Marketing can make or break your business. Whether you run a brick and mortar shop or have exclusively online sales, good marketing is what enables customers to find and learn about your products and services. Before you launch your website, here are five things to keep in mind to ensure online marketing success.
Before you even launch your business online, you want to go through comprehensive testing and internal reviews of your website. You want to design with the user experience or UX in mind. Determine what your conversion goals are, and ensure you minimize the total number of clicks it takes to obtain your conversion. You'll also want to keep in mind where your inbound traffic comes from, and how those visitors access your website. Broadband Search says that more and more web traffic is generated through mobile devices each day and you'll want to make sure your UX website is mobile friendly and responsive.
Once you do complete some online conversions, make sure to follow up with those customers and ask for online reviews. Prospective customers often base their purchasing decisions based on feedback from other users or past customers. According to Podium, online reviews provide businesses with the dual benefit of boosting local SEO ranking while also helping build trust and credibility with consumers. Make sure to stay on top of managing your reviews by addressing any questions or concerns or offering solutions to problems past customers have experienced.
Incentivize communication between your business and your customers by encouraging them to sign up to receive email and text message communications with exclusive offers or discounts. You can accomplish this by having a pop-up capture form on the landing page for your website asking for visitor information. Current best practices encourage you to have a double opt-in service where the user agrees to receive communication from you at the point of sign up, then confirms agreement again in a follow-up message. As Mobile Text Alerts explains, text message marketing has a great open rate, ensuring your message gets delivered to customers. Both text message and email marketing also have the benefit of syncing with your website analytics to track inbound traffic.
Many times, potential customers visit your website, add something to their cart, but never complete the transaction. As explained by Shopify, this so-called cart abandonment is probably losing your business 67.45% of sales. Increase the likelihood that these customers will come back to your website to finish their purchase by using re-marketing and retargeting display ads as part of your online marketing strategy. In short, these ads will display photos of the items that visitors have clicked on or added to their cart but have not purchased. Some of the best practices for running a retargeting campaign include using clear and concise creative, using a/b testing, and setting limits on the frequency of impressions to extend the life of your budget.
Social media allows you to turn your past customers into your best advocates by encouraging them to share photos of your product and tagging your company. These shout outs may encourage inbound traffic from that customer's network of friends and followers leading to additional sales. However, social media can quickly become a time-consuming task. To preserve resources, allocate your social media presence to those platforms that generate the most inbound traffic. Develop easy-to-remember and catchy hashtags to follow, and make sure these hashtags are included in any direct to consumer messaging. You may also want to encourage posting from your past customers by offering raffles or other incentives for tagging your company or using your hashtag.
Online marketing should be part of your comprehensive strategy to launch your business and ensure long term success. Many efforts, such as using social media or collecting online reviews, are low-cost solutions to building credibility and improving your marketing ROI. Ensure that you are actively managing your reviews by quickly addressing and correcting any concerns or negative comments from customers. Oftentimes, this small amount of personal engagement is enough to ensure repeat buyers in the future.
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