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“When business is good it pays to advertise, when it is bad you have got to advertise.”
Red Auerbach (1917 – 2006)
Hall of Fame Basketball Coach of the Washington Capitols, Tri-Cities Blackhawks and Boston Celtics
As a business owner, you’re open to any and all tips to aid in the growth of your business. But, if you haven’t started your company blog yet, you may want to reevaluate your marketing strategy.
A company blog has influential benefits, such as improving your website authority and raising awareness of your brand, which in turn produces loyal readers which translate into customers. A major component in the success of your business is the marketing plan that you’ve implemented. Optimize it by introducing well-written, professional, informational, and engaging content that’s sure to take your company to the next level.
Search Engine Optimization and Traffic
Regularly publishing fresh, updated content containing your relevant keywords will boost your SEO and help you rank higher for those keywords in Google. In addition to rankings, your engaging and informational content will attract new readers and land them directly on your page. If you utilize you call-to-action properly and effectively, those visitors will be converted to leads, hopefully generating loyal and happy customers.
Establish Authority and Grow Your Backlink Profile
A blog gives you the chance to establish yourself as an expert in your field. For example, I create the blog content for a cubicle manufacturer and office furniture supplier, Skutchi Designs. “Cubicle specialist” is how I refer to myself in the blog. I am building my credibility for related topics in this field. People will begin to trust my blog and writing and specifically search for our site when they have a question or are looking for a product related to office spaces.
As your blog gains traction and becomes a more popular, reliable source, you’ll find yourself gaining natural backlinks from sites in related industries as well. This will only increase your site’s authority more and help you rank higher, driving even more visitors to your site.
Spread Brand Awareness to Reach a Larger Potential Audience and Customers
As you continue to publish content of exceptional quality to your blog (hosted on your primary domain), you’re spreading awareness of your brand. Using Skutchi Designs as an example again; someone who has never heard the name “Skutchi” before may be searching for tips on cubicle organization. They come across the blog post, “25 Office Cubicle Organization Ideas,” and click on one of our cubicle organizers I suggested in the post, then decide to buy. The blog content just converted a stranger looking for a solution into a customer. If they’re happy with the product, they’ll become a loyal user of our blog, website, and products.
The trick is to create content that people are genuinely interested in. Through some keyword research, you’ll discover what topics in your industry people are searching for. If you can develop great content, your blog and website will expand and gain popularity through likes and shares and backlinks from other sites or industry leaders. Your goal is to develop trust and relationships with your customers and influencers through the use of your company blog.
Ultimately, a blog just makes sense. It’s a free and effective way to grow your business, spread brand awareness, establish authority, and acquire new customers. Give yourself a boost above your competitors by establishing yourself as the most credible and trusted source in your industry and grow your search traffic naturally.
Are you currently dissatisfied with your ecommerce business venture thus far?
Maybe you haven’t achieved the levels of success that you know you can reach. Or maybe your little ecommerce shop is bursting with customers and you’re ready to take things to the next level.
Whatever your reasoning may be, just know that there are powerful marketing tips that make it more than possible to grow your e-commerce site by leaps and bounds.
Let’s take a look at our best recommendations for 2017 and beyond.
Create a Powerful Content Marketing Plan
Whether you realize it or not, content marketing is one of the best ways to gain additional exposure for your ecommerce business.
But coming up with a plan might not be that easy.
As you will learn, or even already know, there are a few different ways to approach content marketing. The most effective way that I’ve personally come across is through blogger outreach.
Putting a customized blogger outreach plan into effect will be time-consuming and you’ll have a lot of moving parts.
Instead of leaving things to chance, and potentially creating a system that fails, I recommend using time-tracking software like Clockspot to track everyone working to help implement your plan. This includes tracking the projects of staff writers, freelance writers, project managers, virtual assistants, and anyone else involved in your content marketing strategy. Also, you might want to check some the best live chat software to help your team stay organized.
Why content marketing?
