When it comes to marketing your business, there is an infinite number of ways to go about doing this. But we can all use some inspiration and guidance when thinking up ideas to increase the reach and influence of our business in 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 you can 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.

Become a media contributor

The media houses in your country are always looking for content and new stories. If you are creating informational content about your industry on your social channels, you can contact 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: those should be the topics you aim to publish when you get the opportunity to contribute on media platforms.

Don’t wait for them to discover you, start reaching out to contribute, even if it’s on a one-submission-a-month basis.

Incentivise referrals

Have people post about your business and give them 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.

[caption id="attachment_1016642" align="alignnone" width="1024"] -[/caption]

It can also turn anybody into a sales rep for your company and allow you to tap into audiences 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 you can partner with. Look for brands with a similar audience to yours 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, teaching people how to use their smartphones for photography.

Huawei and bmobile jumped on board because of similar interests among their audience. Collabs don’t always need to involve money: find low-barrier entry points to get started on 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 and info shows up on Google Search and Google Maps – a great w