Here are eight things marketers can do to help them boost online sales significantly.
1. Make your Website User-Friendly
Your website is your business window on the internet. That is where potential customers first make contact with your business and that is where customers return to for repeat business. It is the first place every prospective buyer gets to before making their buy decisions. To enable your website serve this useful purpose efficiently, it must be well-designed and hosted on the internet. The images, photos, graphics and videos on the site must be such that enables it to be visually engaging, load quickly and interactive enough for the convenience of customers. It must be optimized for search engines and mobile devices.
2. Write an Informative Blog
To write an informative blog, you must first figure out your area of expertise in your business niche. That is where you can develop great blog ideas and topics that will be informative enough to showcase your expertise and attract readers. For most marketers, writing a good blog remains one of the best tools to convey value to prospective customers and establish themselves as experts in their business niche. To make your blog content more engaging and shareable, you must optimize it for SEO and incorporate multimedia channels in it. You can in addition promote the blog via your email newsletters.
3. Create Buyer Personas
You need an ideal buyer persona to help you craft your marketing messages. This is because you cannot effectively market to your target audience if you don’t know who they are and where they are. You must take quality time to come up with detailed buyer personas for the people you think would get the most benefits out of your product/service. Exactly who are the people most likely to use your product/service and how you can package the product/service to appeal to them are issues your buyer persona must clearly address. From there, you can deliberately create content specifically tailored to each persona you have created.
4. Jack-up Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the best and most cost-effective digital lines of communication with customers and potential customers. Once you have a credible email list in place, you can efficiently use it to market new products, announce promos/discounts, nurture and qualify leads, close sales, collect valuable data and so on. The icing on the cake is that you can automate your emails through some email marketing platforms to make your marketing easier and cheaper for you. Through these email automation platforms, you can host your welcome emails, follow-up emails, and appointment reminders to save you valuable time and money. When you automate your emails, it makes it easy for you to time them appropriately, send a series of emails and maintain regular communication with customers and prospective customers.
5. Brand Yourself Better
Your online presence must be consistent to help your branding. For this reason, the branding you use must be cohesive across all platforms and channels. Your business logo, colors, font, aesthetic layout, and other design elements should match across your website, social media channels, and email correspondence. That helps to unify your brand voice making it the same across every platform you are operating from. In addition, your brand must be easily memorable enough to be in the minds of your customers and potential customers. A combination of all these elements will help you to create a brand that is reliable and that people feel they can trust enough to do business with. The real reason you must brand yourself and your business well online.
6. Make your Listings Complete and Active
It is not only recommended you get your business listed, you must make efforts to make the listings active. Keeping your business listing active is critical to ensuring you show up in search results. This is one great way to get more reviews and to engage with more reviewers. If you have not already done so, just get your business listed on GMB, Google-My-Business, Yellow Pages and Bing. Be sure your listing is complete, cohesive and detailed across all sites. Make sure your business hours, contact information like Skype, telephones, office location, business hours, photos, site links, and other relevant business information are detailed on your listings. All these help your business to generate feedback and reviews to enable you engage with customers positively. A good engagement helps your business to build trust, generate more leads and sales.
7. Be Conversant with Industry Terms
Every business has its own language of engagement. You must be conversant with the language of your own industry even if it is industry jargon. If you are conversant with your industry terms and how to use them, it can help you to look more professional in your chosen business. That way, you can build trust with your prospective customers better and faster. However, you must always be sure you really understand a term and its proper context before using it to avoid offending or annoying anyone. The reason you must use these terms sparingly to make sense the way industry experts do.
8. Stay on Top of your Industry Trends
A good grasp of industry trends helps business owners to be on top of their marketing game on the internet. For this reason, it is smart to keep close tabs on industry leaders and take note of how they’re marketing themselves. That way, you’ll get to know what they are doing that you can incorporate into your own marketing strategy and what they are not doing that you can drop from yours. Follow/friend your industry leaders on their social media-handles to see what content they regularly share. Identify the major influencers in your business niche and pay attention to what they’re sharing. Regularly curate and share quality content on your social media pages, watch out for what gets the most engagement, then model your new content off of that. Stay on top of the latest industry data to avoid quoting and relying on outdated statistics in your marketing material or social posts. You can do this by checking industry publications and sites regularly for the latest information, statistics and data. Always double-check the source of any statistics/data for credibility and take note of any relevant information that can be of help to your business.