For starters, this is an excellent way to build backlinks to help improve search engine optimization. And once you start ranking in the search engines for your most valuable keywords, customers will find your products a lot easier.
Second, content marketing helps you become an authority in your niche.
By putting out high value content all over the Internet, potential customers will see that you and your company know what you’re talking about. This will help make you an expert in your industry.
Do yourself and your ecommerce site a favor and harness the power of content marketing through blogger outreach sooner rather than later.
Create an Automated Email Marketing Campaign
If you ever want to have an effective e-commerce business, you need to begin incorporating powerful strategies for your ecommerce business.
For many successful ecommerce owners, they look at email marketing as the bedrock of their strategy because it’s a great way to influence your customers to buy the product that they recommend.
Through email marketing, your customers will receive regular marketing messages from you. If you automate this system, they will be in regular contact, hear about excellent products that you recommend, and if you write your emails persuasively, you can convince them that your recommendations are worthy of their time and attention.
Consumers like opening emails, especially transactional ones like welcome emails or cart abandonment emails. That’s the bottom line and it’s never going to change. They look forward to getting emails in their inbox.
So do not hesitate to build up a big mailing list.
Make sure your emails contain helpful information about your products. Answer questions and concerns that your customers might have. And always remember to recommend and sell your products.
To automate your email marketing campaign, make sure you have access to a top email autoresponder. It costs a little bit of money, but it’s a worthy investment that will pay for itself tenfold over the long run.
Diversify Your Social Media Platforms
Right now, you may have a strong presence on one or two social media platforms. And that’s perfectly okay for the moment.
What happens if one of those platforms falls out of favor? You’re going to lose access to a major part of your customer base.
Instead of leaving yourself vulnerable, diversify the social media platforms you post on. By building a strong presence on multiple platforms, you’ll be insulated in case one or more eventually falls out of favor.
Keep Track of Your Productivity Time with Helpful Software
It’s also important to mention the in order to get things organized, you would also need to check out what are the best tools out there that will help you maintain things tidy. Whilst there’s so many apps out there, it’s very hard to suggest a specific software generally, as every business is subjective. Aside from time monitoring, website running and data organizing, there are also packages that will be useful especially to developers, applications that test quality and errors of your app, which basically points out red barriers you need to keep in mind in order for things to run smoothly. See more in this source: https://stackify.com/what-is-load-testing/
Needless to say, if your project runs about application development, these kinds of apps built from devs to devs, are something you, as a developer, definitely must have.
Conclusion
Building an ecommerce business is hard and it takes time and dedication. But if you use these tips, you’ll be on the right path to success for many years to come.
Social media marketing can seem like a quick win for many businesses, but if you don’t fully understand how to utilize these platforms, the millions of likes and followers won’t mean much if they are not converting. Many businesses are fixated on high numbers when it comes to social presence, but in fact, engagement is an accurate representation of the quality leads you can expect from this form of marketing. By focusing on the bigger picture, you can implement a precise strategy to make the most out of this vast arena. It’s not enough to just upload content and hope for the best, as most people want to be a part of the brand experience plus if you interact and communicate on a deeper level, this can have enormous benefits for your company.
Take a look at the ways to make a start in social media marketing, so that you can utilize its potential.
Understand what you are trying to achieve
When you create content or promotions for your social media platform, it’s naïve to think that if you just pop it up that people will find it. Feeds change every second, so if you haven’t got anything interesting to shout about, it’ll get lost in the ether. Unless you know what you want to get out of the post, you will have no idea how to measure its success. It could be a simple tally of likes, or how many followers you achieved but delving deeper could identify the engagement level and what type of people are looking at your content.
You can’t be good at everything
You will rarely see one brand doing every platform well. There are so many to choose from that spreading yourself too thin will mean that each may fall under the radar in the long run. Looking at how the different platforms work and what type of people they attract will help you decide on where to focus your efforts. For example, young people love Snapchat and Instagram, whereas professionals will be on LinkedIn, so knowing your audience is key to delivering the right message and not wasting your time trying to promote to people that have no interest.
