Building a successful marketing strategy for your ecommerce website

Starting your own ecommerce site used to be something you would do once you had already come up with the products that you are selling. However, nowadays, it is an essential early step to take if you want to maximize your sales and reach as many people as possible. Customers are used to services such as Amazon and they expect you to have your own site. However, once you have your ecommerce site up and running, how can you get people to come to it? What you need is a successful marketing strategy.

Have plentiful content

Your site needs content as well as products. Your homepage, your product category and product pages all need plentiful text content on them. This is because search engines consider sites with lots of useful, well-written and relevant content to be better than other sites – similar to how people view sites. Your homepage needs to tell people exactly what it is that you sell and why customers should buy from you instead of somewhere else. Your product pages need to explain the features of the product and how they will benefit the customer. You should aim for at least 300 words of content per page, where possible. If you sell hundreds of different products then this might be a tall order, so you should probably just concentrate on the main pages.

Produce interesting blog posts

As well as plentiful content for your pages, you also need to make sure that you have a regularly updated blog that is full of interesting posts. Search engines look favorably upon sites that add new pages relatively often. However, blog posts are also a great way to get people interested in your site and your company. Blog posts can be about anything you want. You could do a post about a new product that you have available on your site. You could write one about something industry related that you are an expert on. You could even interview an industry expert. Blog posts are also a chance for you to express yourself and get your company culture across.

Social media presence

Having a social media presence is an absolute must in 2018. When you start an ecommerce site from home, you are unlikely to have a particularly large following. This is where your existing social media profiles will come in. You will (hopefully) have some friends on Facebook, who might be interested in what you are selling. Set up a new profile for your brand and then share the page on your personal page to get interest started. After doing that, you can do posts on the brand profile about any new products or deals, or even link to your interesting blog posts.

The objective of your social media presence will be, ultimately, to get people to click onto your site and browse your products. It’s essential to get great pictures of your products whether you do it yourself or get professional still life photography of your products for better results. However, you can also do other things to build your following on social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are excellent for having conversations with your followers. Engage with your followers by replying to their questions, complaints and comments. You can ask their opinions about new products and deals and even run competitions for them.

Email marketing

Email may seem like ancient technology compared with social media but it is still an immensely important weapon in the digital marketing arsenal. It is hugely effective at reaching your audience in a more targeted way. Email marketing is not about spamming generic sales emails to anyone and everyone. Since spam is not the aim of the game, you need to be able to harvest people’s email addresses. Existing customers will have already given you their address when they signed up to buy from your site. You can get potential customers’ email addresses by encouraging them to subscribe to your blog.

Email marketing platforms will let you split your customer base into various demographics, based on stuff like whether they have signed up to your blog, what they have bought before and much more. This means that you can send them more personalized emails that will engage with them better. Valentino Vaschetto is an email marketing expert who works for advertising and marketing agency Iconic Industries. Valentino Vaschetto has a popular Vimeo that uses videos to explain all aspects of digital marketing to you.

Conclusion

Starting up a business from home has never been easier. Ecommerce and digital marketing allow you to direct customers to your shop where they can buy your products, all by using the internet.

Continue Reading

It’s Time to Turn Your Business Website into an E-Commerce Powerhouse

The place for business in the 21st century is on the web. More and more businesses are establishing websites in order to do the bulk of their advertising and selling. If you are searching for a way to turn your business website into an e-commerce giant, you’ll need the proper software. There are a number of types of ecommerce shopping cart software to choose from. It only takes the bare minimum of research to enable you to decide which types will work best for the needs of your business. Once you know what you need, it’s easier than ever to go about getting it.

A Shopping Cart Is an Essential Piece of Modern E-Commerce Software

One of the most important pieces of e-commerce software you can order for your business site will be a shopping cart. This is the place where your customers can store items that interest them while they continue to browse around the rest of your site. Giving them a place to store these goods is an excellent way to keep them from forgetting about these items. Once they have completed their visit to your site, they can quickly retrieve their item from the shopping cart and take it to the checkout page to complete their order. Shopping carts save you sales.

