Showing posts with label business marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label business marketing. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 October 2012

Digital marketing on the rise for ecommerce stores

The number of online stores investing in digital marketing has never been greater, according to figures released by the Internet Advertising Bureau. 

The survey, carried out by accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), found that ad spending on the Internet and for mobile phones, rose 12.6% to £2.6 billion when compared to the same point in 2011. 

A specific breakdown of the figures found that:

  • Mobile advertising is up 132% to £181.5 million
  • Video advertising is up 43% to £69.8 million
  • Social media banner advertisements are up 36% to £134.2 million
  • Paid advertising is up 15.9% to £1.527 billion, accounting for 59% of all digital advertisement spending
So what does this mean for your ecommere store?

Well, the first obvious thing you should take from this is that if you aren't really putting in the time to develop a strong digital marketing campaign, you may want to do so in an attempt to not only help boost your brand and sales, but to also keep up with your competitors as these increased figures indicate that many online stores are making use of this digital marketing platform. 

Where to start?


Although paid advertising makes up around 59% of all digital advertisement spending, you may want to try other avenues before delving into channels such as retargeting and adwords. As pretty much 99.9% of all businesses have some form of social media presence, social media banner advertisements may be the way to go to begin with as not only will it allow you to increase traffic and sales for your online store, it will also allow you to build up a greater social media presence and increase any social commerce your business may have.

Once you have developed strong marketing engagement through these channels, you may then look to branch out and take advantage of other channels such as mobile marketing and other paid advertising as mentioned above. There are a number of different things you can do to help effectively market your business, both for free and paid. Read 'Marketing tools for the big, the small and the just getting started' to find out a variety of marketing techniques, both digital and non-digital, that you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.

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Monday, 8 October 2012

Marketing and the absolute necessity of active self-promotion

When someone sets up an online store for the very first time, they sometimes believe that all they need to do is add products to their store, have an appealing design and upload a logo and the customers will come flocking. Well, with literally millions upon millions of people running ecommerce stores worldwide, what are the chances of a customer somehow stumbling across yours? The answer is very little.

You need to think of a new ecommerce store in the same way you would if you were running a bricks and mortar store that was down a small, dark alleyway that no one ever goes down. You may have the best store in the world, but if no one knows that it's there, they aren't going to visit it.

In order to have your site achieve the levels of traffic and sales that you desire, you need to be actively promoting and marketing your store across a number of different channels. However, as I have said a number of times throughout various articles, you should first begin by entering all of the relevant meta keywords for your pages and products to help improve your search engine standing. While this does require some effort to actually input the keywords, monitor their success and alter as required each month, this is the closest form of marketing that is going to allow you to simply sit back and watch customers come to your store. However, if you are setting up a new online store, you shouldn't expect these results to be instantaneous. Once you have inserted the keywords for your pages and products, it will take a few weeks for various search engine spiders to scour the Internet and come across your pages and keywords. Once these words have been located and indexed, you will begin to see a rise in traffic levels as more and more customers come across your website through the keywords that you have entered. 

With the shear number of online stores being set up each and every day, if you don't promote your own business in order to create that initial brand awareness, you're not going to get anywhere. Although you may think asking your friends to help promote your website is like tossing a pebble in the ocean, you will be surprised how quickly it will begin to snowball and simple maths can give you an insight into this. Say you ask one of your friends to promote a link to your online store on their social media page. That one link is then seen on the newsfeeds of the 500 friends that your friend has. Of those 500 friends, three are interested in your store so much that they decide they also want to share it with their own friends. As they each have 500 friends too, it means that in the space of a few minutes, your store has been exposed to 2000 people and that was only through one of your friends generously helping give your business a hand. 

While you may have a Facebook business page or a Facebook store, you should also be actively promoting your online business on your own personal page, as I would image that at this early stage of your business, your personal account will have many more active followers than your business. What you need to understand when setting up a new business is that self promotion is everything. You may feel that your business is good enough to stand on it's own merits and that you are too proud to actively promote it yourself. If you do feel like this, for the sake of your business you need to get past this and quick. Self promotion is an absolute necessity in helping make your business a success. If you yourself, someone who is incredibly passionate about your business, refuses to actively promote your store and what you have on offer, why should other people do it? 

This means that you should be regularly placing content regarding your business on both your personal and business social media pages including the relevant link to your store numerous times to ensure that your message is able to reach as many people as possible. On top of this, you should be looking to create banners, send out emails, engage with forums and pretty much do anything else you can think of that will allow you to help get your store name out there and get as many people as possible to visit your ecommerce store. If you are struggling to think of ways to help market your business, read our post: 'Marketing tools for the big, the small and the just getting started'

If you want to make your online store a success, you need to be willing to put all the hard work and effort that success requires. If you sit back and do nothing waiting for the sales to start generating themselves, you are going to be waiting a very long time. 

