WHEN it comes to marketing your business, there are numerous ways to go about doing this and we can all use some inspiration and guidance when thinking up ideas to increase the reach and influence of our business within our market.

The challenge for business owners today is that with so many ways to grow your brand, it can become overwhelming to continuously keep up with all the changes in the digital world to be able to meet your audience & consumers where they are at.

I want to give you some guidance and share five ways that you can utilise to grow the reach of your business.

1) Media contributor

2) Incentivise referrals

3) Brand collabs

4) Google Business

5) YouTube as a search engine

Let’s break down each of these five strategies.

Become a media contributor

The media houses in your country are always looking for content and a new story. If you are creating informational content about your industry on your social channels, you can start to reach out to the media houses to become a contributor. Contributing allows you to get reach, address industry topics and help to build your brand as a leader in your niche.

Think about the top pain points in your niche that your consumers are facing and that should be the topics you aim to publish when you get the opportunity to contribute on the media’s platforms. Don’t wait for them to discover you, start reaching out to contribute, even if it’s on a one submission per month basis.

Incentivise referrals

Start incentivising referrals. Have people post about your business and provide them with a discount code to get money off their next transaction. This will help build up your user generated content (UGC) and is a powerful way for digital word of mouth to spread around your business. It can also turn anybody into a sales rep for your company and allow you to tap into audiences that you may have never been able to access before. Incentivising your referrals is also a great way to show appreciation to your customers.

Brand collabs

Make a list of companies that you can partner. Look for brands that have a similar audience to you and put out content or even do events in your space. Reach out to them and see if you can create a partnership to create content or do an event in partnership with them to grow your industry. When I had my tech brand Droid Island, I created the “Shutterbug Photo Walk Event”, an event teaching people how to use their smartphones for photography. Huawei and B-Mobile jumped on board because of similar interests for their audience. Collabs don’t always need to involve money, find low barrier entry points to get started collaborating with other brands.

Google Business

If you do not have a website, you should be maximising Google Business. Set up your profile with your phone number, location(s) or service areas for digital businesses, and opening hours. Google Business will allow you to list your products, photos, videos, events, updates and much more and all of this content & info shows up on Google Search and Google Maps. A great way to increase your reach for free. Getting your customers to leave ratings and reviews on Google Business gives you the added benefit of Google pushing your business higher in the search listings.

Start a YouTube channel

The thing with social media is that all of the content created on those platforms stays on the platform. It does not show up in a Google Search; however, YouTube is a search engine. For all of the video content you are creating on TikTok, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you should be dumping all of your videos onto YouTube so that your videos can begin showing up on Google Search results. Nobody goes to your social media page and scrolls back months looking for information. That’s what Google is for. Put all of your videos onto YouTube & YouTube Shorts for those TikTok/IG Reel videos. Focus on leveraging YouTube as a pathway to showing up when your audience is doing their research on Google.

If you put these five strategies into practice, you will be able to grow your brand’s reach and establish yourself as a leader in your niche.

Keron Rose is a digital strategist who works with Caribbean Entrepreneurs to build their digital presence and monetize their platforms. Learn more at KeronRose.com or listen to the Digipreneur FM podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify or Google Podcast.