Starting up and running your own business from home can be both an exciting and daunting experience. Depending on how much experience you already have, there can be so much to learn and so much to organize, that it can feel (certainly at the beginning!) like a thankless task. One of the areas you’ll need to be concentrating on is marketing your company, raising awareness of what it is and what it offers, and this is where a digital strategy comes in. A digital strategy? Yes, that’s right, all businesses should have one. Here are some ways to make the most of digital opportunities.

Come up with a plan

There’s no point in throwing time and money at doing digital stuff if you don’t have a serious plan behind it. It’s not something you just want to be trying out on a whim and then forgetting about and returning to a few months later. You need to have a consistent and sustained approach, which is designed to deliver results for your home business. In other words, boosting its profile and bringing in revenue.

If you don’t have a clue where to start, then ask around your local business community for some advice and support. You may want to book yourself onto some digital workshops, to learn the basics.

Got a website?

If you haven’t already got a website, then you should certainly be thinking about getting one as a priority. Very few businesses are without an online shop window these days. It’s not enough to just throw one page on the web, with a blurry photo and a few lines of text. Potential customers expect much more than that.

You need to be creating a site which is visually compelling, easy to navigate and, perhaps most importantly of all, takes visitors on a journey and turns their interest into sales. They need to be impressed by your site; it needs to give them trust in your products and services and encourage them to want more.

This comes from great design and content, which (if you’re not a website design expert), should be contracted out to a specialist company. You’ll want to make sure that your site and other digital activity is mobile and app-friendly too so that people can look in different formats while on the go, and not get a distorted version. Your designers will also help you with Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, to help your website get noticed.

Socialise with your market

Running a home business, you also need to make social media your best friend. Having company profiles across all of the main platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, will help your business stand out.

Social media is a great way to connect with your customers, and potential clients – making it personal for them. You should be posting content on a regular basis that is not overly-promotional, but instead informative. Creating useful talking points and attracting lots of likes and shares is important. Try and add some photo or video content and think about writing a blog. It can all be very useful if getting your company name out there and talked about, for the right reasons.