How to improve your business with inbound marketing

When running an ecommerce store, getting customers to become aware of your store is the hardest part. Many people, when they set up an ecommerce store, think they can just set it up and leave it there for people to visit without them having to do anything. Sadly, this is far from the truth.

We at eSellution tell our customers that having an ecommerce store is like having a bricks and mortar store that is miles away from the high street, down a small darkened street that no one ever goes down. If no one knows your store is there, no one is going to visit. One of the ways to increase public knowledge of your store is through inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing allows you to not only increase traffic, but also turn these initial visitors into strong sales leads. Depending on the size of your business there are a number of different things you can do to help improve traffic to your store.

Search Engine Optimisation

The bread and butter of all websites and something which is a must if you are to achieve the levels of traffic that you will need in order to be successful. However, depending on your budget, there are varying levels of SEO that you can undertake. If you don't have much to spend on SEO, the basics you can look to cover are to make sure your products and your pages are all optimised to provide the best search engine results. This includes:

• Ensure all of your titles have keywords included that a user will search for. Generally you want your keywords to be within the first few words of the product title as these are what a user will search for. The closer your product title matches a users search engine query, the higher up the search results your product is going to be ranked and the more traffic your website will achieve.
• Place meta tags on your products and your categories. Just like optimising your product titles, you need to place all of the meta keywords and phrases that are to do with your business and the individual products you have on sale. This should be very straightforward to do no matter what ecommerce software you are using. When selecting keywords, you want to choose words and phrases that has had the most search engine queries in the last month. You can find this out either by using a keyword tool such as the free one provided by Google or simply by typing a keyword into the search engine search bar and looking at the related search phrases that are popular with users.
• Place keywords related to your business through your page content and in your page titles. When Google crawls across various websites, they pick up keywords in order to relate those keywords to a particular search engine query. For example, if you sell womens clothes, you should have keywords such as womens clothing, womens dresses, etc. That way, when a user enters one of these keywords or phrases into a search engine, your page will be shown as a result.

Even after you have made all of these changes to your site you need to be patient. In order for your pages to be ranked by a search engine such as Google, you need to have those pages crawled by search engine spiders in order to pick up all of the keywords and phrases to do with your site and then have them indexed within the search engine. It usually takes between 4 and 6 weeks before you begin seeing results in search engine queries. 

Blog

Following on from carrying out SEO for your business, a blog is a great tool for not only increasing your search engine ranking through backlinks, but also drawing in an audience and then converting them into customers. When creating content for your blog, you should look to write about anything to do your ecommerce store. Users will then visit your article in order to read about that particular subject. You can then place links on the page giving these readers information about how they can access some of the products you have on sale. While not all of these users will visit your online store, you will get a few who will take a look at the products you have on sale.

In terms of backlinks within your articles, you should place hyperlinks on keywords in your article to pages on your site that relate to that particular page. For example, if you wrong womens dress in your article, you may create a backlink from those keywords to the page on your store that has the womens dresses you have on sale. 

Social Media

As we have stated in the past, social media is the best tool to allow you to regularly engage with your customers and other followers. To ensure you help them create an active interest in your business which results in them visiting your store and possibly making a purchase you need to:

• Post content on a regular basis including links to your ecommerce store
• Answer any questions your followers may have
• Post images of various products you have for sale
• Tell your followers about any promotions you are running
• Make each of the users you engage with feel valued, building up that initial relationship that will hopefully develop into them becoming a customer.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is a marketing tool that some businesses use to help drive traffic to your store and increase your overall conversion rate. It works by having adverts about your business appearing on search engine queries to do with specific keywords that are related to your business. In order to have your advert appear, you must bid on these keywords, the higher you bid, the higher up the search results page your advert will appear. If a user is interested in your advert, they can then click on it and be taken directly to your site. Based on the price you have bid, you will then pay Google or whatever provider you are using for the cost of the click. You can also set a limit for how much you want to spend each day. For example, you may only want to spend a total of £10 a day with a cost per click on 50p. Once your ad has achieved 20 clicks for the day, the advert will be disabled from the search engine until the next day The benefit of this is that you know the people who are adverts are appearing to will have an interest in the products you have on offer as they have searched for keywords related to it. 

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Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing

Improve you business’s ability to target and convert customers

"Consumers are like roaches - you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while." – David Lubars, Omnicom Group.

Although in the past heavy reliance has been placed on typically stale marketing techniques such as trade shows, direct mail and telemarketing (outbound marketing/channels), consumers are now sophisticated and wise to these intrusive methods which involve messages being pushed on them.  When you take into considering the fact that daily your average human is immersed with over 2000 outbound marketing interruptions, new techniques have been developed to tune out unwanted drivel, such as spam filters and caller ID.

When planning your business’s marketing campaign, it would be highly recommended that you choose techniques which concentrate on building and maintaining strong relationships with potential and current customers.  Inbound marketing focuses its communications around consumers who are interested in their business or product type, allowing people to “opt-in” for information and news online.  Inbound marketing techniques include:

•    Blogging
•    Content Publishing
•    Organic Search SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
•    Social Media

Why should I implement inbound marketing within my business’s activities?

Web 2.0

In recent years there has been increasing interest in customer engagement and CRM (customer relationship management), linked with the evolution of technology and the internet; with social media such as Myspace, Facebook, wikis, blogs, micro blogs such as Twitter, bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, video sites such as YouTube, and virtual worlds.  With the influx of these sites as well as estimations stating the social media industry is set to grow by 34% next year, it makes sense to strive to integrate social media into your business’s marketing; and target consumers in a new, non-invasive way, making it easier to put across offers and information to consumers who care.

SEO

Recent surveys show inbound channels produce higher quality leads in relation to SEO, as SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, and are also 8 times more likely to close into customers.  Your business should focus on not only targeting the right customers, but drawing them in and converting them, to increase WOM recommendations.

http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/docs/ebooks/the_2012_state_of_inbound_marketing.pdf

Cost Saving

A further advantage recognised from adopting an inbound marketing communications method is the obvious time and money saving aspects.  As consumers are already interested in the product as they have “opted-in”, they will be more open and happy to receive messages.  

As a small business, inbound marketing can be particularly effective as it improves your companies networking and ability to generate leads.  It also saves a chunk of your budget, which could have previously been wasted on unsuccessful trade shows, direct mail and telemarketing.  The statistics below support the notion of adopting inbound marketing within smaller businesses.



http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9408-the-inbound-marketing-explosion-infographic

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