You’re great at what you do! It’s no accident.

Your greatness didn’t fall upon your business by happenstance. You worked darned hard to build it up to the point of greatness, and made a considerable investment of your time, effort and capital.

You took the time to recruit only the top tier candidates and gave them the rigorous training and development that they need not just to do their job but to provide a shining example of the ideals your brand is built upon. You make the effort to ensure that employee morale is high and your employees show up to work with their game faces on every day.

Your product is second to none. You stock the best products and your promotional materials are printed on high-quality paper and displayed in beautiful booklets and brochures in collaboration with organizations such as Duplo International that provide binding solutions.  You know because you spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on research and development to ensure that it was perfectly suited to your customers’ needs. Your customer service? Beyond reproach. That’s not you blowing your own trumpet; you know it for a fact because you channeled so much effort into market research, taking care to collect customer feedback from their transactions and using it to inform your ongoing strategy.

And yet, despite all your many efforts, your business isn’t booming quite so much as you’d hoped. You’re doing okay, your keeping the doors open and just about covering your operating costs… But a business as operationally successful as yours should have the monetary success to go with it. Perhaps you could be doing more to build brand awareness? If you aren’t already using these tricks of the trade, you should incorporate them into your operational strategy as soon as possible.

Weaponize your customers’ loyalty

You have a small core of loyal repeat customers and that’s great. Research shows that it costs it costs at least 5 times more to attract new customers than to retain new ones… But while your customers say all the right things in their feedback forms, it’s doing little to grow your brand. It’s time to weaponize that loyalty and glowing feedback.

The easiest way to do this is by ensuring that your glowing testimonials are front and center on your website so that users know that you can be trusted. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Why not take a tip out of the Uber playbook and develop a system that incentivizes users to share your products or services with their friends, family and co-workers?

This is the best way to keep your customers coming back for more.

Keep your content consistent

Lots of brands assume that they’re doing content marketing but not all of them are doing it right. When it comes to generating and sharing content which is either hosted on or backlinks to your website, consistency is the key.

Many entrepreneurs like the idea of content marketing because it can provide a platform for them upon which they can extol the virtues of their products and services to a potentially enormous audience of people who could benefit from their business. It also establishes them as a great mind in their field with insights, experience, thoughts and reflections well worth sharing both with your customers and the legions of would be entrepreneurs out there who can learn from your example.

The trouble is that in order to be effective, consistency is key. If your online presence is to gain the traction it needs and deserves you need to be posting fresh, original, engaging and factually dense content every day.

If you’re the kind of entrepreneur who generates content for fun whenever they can spare a moment, you’re unlikely to get the SEO boost necessary to grow your brand. That said, some entrepreneurs go too far the other way and produce a metric ton of content every day in the hopes of boosting their search engine rankings… But the content itself is garbage; cheaply outsourced blog posts from overseas content farms that is either poorly written, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors or factually misleading.

If you’re to get the best of both worlds an SEO agency can help you to boost your search engine visibility with a combination of link building and content solutions to help you to build brand awareness without compromising the integrity of your brand.

Here are 4 top SEO tips that’ll make your business thrive.

Show vim and vigor with video

Of course there’s more to great content marketing than regular blog posts. Indeed, in an age where most of us now consume content and make ecommerce purchases via mobile devices rather than our desktops, trends in content creation are changing. Most people today consume content on the go in quick bursts and this isn’t always achievable with long form written content.

Video production, however,  is perfect for these short sprints which need to engage a user and impart a lot of knowledge in a short space of time. In an age where over a hundred million hours of video are viewed on Facebook alone and it’s estimated that by 2021 video will account for 81% of all online traffic, getting in on the ground floor should be a top priority. But with so much slickly produced video content out there competing for users’ attention you need to invest in a production company who can help you stand out. Choose a veteran video production company like Perfect Image Video. Sure, you could try and do it on your own, but unless you have the time or the knowhow, your efforts may end up doing more harm than good.

Harness the power of influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is a relatively new and untested way of boosting brand awareness but it’s the bread and butter of the likes of the cosmetics industry. Big brands are slowly realizing that there’s more traction in courting social media influencers than in paying off big stars for celebrity endorsements.

Social media influencers tend to be a more effective (and cost effective) way of targeting specific markets and getting meaningful endorsement or growing brand awareness without having to spend a fortune.

It’s time to get your business noticed by new customers.

Rethink your social media strategy

Finally, it’s no longer enough for your business to simply be using social media. You need a strategy and moreover you need to ensure that you’re using the right platforms to target the specific markets with which your branding will resonate the most. There was a time when a social media presence was a fun novelty but now it’s a necessity. If your social media strategy is to be truly effective you need to ask yourself why your business is on social media:

• To sell?
• To drive web traffic and generate links?
• To entertain?
• To field customer service queries?

If you’re trying to do all of the above yet do not allocate sufficient resources, your social media strategy may fall flat.

Here’s a great way to approach your social media marketing with big data.