How to Promote Your Hong Kong Company for Free

By now, you have probably realised that you need to promote your Hong Kong company like crazy in order for it to rise above the hype, so prospective customers will notice you against the backdrop of one of the world’s most vibrant cities. Never count on them noticing you as they walk by, not even if they pass you every day—there are too many other distractions to draw their attention away. You must cast out enticing bait, and then reel in the most qualified people who grab hold of it.

Qualifying Prospects

One way to do this is to make a sincere effort to tweak the HK SEO on your local web pages, so potential customers using search engines can more easily find you. Ideally, you want your company to wind up on the first page of the search engine results, but this is very hard to accomplish. The best way to accomplish first-page results is to hire an SEO company to maximise the value of your copy. But small business being what it is, you may not always be able to pay others to do even important things like marketing for you.

As much as you might want an experienced Hong Kong SEO company to do your marketing, it may be more cost-effective to take care of it on your own. Just think of it as one of the many hats you have to wear until your business takes off, along with CEO, sales clerk, and even window washer. There are several effective ways to promote your company for free, above and beyond writing and rewriting your web copy until your Hong Kong SEO efforts are perfect. And if you are still unsure, try a tailor-made digital marketing course in your office and push your online marketing knowledge to the next level.

Business Directories for HK Websites

First of all, get yourself listed in all the business directories that cover Hong Kong—and there are many, including Tuugo.hk, Brownbook.net, HK.zipleaf.com, and Salespider.com, just to name a few. Other Hong Kong-specific directories we recommend you post your information to are 852.com and, if you are an F&B outlet, of course, Openrice.com.

There are more to find and exploit, so get to it!

Write up some SEO-rich copy to pump up your presence in the local online community. Always list more than just the basics of what you offer; make the writing as interesting as you can, so you stand head-and-shoulders above the other companies that do what you do. The idea here is to convince people that you do everything those other companies do, but better!

And another thing: never write a single entry and tailor it for each different directory. That would be a big mistake: not only is it boring, and may cause people to overlook you, Google and other search engines will now include only ONE copy of listings with identical content in their results, while ignoring all the rest. In other words, that means that at the most, your prospects will see only one entry with your business information on it. This practice killed many online businesses all over the world that depended on posting the same content on many, many sites in order to get as much traffic as possible. In the business, this became known as the “Google Slaps.”

So take the time to do this right.

Create a new entry for each directory. Rather than use one article for the template of another, write each new one from the ground up. If people see something different for your business in every single directory, they will be less likely to skip you when they see you again. One of the entries may strike a chord with them even if your original one did not. If you ever do work with an SEO company in Hong Kong, ask them to do the same for you. A fresh, new approach for each directory you add yourself to may take a while, but will be more than worth it in the end.

Segments and Global Directories

You can also post on what we call segments directories, like the one on hongkong.asiaxpat.com . Potential customers often check those directories as well, especially if you offer the specialized services they need. You can do the same with global directories that include Hong Kong businesses, because your prospects may check them as well. Apply your Hong Kong SEO skills to these sites. Global directories we recommend you try include Google My Business, Yelp.com, and TripAdvisor. These are places where existing customers can review your site and post their impressions, leaving ratings. Needless to say, you want to impress your customers, so that when someone new finds your listings, they will see the high ratings and choose you over your competitors.

Press Releases Are Your Friends

Finally, never hesitate to issue press releases. These bite-sized announcements are rarely more than a page long, and because news outlets need news, they may be willing to publish your press release. With these, you send the same news release to multiple outlets. We recommend, for example, issuing your press releases to not just the SCMP and The Standard but also Apple Daily, Harbour News, Hong Kong Free Press, and Coconuts Hong Kong. Submit to both electronic and traditional newspapers. The worst that will happen is, they will fail to run your press release.

Start with a general press release announcing your business and the variety of products or services you offer, complete with reasons for potential customers to find you and buy from you. Later, every time you expand or business or release new products, send out another well-written press release to inform the world that your business has just gotten even better. This really works, or companies all over the world—including the biggest multinationals—would stop doing it!

Keep Growing

You may find that these methods provide you with all the business you need to keep humming along. Of course, the real goal here is to draw in so much business that you can expand. You already have a plan on hand to scale your business, right? If not, you had better get serious about that right now, so you can handle all the work that may flood in. You can always hire more employees and rent new retail space!

Floyd Largent is a freelance writer/editor with 25+ years of experience. Since he became a full-time freelancer in 2005, he has written literally thousands of SEO articles for a variety of clients, as well as hundreds of productivity and business articles, and has ghostwritten eight books on subjects as varied as marketing, productivity, and veganism. Educated as an anthropologist and historian, he worked as an archaeologist and technical writer for 15 years before beginning to write fully-time. He believes a good writer can write on any subject, and has also written games, a play, several novels, dozens of short stories, close to 100 history and archaeology articles published in U.S. magazines, a dozen scholarly papers, more than 100 cultural resources reports, hundreds of pieces of web-copy, as well as numerous technical specifications and white papers; and he has edited more than a hundred fiction and non-fiction book manuscripts. He can be contacted directly at [email protected].