

Your competitors are leveraging social media to engage your target audience. By investing in social media advertising, you’re keeping up and pulling ahead of your competition. You’ll get your product or services in front of these interested leads and make yourself a viable option.

6. You get insight into your customers

Ever wish you could know more about what your customers like or don’t like? Customer insights are just one of the many reasons to advertise on social media. When you run a campaign on these platforms, you’ll get valuable insight into what your customers want.

Learn more about customer insights and analytics by joining analytics class at OraDMT to learn more about your customers, understand your audience and make informed decisions as far as your advertising is concerned

We have gone through the advantages of advertising on social media but the bigger question is, how do you actually get started? If you are asking yourself this worry not because you can get a social media training course either online or offline within a few days and start running your social media campaigns and getting more customers from social media.

7.     Get your products featured in Online Market places and websites

Maybe you have a physical store and you have no website and you are looking to break into a larger market you should start listing your products at different online market places which offers you the potential to grow by finding new channels for your products to sell

Mybigorder can be a lucrative marketplace for any Kenyan seller, whatever the current status of their business. In fact, if you’re serious about e-commerce, you should definitely try to sell on MyBigOrder.

Here is why it is worth it

Reach thousands of customers

What does this mean to you as a reseller? It means creating product listings on MyBigOrder gets them in front of the eyes of tens of thousands of interested shoppers.

Low initial investment

MyBigOrder listing fees are relatively low meaning you can start selling things from refurbished products to new products.

• MyBigOrder does its share of the work

MyBigOrder handles most of the technical details, to begin with, but can also offer customer service without forgetting advertising

8. Get listed on Apps that offer On-Demand services if you do not sell a physical product

Kenyan business owners who offer services on demand are not short on ways to market their businesses online. One of the ways to tap into a huge market in need of your services is to list yourself on different platforms in order to maximize your reach and place your business in front of the eyes of clients who are actively searching for you in your area.

If you offer On-Demand Services like plumbing, electric engineering, food delivery, gas delivery, and more you can conveniently access customers online. One platform that standout and that works with services is known as ODS chapchap which is a Kenyan on-demand service app connecting service providers to their customers.

9. Train and Get Do It Yourself Digital Marketing Skills

The idea of hiring a young ambitious marketer is very tempting since as a brand you can utilize the skills they already have. But the question is “what happens when they get greener pastures?” This is where cultivating company growth by offering them and yourself training from an institution that is already excelling in digital marketing. Offering training to your employees does not only get you top-of-the-roof results but it also cultivates loyalty.

Enroll your staff in a digital marketing masterclass today and empower them to get your company greater results.

10. Promote Your Business Everywhere

Never stop or shy from promoting your business. Use all available choices that you have like word of mouth. Request your friends and family to promote your website and business. Explore online advertising for Google Ads 

There are many options when it comes to google ads for example search ads where your business gets a chance when a customer is looking for the services that you offer.

Another way to promote your business that has proved to be cost-effective is affiliate marketing this is an advertising model in which you compensate third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to your products and services. The third-party publishers are affiliates, and the commission fee incentivizes them to find ways to promote the company.

Achieving Online Success Takes Time

Being successful online takes time. However, when you integrate your online presence with your real-world presence, you’ll get results slightly faster. While your marketing team lays the foundation for SEO and other digital marketing strategies, your customers will promote your online presence through word of mouth and referrals.