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The Digital Grapevine: Taking Your Asheville Business Online

With so many great businesses in Asheville, it can be difficult to make sure your own one stays a notch above the rest. In today’s competitive market, it’s important to not only attract new sales, but also to retain customer loyalty once you’ve got it. Despite this, as many as 60% of small businesses barely have an online presence, with some eschewing even so much as a Facebook page. However, with more and more customers using digital channels to at least suss out where to shop, it doesn’t make sense for any astute business owner to overlook such a key source of business. Here’s the best way to go about starting to build up a presence for your business online.

A welcome website

The most obvious way to get started is making a website for your business. Unlike in the old days, setting up a website without the technical know-how is not too difficult, and not too expensive either. There are several options to choose from. For newbies, Squarespace and Wix offer reasonable pricing and customizable layouts easier for businesses just beginning to dip their toes in the water. However, more complex options like WordPress might be a better bet if you start to want ecommerce capabilities for your website, or want it to be SEO-optimised. Speaking of…

Getting the down low on SEO

SEO seems to be such an omnipresent buzzword for small businesses today. It stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. This might seem like a long and confusing phrase, but it basically is how you go about increasing the number of people who find your website through search engines like Google. There’s lots of different ways you can go about doing this. For instance, you could look at what niches in cake decorating, residential architecture or Chinese cuisine might not be being addressed by local businesses who are already online and make sure your website is geared towards them. It could also mean taking advantage of results on Google News for business promotion.

If this sounds a bit confusing, you can also think about paid search results, most famously Google AdWords. These are the results on the search engine which display first and have ‘ad’ written next to them. The Google AdWords team can give great advice about how to get the hang of using their products.

All atwitter about social media

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter seem to be all over the news, but it can be difficult to know how to best use them to win new trade. The best place to start is looking at your existing customers: what social media platforms do they use most frequently? For instance, an accessories store might take pictures of their new products and put them on Instagram to attract a fashion forward crowd. Once you’ve decided where best to focus your energies, there are many different ways to publicize your business online. Keep your account updated with engaging contents like photos of what your business is up to, news relevant to your audience and exclusive offers on your products. This gives customers a reason to return to your corners of the internet.

We’re not in Asheville anymore, Toto

A successful online presence could even take you beyond North Carolina. If you really think you’ve found a niche with your product which other people inside or outside of Asheville don’t have, your product could go national or even international. After all, Amazon was started by Jeff Bezos in a garage in Washington, and the fact was no one else had thought to sell books online at the time!