This highly depends on your product or service, where you primarily sell it, and how do potential customers find products similar to yours.
If you are selling a physical product or a service that is sold or done in person or in stores, you’ll likely need to advertise and have active listings at:
Location based platforms such as:
- Google Local Listings
- Google Maps
- Facebook Places
- Foursquare
- Yelp
- Zomato
- The regional and local competitors to the above in your country
- Google Merchant Center, especially if you have a sizeable catalog of products and SKUs
- If it’s a service, I would recommend crowd-purchasing platforms such as Groupon
If you sell physical products or services online, i.e. eCommerce, then depending on your target market, you’ll likely need to create targeted campaigns on these platforms because your users are likely to spend time on these. Always think about a typical day in your user’s life, note down all the things they do, everywhere they spend their time. That’s where you need to be.
Social media platforms are great for creating awareness, brand positioning and quick, low-cognitive-threshold sells such as gathering emails, phone numbers from potential users so you could market to them later.
Facebook Pages and targeted posts that attract conversations and discussions are core in terms of garnering exposure.
Youtube – create engaging videos about the problem your product solves. Millions of users search for and watch videos on Youtube every day. In any month 8 out of 10 18-49 year olds watch Youtube.
Find online communities where users are already discussing either the problem you’re solving, other solutions, your competitors etc. Some of these are:
- Slack
- Meetup mailing threads
- Quora
- 4Chan
- Hacker News
- Product Hunt
- SlashDot
- Discord
Marketplaces – sell your product through established marketplaces where users already frequent to make similar purchases
- Amazon, Wayfair, Newegg
Search Engine Marketing – engaging online communities is just one way to get attention online. The second way is to get in front of users who are actively searching for this product
- One way to increase this search engine presence is by discussing and posting links to your products, reviews, services in the discussion threads on established blogs within your industry. You have to make sure your contribution to the thread is positively adding to the discussion.