If you took on board everything we covered in my last blog post, then you should now have an online store that is highly effective at converting visitors into paying customers. You’re attracting attention, making your products look desirable and then maximising the profits from each sale you make.
All that’s left then is to make sure as many people as possible are finding your website. And if you do this right, then your business will start to scale and you can invest more back into marketing.
Here are some strategies you can use…
SEO
Before you start spending money on adverts, SEO might be a better first port of call. SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’ and is essentially the process of optimizing a website and link strategy so that your store is easy to find on Google when people search for it.
To do this, you will often begin by identifying a search term (key phrase) such as ‘buy hats online’. Only you won’t want to choose ‘buy hats online’ because that will very competitive and very difficult to rank for. This is why it’s such a good idea to have a particular target audience and a particular type of product. Remember how we discussed selling brightly colored shirts? Well ‘brightly colored shirts’ is likely a keyphrase that people look for but which isn’t quite as competitive.
To start ranking for this term, you need to ensure you have a well optimised website (meaning it’s fast, mobile friendly and easy to navigate) and that you include the keywords you’ve selected in your descriptions and on your blog occasionally. Aim for around 1% density, so for every 100 words, you can include the key phrase once. It’s also useful to include it in headers and in meta descriptions and then to try and build as many links as possible on relevant websites (that might mean getting a fashion blog to link to you for example). You might be able to do this by providing them with free content, which is called ‘guest posting’.
Content Marketing
Speaking of content, content marketing is also a fantastic tool you can use. This basically means you’re running a blog and the aim is to get people to subscribe and to look for your site when they want information relevant to your industry. So if you sell gardening tools, you should have an authoritative blog on gardening that peoples subscribe to.
In doing this, you’ll now have an audience that trusts your recommendations and that listens to what you say. You can now recommend them your own products and even provide them with special offers.
Email marketing goes hand in hand with content marketing. Try to build the trust of your audience to the point where they’re happy to hand over their contact details – then subtly sell your products to them.
Building an audience for your blog is of course the tricky part but you can do this by running a social media account and by using SEO.
Social Media
Speaking of social media, this can also be used to directly sell your products. One great way to do this is by promoting the value proposition and the lifestyle that your products support. So if you want people to buy your fitness books, this might mean running an Instagram account that includes lots of pictures of you training in the gym. You can also use ‘influencer marketing’ this way – why not get a big Instagram star to post a photo with one of your products?
You can even sell directly through several social media channels. Pinterest for instance now lets you sell straight through your account and so too does Facebook if you use the right WooCommerce plugin or Shopify plugin for your page.
Don’t be afraid to ask your friends to share your page and your special offers either!
Note that with both content marketing and social media the main objective is to provide value. If you don’t do that then people won’t follow you and you won’t have an audience to sell to!
PPC
PPC is ‘Pay Per Click’ marketing. This is an excellent tool for getting more sales but costs money. Basically, these platforms charge you only when someone clicks on an advert. This means that if the adverts don’t work, then you won’t be charged anything! You can set a maximum ‘cost per click’ though the more you’re willing to spend, the more your advert will show up in competitive niches.
The biggest platforms for PPC are Google AdWords (meaning your advert appears on Google) and Facebook ads. And they must work – Amazon spends up to $1M a day on AdWords!
And particularly useful is the ‘remarketing feature’ of AdWords that lets you advertise products that people have considered buying previously back to your old visitors when they’re on other sites.