Having a Shopping Cart on Your Site Will Save You a Lot of Sales

As noted above, it’s a tried and true proposition that having a shopping cart on your site will save you a great many sales. Even if a customer should forget to take that particular item to checkout, you can still make it the basis of a reminder email that you send to them later on. A quick email with the item and a message along the lines of, “Don’t forget about me!” can save you a lot of sales in the long run. A shopping cart is an e-commerce item that serves many functions and will more than repay the initial investment you make in order to add one to your official business website.

It’s Time For You to Show Your Competitors Who’s the Boss

If your website has been losing ground in favor of your competition, the reason is as clear as it is simple. Your site simply isn’t up to snuff. You’ll need to overhaul it in order to feature all of the latest e-commerce software. Your competitors have already done and are reaping the benefits of their foresight. It’s time for you to make up for lost time so that you can get back to challenging them for the crown.

Order Your Shopping Cart Software From a Professional Provider Today

It’s an excellent idea to order your shopping cart software from a professional provider as soon as possible. The sooner you do so, the more your productivity and profitability will increase. E-commerce software enables your business to interact with your customers in real time so that you can quickly get a reliable feel for what items interest them the most. There are a thousand other benefits that come with these valuable e-commerce software items. A shopping cart and official web store are two of the most important ones that no modern business website can afford to be without.

Continue Reading

What Makes Your Home Business Attractive?

So that your home business can thrive, what are you doing to attractive new customers?

Some home business owners will turn to as much advertising and marketing as their budgets will allow. In doing so, they can demonstrate the lure of their products and/or services.

Others, meantime, opt for a heavy dose of stellar customer service to win new customers. Show a new customer how much better your service is than the competition’s, allowing you to win them over for years to come.

Knowing what makes your home business attractive is not something you can sleep on. In fact, it should be something you make a priority of.

That said take some time to re-evaluate what truly makes your home business attractive, allowing you to capitalize on that now and in the years to come.

14202195290_9138924e46_o

Truly Understanding Success

So that you can better understand what makes your home business tick, start by re-evaluating the entire process.

Okay, you may think that you do not have the time for such actions, but wouldn’t your business be better off if you did take the time and effort?

To start with, compare you revenue numbers from a year ago at this time.

Are they ahead of where they were last year? Are you essentially about where you were ago? The last and worst scenario, are you behind now from where you were a year ago at this time? Even if you are ahead of where you were at this point in 2015, don’t rest on your laurels. Complacency for any business, especially one that is typically a one-person show and operating with less financial capital than the big boys, can be a recipe for trouble.

In the event your numbers are down from a year ago, determining the reason or reasons for this is not a choice, it is a necessity.

While it could be any number of reasons, one could be your company’s overall organizational skills (or lack thereof them).

Don’t Lack for Website Skills

One area where you do not want to be lacking in organization is your website.

As a home business owner, stop and think for a moment where you would be without a top-notch website.

A solid website should be organized, informative, authoritative, well-promoted, and something that allows you to distance yourself from the immediate competition.

When it comes to organizing the site, how much of your time and effort goes into making sure it looks clean and gives customers (present or potential ones) everything they need at their fingertips.

Some customers may want to use your site to download and order purchase items, something a tradebit or other similar sites can easily provide.

Others may simply want to come to your site to gain more information on the industry with which you are a part of.

No matter the reason, you and your website can’t afford to drop the ball.

Another area of importance is properly promoting your site, especially on social networks.

If you do not already, make sure you display your respective social media icons (the sites you have accounts for) somewhere on the front page of your site. This allows you to demonstrate that you not only have a social media footprint as a home business owner, but that it is also important to you.

Also keep in mind that your website is essentially the best mouthpiece you have as a home business owner.

That said you should always look at your site as a money-making vehicle, along with being informative for consumers.

There are countless home businesses operating nationwide these days, so the opportunities are literally endless for the millions of people involved in these.

Taking the time to really get to know what separates your home business from the competition is more important than you might think.

Always devote some time and energy to making sure your business is not taking anything for granted, along with always looking to improve things.

As any smart home business owner can tell you, he or she didn’t strike it rich overnight.

