Web marketing is always changing. New marketing channels spring into life. New techniques inspire new routes to success, and constant changes to well-known platforms require regularly adapting to. Given all that has happened this year so far, here are three great ways to promote your business in the last quarter of 2013.
If you sell products, eBay and Amazon have never looked better. Many people head straight to eBay and Amazon when looking to buy products. Both sites offer a wide range of choices. There’s not much we need in life that cannot be found on at least one of these big players. Because of their popularity, people trust them to deliver on-time and to deal with any customer support issues should something go wrong.
Due to this “trust”, eBay and Amazon can be a great place to find your first, or new, customers. Both are sites where people can “try you out” and discover your product range, all backed up by the trusted customer support of these two internet giants. Despite this, many businesses shy away from listing their products on eBay and Amazon as they feel they are price driven. Whilst this is a fact, it is also true that both of these sites have so many people browsing, that almost every kind of customer can be found there, even ones who are not price conscious. The trick is to ensure that your own unique selling points are reflected on your product and company profile pages. For example, maybe all of your competitors send their products flat packed? You may charge a little bit more but actually assemble your customers’ products for them onsite? Such a selling point should be embedded clearly within your product and store profiles.
One other big reason to look at these sites now is how they benefited from the last two big Google updates. You will see more pages from eBay and Amazon ranking for many keywords that never got them ranked six months earlier. You may even have noticed their pages appearing for keywords that you’d like your own site to rank for? Whilst you are working to get your own site where you want it to be on Google, why not take advantage of eBay and Amazon’s high rankings by establishing a store on one, or both, of them?
Having a presence on eBay and Amazon doesn’t mean you are abandoning the notion of attracting customers to your own site. We should really look at both sites as channels for attracting new customers. A marketing strategy should be in place that would entice customers who first encounter you on eBay and Amazon to visit your own website for their next purchase. This strategy may simply be the placement of a discount coupon (valid for your own site only) placed within your delivery package.
I don’t sell products, what if I sell services? Top thing to understand when selling services is the relationship between “connect” and “buy.” Many service driven websites, despite having Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn buttons somewhere on page, make little effort to entice website visitors to “connect” with the company unless they are ready to “buy” right now. If we ask ourselves how many prospects are ready to buy right at this moment, we will all agree that many of them take a little bit more time to think before becoming actual customers.
If you sell services, your website’s role is to generate “connections” with people who have an interest in what you do. That connection may take place via someone liking or following your social media accounts. Ideally it would take the form of them offering their name and email in order to receive great information from you on a regular basis. This way you can keep in contact with your website visitors via promoting regular email newsletters, website/blog updates, special offers etc. to ensure that you are firmly in their minds when they ultimately wish to buy a service that you offer. This places a responsibility on service based businesses to maintain a high level of quality information being published regularly online. The higher the quality of your content, the more leads you will convert into actual customers. For service related businesses, people still buy people, even in the virtual world.
Promoting your personal and company values together Whatever kind of business you run, the current online world is one where we cannot separate ourselves from the businesses we are heavily involved in. Social media allows anyone to quickly connect a company with the people behind it. This means that your values, and your company values, are inherently linked. It is far better to build a company on the values you personally hold than try to build one on values gained externally to ourselves. The Internet is now a place where authenticity and non-authenticity are easily recognised.
With this in mind, let your passion and belief in what you do flow throughout your webpages, blog and social media posts. The Internet allows us to promote our brand and unique points of difference with a freedom that we never enjoyed before. Be genuine, be useful, and be your true self to people searching and browsing in and around whatever you may do. Wherever your people come from, be it eBay/Amazon, your latest blog post, Twitter, Facebook or your favourite LinkedIn group, strive to be your most positive self online. The more positivity we can generate within our web visitors the more successful we are going to be online.
Enjoy this blog post? Intrigued by web marketing? Then why not take advantage of this special gift for all readers of the Yorkshire Enterprise Network. Email me on pb@philbyrne.co.uk with the URL of any competitor and I’ll send you a spreadsheet of their most important keyword rankings in Google over the last 30 days.
About The Author
Phil Byrne is a web marketeer who believes in the power of emotive marketing. Read more about how he believes you can spark true positivity online around whatever it is that you do at www.philbyrne.co.uk
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