How to make a small company’s portfolio visible online effectively to targeted customer/ vendors

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In general, most companies and businesses want to optimize the visibility of their portfolio to as many consumers as possible. However, it might not be the case for small bespoke service providers due to limited recourses and capacity. For example, most bespoke wedding planners accept limited number of wedding a week, therefore they are more likely to target valuable customers rather than large amount of customers. The following content will start with some approaches which are widely employed by small service businesses in order to increase visibility of company’s portfolio, and then some social media marketing tips and measurements to guide small services providers.

  1. A website-Before getting into optimizing business’s portfolio visibility, an accessible and  visible company website is necessary. The benefits of having a website include gaining credibility, having a place to showcase your work and another 8 reasons why a small business needs a professional website. Moreover, the design of a webpage is also important in enhancing the online consumer’s experience especially for the creative businesses including advertising, architecture, designer fashion and the performing arts which website is a main platform to show or advertise their works or services. Therefore, it is helpful to apply Valacich JS, Parboteeah DV and Wells JD (2007) Online Consumer’s Hierarchy of Needs (OCHN) framework in evaluating your current e-commerce experiences and thus optimize the web page design.
  2. Go Google (SEO)-In order to stand out online, wisely manage your business website and submit it to Google are the first step for most small businesses. “Go Google” is more then ranking in the top ten in google search, but to utilize the services and tools or even Google’s advices in optimizing the visibility of your company’s portfolio to targeted or potential customers. For instance, Google Webmaster tools enable your website to Google for indexing and also to view the kinds of search queries that are driving traffic to your site. Here are six simple ways to guide you in increasing your site visibility in google search results which I found it is quite comprehensive as well.
  3.  Social Media– also plays an useful role in small-business visibility. A business’s social media pages will be indexed by search engine, and searches for the company name will turn up results for all of these sites (Null,2013). For example, frequently updated the content of your social media platforms might make your website to be the top result in a search for your company name, together with your company Facebook page appear next, and your Pinterest page to be the third. Other than facilitate visibility on search engine, being visible within the social media platform is crucial as it will attract in more users and encourage engagements thus increase brand awareness for services. However, before you start boosting visibility of your social media, you might want to have a look on the “12 ways to improve your social media profile” to ensure your profile in all social media is consistence and impressive. Now here are some tips for Boosting Visibility of Social Media Profiles.
Effectiveness of reaching potential customers
 After having an ideas about how to increase visibility of company’s portfolio, small businesses with limited capacity and resources might want to think about how to increase the effectiveness of above approaches in targeting and connecting to potential or prospective customers. To do this, a business should have a clear understanding about its target market demographic so that it could exclude less-valuable customers  and make marketing more relevant to the high-valuable customers. Lastly, small business should also a measurement to track the performance of the social media marketing. According to Davis (2012), an effective social media measurement program should include at least ongoing and campaign-specific measurement. The ongoing analytics are important for keeping up with the overall pulse of general conversation about a brand and company, while campaign-focused metrics help understanding the impact of targeted digital marketing initiatives.
In sum, having a professional website, utilizing Google products and service and maintaining social media platform are the general approaches which most small businesses employ to increase visibility and traffics. However, without effective market targeting strategies and appropriate measurements the approaches might bring a negative impact to a business.

References:

Davis, J. D., 2012. The 5 Easy Steps To Measure Your Social Media Campaigns. [Online] Available at: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/social-media-measurement/ [Accessed 28 January 2016].

Null, C., 2013. Make your business shine online: 8 steps to boost visibility. [Online] Available at: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2029636/make-your-business-shine-online-8-steps-to-boost-visibility.html [Accessed 28 January 2016].

Valacich JS, Parboteeah DV and Wells JD (2007) “The online consumer’s hierarchy of needs”, Communications of the ACM, Vol 50, No 9, p84-90 [online in: ACM Portal]

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