In many cases, it takes hours and hours of hard work and dedication to turn a decent profit.

Will you be one of those successful home business stories?

Continue Reading

How To Use The Internet To Grow Your Local Business

Ensuring your business is successful no doubt takes up most of your time. Your business is your lifeline; its success affects your quality and way of life, on top of providing you the cash you need to pay the bills, put a roof over the family’s head and pay for food. Making sure your company survives and grows means having a great product or service on offer, offering high-value prices, boasting excellent customer service and standing out in the crowd.

In this increasingly competitive economy, marketing your business is arguably more important than ever. Small businesses may not be looking to get themselves on prime-time TV, but they should be looking to market their business effectively if they want the maximum potential return on investment. Even small, local operations can find themselves increasing profits through online trade and often find a great website can transform a small operation into a national one.

Local Internet Marketing

Utilising internet marketing, in all its forms, should be a top priority for local businesses in the UK. Customers are searching for all types of businesses and when they’re looking to buy, local searches are commonly used. By this, we mean people are searching for specific businesses in specific areas, and that’s why Thomson Local is the go-to place for local business advertising. This company is used by millions of customers in the UK, and they generate millions of online referrals and deliver millions of directories to households and businesses. Thomson’s goal is the same as what yours should be; to attract business from as many potential customers as possible.

Using the Internet to Get Found By Customers

Getting your business onto online directories is a no brainer, but to unlock online sales to the maximum potential and really watch your business boom, you should be utilising numerous channels of internet marketing. If you get to grips with what you need to do and, in time, master the art, internet marketing can be extremely cheap – oftentimes free – but you should always seek advice where you’re not sure to get the maximum return on your efforts.

  • Social Media Marketing – You might be a traditional family-run business that’s been operating just fine for decades, and you might not be an avid user of Facebook yourself, but these days everybody is using social media, including your customers. Many people spend hours browsing through the social media feeds and millions of people check their feeds periodically through the day. If you attract followers to your page, you can share news about products and promotions that will be read by potential customers. Plus, they may share this news to others. You can respond to queries and complaints instantly to bolster your customer service, and if your campaign is a success, you can watch your customer base grow.
  • Having a Good Website – When people are searching for your business online, it’s important that you have a website for them to find. Online directories can help your business get found by local customers, but nowadays, they’ll want to find more than just a phone number and a location on a map – though both of those are completely necessary. They’ll want to take a look at your website and get a first impression of how professional your business looks. They’ll likely want to be able to look at products or have a general read of what your business is about. It’s also extremely likely that many of them will want to buy products from you online. Most of your competitors will be doing it, so having a website nowadays is crucial to staying in the marketplace.
  • Search Engine Optimisation – Just making a website is like putting a drop into the ocean. The internet is flooded with existing websites and new ones are created in abundance on a daily basis. Standing out in the crowd is what will bring your website success, and this is achieved via good search engine optimisation. Google among other search engines have a very complex system of deciding which websites are most relevant to user searches, but you can help your website reach the first page and attract more viewers by publishing content regularly, bearing in mind keywords your customers may search for and making sure they are featured in your text, building relationships with other businesses who can help spread the word of your website, and –as aforementioned – being featured on online directories and running successful social media campaigns.
  • Content Marketing – Many people are now immune to the hard sell. People don’t want salesman knocking on their doors and they don’t want to read articles on a website that focus solely on attracting their custom. People browse the internet at their own leisure, and as such, would prefer to read a more engaging article with useful information. Guest blogging and placing blogs on your own website, which explain things or provide a solution to a problem, can help build trust with potential customers and lead to future sales. Many businesses find success attracting new followers to their social media profiles by sharing related industry news and not always focusing on advertising themselves.

All of the above may be hard to master for new or inexperienced users, which is the reason so many businesses are around to help you market your business locally using the internet. Investing in one of these companies could be a good idea, but getting your business on Thomson Local really is a must. This company’s purpose is to get you found and it works with many partners to do just that, but it’s still important to remember other vital ways to attract new business using the internet. Social media marketing, having a great website that is search engine optimised and producing high quality content will all help you take your business into the future.

Continue Reading