Showing posts with label SME. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SME. Show all posts

Thursday, 20 September 2012

There has never been a better time for your business to use Pinterest

There has never been a better time for small businesses to take advantage of Pinterest as, according to research carried out by Shareaholic, Pinterest has recently moved ahead of Yahoo as the 4th biggest source of traffic on the Internet. Since May, the site has doubled in size with more users than ever taking advantage of the platform.

If you are a run an ecommerce store, you should be looking to take advantage of Pinterest in order to create an extra marketing stream to promote your products to users. If you have never used Pinterest or are unsure what it is, essentially Pinterest is a virtual pinboard for images. When a user visits the site they can click on the search bar and enter a keyword related to images they would like to search for. They will then be shown a list of images that relate to the search parameters. The user then has the option to click on an image to view it in greater detail, comment on the image, like it or repin it. 

How can this help my business?


When selling through an online store, the more places you can display your products, the more chance you are going to have of making a sale. Pinterest allows you to add all of your product images to their system, meaning that if a user searches for something that is related to one of your products (e.g. women's shoes) the image of your product will be placed within these search results. If a user clicks on your product image, they can then see your profile as you are the one who originally "Pinned" it to the site. When the user lands on your profile, they are able to not only see all of the other images you have added to Pinterest, but they can also click on one of the external links to visit your store or view other social media accounts. 

Even if the user looks at your product but doesn't visit your online store, they may decide to "repin" the image meaning it then appears on their own Pinterest board for a whole new set of people to see. You can see the snowball effect happening here as more and more people will see your product and become aware of your overall brand, increasing the traffic your store is going to generate. 

How to get started?


Using Pinterest is pretty straightforward, what you first need to do is visit the Pinterest website and create a new account for free. Once the account has been created, you will then need to click on "Add" at the top of the page and select the image on your computer that you would like to place on the site. If a number of your products fall under one category, such as a specific product range, you could look to create a new board to place them all on. With over 10 million registered users on the site, it is a great opportunity to establish an extra marketing channel for your products, increasing the traffic and sales you will generate. 

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Monday, 3 September 2012

Boost your business with hashtags

If you are someone who uses Twitter in order to promote content produced by your online business such as blog posts and advertising Tweets, you can increase the audience for your content with the use of hashtags.

Hashtags allow you to group your content to a specific category, meaning that when a Twitter user searches for a category, if your Tweet has that searched for hashtag within it, your Tweet will be displayed to them no matter where they are in the world, whether they are following you or not.

If you are a small online store or an ecommerce business looking to advertise your brand to a wide audience, hashtags are a great way to get your content seen by people who you may not have been able to reach through other marketing methods. What's more, the fact that these people are using this hashtag means that they may already be interested in the various products or service your business provides.

There is no limit on what you can have as a hashtag. However, you need to remember that if the hashtag is really obscure, the likelihood is that no one else will be using it, which means that no one will see your Tweet through the hashtag. A good place to start when selecting hashtags for your Tweets, is to simply use that hashtag that relates to what it is your ecommerce store sells. For example, if you sell electronic goods, use the hashtag "#electronics" on your Tweets.

There are a number of other popular hashtags that small businesses should look to use to help improve their identity and gain followers. These hashtags include "#ecommerce," "#SMEs" and "#business." These hastags are generally popular and will result in people outside your followers being able to see your related tweets.

eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

http://esellution.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/move-your-images-up-rankings.html 
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Friday, 24 August 2012

Facebook features that can give your business an extra boost

Everyone knows that to take full advantage of social commerce and increase your business's brand identity you need to have a Facebook business page. However, this is not the only way you can increase your brand exposure through Facebook. There are a number of other features that you can use to display your content to people who don't necessarily follow your fan page.

Promoted posts allow you to pay to have your content displayed to users who do not follow your business. While this is currently in the testing phase, it is a great promotion platform for a small online business who are looking to increase the number of fans they have. However, this option is only available to small businesses who have between 400 and 1000 fans. If this feature does get implemented into Facebook, they will then appear in the newsfeed Facebook users. To ensure that these adverts do not appear in the newsfeeds of people who have no interest in your business, you can choose specific parameters for your adverts such as geographical location, age and gender.

You can also pay Facebook to sponsor search results. This means that when a user searches for something related to your business, your business will appear at the top of the search results as a "Top Hit." This allows a large number of people who are interested in things to do with your business to become aware of your company and possibly visit your business fan page. However, if a user does not wish to see your sponsored link in the future, they can simply click on the 'X' next to the sponsored link and tell Facebook why they no longer want to see it.

Trending articles is another way that you can increase your business's exposure. When numerous friends on Facebook read the same article, that article will appear at the top of a newsfeed as a trending article. If you produce a blog for your business or write articles related to your field of expertise, that article could appear as a trending article, meaning that everyone else on a person's friends list will become aware of your article and may then read it. If they find your article interesting they could then visit the Facebook page or travel to your online store.

 eSellution: www.eSellution.co.uk

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Friday, 17 August 2012

Out of the box advertising

With the sheer number of people looking to set up online ecommerce stores, the ability to make yourself stand out from the rest is becoming increasingly harder. While we have looked at the traditional forms of small business advertising in recent weeks, to help increase your reach to customers, maybe it's time for your business to think outside the box and try marketing ideas that you previously may not have considered.

Provide free products

Now before you start thinking that I've gone mad, I'm not suggesting you start giving out products to everyone for free, but what you could do is offer incentives to customers when they make a purchase. What I mean is that you could offer to give customers a specific item when they make a purchase over a certain amount. The product you choose to give your customers should be something that they would want but it shouldn't be something too expensive as you obviously don't want to lose money on the sale. 

Customers select your products

What this form of promotion could involve is you putting a number of different items on to your store's social media pages, for customers to then vote on. The product with the highest number of votes would then be added to your store for customers to purchase. This is a great promotion for two different reasons. Firstly, it encourages customers to actually interact with your store, increasing your number of social media followers and creating better relationships for with your customers. Secondly and probably most importantly, it means you are adding a product your store that you know will be of interest to your customers.

Customer loyalty rewards

The more products a customer purchases from your store, the more loyalty points the receive. Once the customer gains a certain number of points they receive an email or some form of contact from your store letting them know that they have gained a reward. This reward could come in store credit, a percentage off a product or free delivery on certain items. What this does is make the customer feel valued, meaning they will return to your store time and time again.

Carry out a charity based promotion

Create a promotion whereby every sale that is made in your store, a certain percentage of the transaction will go to a local charity. While this will mean you make less on each item sold, the popularity in sales this will generate will mean that you make more sales, take in more money, while helping out a local charity. Any work you can do in helping a charity or foundation is going to be fantastic PR, making more people aware of your business and increasing the likelihood that they will visit your store.

While these are simple ideas, it is the simple ideas that small businesses sometimes overlook as they go in search of grand promotion ideas to radically boost traffic and sales to their online store. Sometimes, it is doing the simple things well that is going to be the difference between success and failure, rather than looking to do the biggest promotion possible. 

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