As the new year kicks into gear, many of us are looking at ways to push our online marketing to the next level and get more of the lucrative online sales pie.
You may be a business just starting out online or you may have been online for a while now and are looking for ways to expand your marketing strategy.
Over the past few years we have been experimenting with a number of different marketing and conversion strategies to see what works best and gives the highest return on investment without taking up previous time to manage.
In this blog post I outline 4 highly effective strategies to diversify your online marketing, capture a larger audience and convert a higher percentage of them into new customers...
Blog Posts / Content Marketing
Content marketing is a very trendy buzzword in online marketing at the moment. This is due to the fact that it is now obvious Google is placing a high importance on the quality of content on websites when determining rankings. In fact as recently as last month (January 2016), Google rolled out a new update to it's core engine which is believed to focus heavily on this.
Google is looking for sites that show they have content interesting and valuable to their potential audience. Due to this fact it has never been more important than now to spend the time and effort to regularly blog on your website with content that would be of interest to your potential customers.
By blogging, we also mean having a blog within your website and not an external blog as some companies have been doing for the past few years. Simply setting up a wordpress blog and linking to your site will not have the same effect as having an SEO freindly blogging engine built right into your website.
When thinking about what to write about, we suggest you put yourself in your customers shoes and think about what they would be interested in. Also remember the 80 / 20 rule applies here.. 80% of your content should be informative and/or entertaining (and relevant to your audience... no funny cat videos unless you are selling cats). 20% then should be for 'selling' such as special offers, new product launches, etc.
Live Chat
Live chat is a feature that can be installed on any website to allow visitors to 'chat' with you via a chat window that pops up on your website. This allows you to engage your potential customers and assist them with any questions they have regarding your products and services.
It also allows you to watch what people are doing on your website, where they are going, where they are coming from and where on the site they leave. This gives you valuable insight into how people are using your website and areas that may need improving or changing.
The results we found from our experiments where quite impressive. On all the websites we installed the live chat on, we found that they all increased their conversion rates quite dramatically.
When live chat is installed on the website, you can download an app to your phone or computer and then when someone connects on the site you can see what they are looking at and they can instigate a chat with you. You can get a free 30 day trial of live chat here...
Remarketing
The way this works is that when someone visits the website, it remembers them and then for the next few weeks, when they visit other sites such as Facebook, Realestate.com.au and other sites that have banner advertising, it shows banner ads enticing people back to the site.
This is a proven way to get people who have seen your site back to you to make enquiries It is also highly cost effective as you are only advertising to people that have visited your website and therefore are qualified in some way compared to the random 'shotgun' approach to traditional banner advertising.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook advertising is a fantastic system that can be highly effective.
This lets you target specific demographics to get your ad in front of them. For example we could create a carousel advert which is up to 5 slides of important info and photos and then a link to your website. This can then be targetted to show to men and women in a certain age group who live in a certain area and have certain interests. The tools for targeting are very precise and can enable you to maximise your budget to get only in front of people you want to.
We hope this helps with some ideas to expand your online marketing strategy for 2016. Please feel free to contact us if you would like to discuss ways we can help you with your online matketing.