Make it visual
Posts that are wordy can put people off reading them, but if you have a succinct, snappy message with a high-quality image, you will generally grab people’s attention. You can also use free resources such as MailChimp landing pages to create a call-to-action to share on your social media. This helps to give your audience a specific message such as promotional offers, sign up page or competition entry form in a simple way.
There are many things to think about when using social media to target new and returning customers. By utilizing these platforms and creating content that is interesting and shareable, you will begin to see excellent results both in engagement and sales. Like all marketing efforts, this aspect can take time to grow so unless you’re one of the very few lucky ones to get that moment in the viral spotlight, you’ll have to be patient and persistent.
There are many advantages to having an online presence for your business, even if you don’t plan to sell products online. Today, having a business website is as important as having a telephone number for customers to reach you on, if not more so. Research indicates that 6/10 consumers expect brands to have some form of online content, whether those companies operate on a local or global scale.
If you don’t already have a business site, now’s the time to step into the online world and start growing your brand. Here are five ways a website could drive your business forward and help secure its future.
Your Business Will Show Up In Search Engines
Many business owners swear they get along just fine without a website or social media presence; perhaps you know one yourself. While their claims may be true, imagine how much better those companies could be doing if they took the time to invest in a website. Now that we collect data on what consumers search for (as well as where, when and how they spend their time and money online) we can tailor online content to ensure it shows up in search engine results. Therefore, having a website will improve visibility and drive more sales to your bottom line. For advice on improving your website ranking, read this Forbes article.
You Will Benefit From the ROBO Effect
You may or may not have heard of the ROBO effect, but the concept is pretty simple. ROBO stands for “research online, buy online,” and it stems from the fact that 81% of 18-34 year-olds follow this consumer trend. Think about the times you’ve needed to buy something specific. More often than not, you would have used a search engine and found your way to an online shopping cart. It’s easy, convenient, and the fastest way to assess all your price options. Do you want to miss out on the 42% of global consumers who shop this way? Of course not, which is why you need a website.
SEO Can Boost Your Rankings
With so much competition out there, you will only remain visible online if you use some search engine optimization tactics. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of making sure your business shows up in Google’s indexes by creating optimized content, building relevant links and setting yourself up as a market leader in your niche. It is possible to learn the basics of SEO on your own, but few business owners have the time and resources to do this. Most will use a third-party company to stay on top of their SEO, website and other Internet profiles. Companies like Data Design Systems will work with your business to create an eye-catching, smart website design with optimized pages and content to ensure you stay relevant. For more information, visit datadesignsystems.com.
Email Opt-Ins Will Grow Your Client Base
Even if you don’t own a website or social media profile, you probably still use email for your business. Having an opt-in button on your site allows you to collect email addresses from clients, industry contacts and prospective customers so you can keep them updated on your latest deals and promotions. You can even automate the process to cut down on manual tasks. The best way to collect email addresses using your website is to create an incentive for people to sign up – perhaps money off one of your products or a gift or trial of your services? An email list could end up being one of your business’s strongest sales tools, so don’t miss out.
Your Business Can Operate 24/7
Your website is essentially a storefront for your business that is always open; this means customers can research and buy products while you’re sleeping, creating plenty of passive income opportunities. What’s more, customers will always have a way to contact you, no matter the time of day. Studies show that the rise of globalization and millennial culture means that businesses need to operate 24/7 to stay competitive. Recent research indicates that three-quarters of consumers worldwide expect their queries to be dealt with on the same day, while half expect a reply in as little as one hour. As a business, you must respond to these changing demands if you want to survive in your market.
Conclusion
Rather than seeing the need for a website as another pressure on your business, you should seize the opportunity to grow your company’s online presence and tap into the millennial market. Having a well-designed, user-friendly website will give your business credibility, making it easier for consumers to find you, shop with you and spread the word about your offering.
The question is not whether you should create a website for your business, it’s when to make that all-important step toward your company’s future.
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