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Get the Growth | How to grow your business online

I’ll cut to the chase. I have created this short piece on growing your business online because I want to help you to find the same sort of success in business that I have been lucky enough to experience. I own two businesses and have been around long enough to remember a time when marketing didn’t equate to online, and to when you didn’t have a device in your pocket capable of calling someone by video on the other side of the world.

That’s not to say that I long for a different time – far from it! I am so excited about the digital age that we live in and love seeing all of the innovation that has come from the internet. One of the key ways in which being online has impacted on my business has been the ability for my company to grow and to ‘go global.’ For the longest time, I was constrained by the fact that I had to have all of my staff working in the office with me, and was limited by the fact that I had to have everyone in the same city as well…

Well let me tell you something. As soon as I discovered remote working waaaaay back in the early days of the internet, I jumped on it like a fox on a trampoline. Now, I am based in Hong Kong, and I simply hire one of Servcorp’s virtual offices for when I need to have client meetings. The rest of the time I enjoy the freedom, flexibility and variation of being able to work from Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia. My team have the same freedom. It’s exciting, to say the least.

I want to share my success with fellow entrepreneurs in the hopes that it helps you to grow a successful business. In order to get the results you want, you have to get the people excited online. If you’re just throwing content out there and aren’t actively engaging with your audience you won’t get an idea of what they respond to.

So let’s take a look at how to grow your business online.

Engagement

Reach out to people who are influencers in your field of work and see if you can’t get them to feature your company or brand. Along with engaging with people by asking questions, your users are going to be asking questions which you can respond to with helpful answers. This works in a couple of ways – chief among them being that you build your personality and tone of voice when you respond to people. Showing your company’s personality with thoughtful answers will go a long way towards getting people’s approval and respect. Make sure you respond to any engagement pretty promptly. If your audience can see that you’re on to things they’ll dig it.

Hold a contest

Contests are awesome for lots of reasons. They get people excited about your brand because people love free stuff, basically. Give back to your audience and get them excited about your brand and it builds their excitement about your product or brand. Be clear about what you’re communicating in your competition or product giveaway so that your intention is clear. Are you after more followers on your social media? Be clear about it. Are you after more exposure? Make it obvious. Your followers will appreciate the honesty. If you’re conducting a survey, be frank about what you want to know. People want to know that their opinion matters, and a great way to reward people is to make their voices heard. Retweet, regram and generally share the awesome stuff worth sharing.

Get them with some emotional content

It’s ok to publish the occasional bit of emotionally driven content. This is a really easy way to demonstrate the personality of your brand while sharing something that you truly care about. Don’t just hitch your wagon to a trend – make sure if you do post something emotional it needs to be genuine. Being real is the most important thing.

So behind all of this, you need to make sure that you are being consistent with your messaging and your tone of voice. That’s the way to your audience and your key to growing your business online.

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