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Friday, 28 September 2012

Marketing tools for the big, the small and the just getting started

eBay are looking to expand the number of customers and eBay stores within the martetplace through the release of a television advert within the UK. The advert is used to not only promote the eBay brand as a whole, but identifies the ability for customers to make purchases on their tablets and mobile devices. While eBay are spending a substantial amount of money to have an advert appear on UK prime time television, what can you do to help promote your business through various marketing channels?

Obviously, what marketing avenues you can use are going to depend on the amount of money you have within your marketing budget and how much you are currently making through online sales.

If you don't have much money to put towards an advertising budget, there are a number of different free marketing tools you can take advantage of:

  • Social Media - Create accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn. This then allows you to not only build up your brand, but generate a larger customer base who you can then advertise your store and products. This will increase the traffic and sales you store will generate, while helping you increase your social media presence, creating a positive public image.
  • Forums - Similar in the sense to social media as it allows you to build up your own public brand image. However, rather than using the platform to essentially sell yourself, you should look to engage with other users by answering questions they ask in threads or just engaging with other users in an informal manner.
  • Blogs - A great tool for not only promotion your store and engaging with your customers, but also allows you to build up a regular readership and also improve your SEO standing. What you choose to write about is entirely up to you. It could be an informal diary discussing the problems you have faced in your store and how you overcome them or they could be on the latest news and information about the particular product types that you sell in your store. When deciding what to write about, you should look to include keywords that users will search for in search engines. 
  • Word of Mouth - One of the most traditional and effective way of growing your business. When a customer makes a purchase, if they are happy with the overall product and service, they will recommend your store to their friends. While you can't control whether a user decides to share your store with their friends, you can encourage them to share it with their friends by placing social sharing buttons and your site such as Facebook and emails.
  • Emails - Email marketing is one of the most important parts of any business, however, in order for them to be free you must send them out yourself, rather than employing a email service to send them out on your behalf. What this means is that there can't be too many emails for you to send out to your customers as sending out thousands of emails will literally take you hours to do. Your emails should vary in content ranging from the latest news regarding your business to any new products or offers you are currently running. All of these emails should contain the relevant links to draw customers back to your store.
  • Local Trade Shows and Meetings - This might for be for every business, but if you run a store that specialises in selling goods or services to other businesses, this is something you should definitely be looking to take advantage of. Throughout the year there will be a number of breakfast meetings and trade shows that you can attend to interact with other business owners and form professional relationships. This initial meeting allows them to become aware of your business and could possibly lead to future  transactions.
If you have some money to play around with to help market your business, there are a few other channels you can look to take advantage of. However, even if you do have a larger budget, you should still look to take advantage of the free marketing techniques I mentioned above as they will all help increase your brand awareness and sales:

  • Forum Sponsorship - One of the cheapest types of sponsorship you can do and allows your business brand to be seen by literally thousands of people. Most forums will allow you to sponsor one of their sections for around £50 a month, allowing you to have your link placed on the site, any banners you would like to add and some even allow you to create a thread advertising the products you have for sale.
  • Prizes - This is one of the best ways to drastically increase not only your total sales, but your social media follows and what's more, it won't cost you much at all. You could decide to run a promotion where one person who follows you on your social media page will win a specific item from you store. This encourages a number of people to then follow you on your social media pages in order to have a chance of winning the prize. Whether they win or not, many of these people will then visit your store to see what products you have for sale and some of them will make a purchase.
  • Banners - Banners are a great tool to provide a visually enticing promotion for users to see. Where you decide to place the banners is up to you. You can place them on forums, blogs and other websites.
  • Retargeting - When a customer visits your website, the data regarding the products they viewed is then stored within cookies within the browser. Retargeting then places adverts for your business and those particular products on to various websites that the user visits. This allows the user to be constantly exposed to your business and may result in them returning to your store to make a purchase.
If you run an ecommerce store with an established brand image and you have maximised all of the marketing channels previously mentioned, you may decide it's time to take advantage of some of the biggest marketing platforms you can use, similar to what eBay have recently done with their television advert:

  • Television Advert - Should only be attempted if you are a large successful business with a number of customers and sales as this is a very expensive avenue to go down. However, if you find that your business has achieved great local success, you may decide to create an advert that only appears on local television.
  • Radio Advert - A local platform that allows you to create an audio advert for your business. However, before deciding to embark on a radio advert you should remember that a radio advert is quite a generalised form of promotion and rather than aiming it at a specific demographic. This form of blanket marketing may result in you not seeing the results you would have liked as the message was just too generic.
  • Editorial Pieces - Unlike a radio advert, an editorial piece is a great way to market your business to people who have a specific interest in what your business provides. You would pay a publication related to your business a fee to have an editorial about your business appear within their magazine and on their website for that particular month. This is a great way to have your brand reach the type of demographic you want to reach, however, it can be quite expensive with some publications charging in excess of £1,500 for the service.

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Tuesday, 14 August 2012

Mobile Marketing vs Online Marketing

Although many people now consider mobile commerce to be the new face of online selling, many people are still shunning this form or marketing, choosing to stick with traditional methods as they believe it is these tried and tested ways that will bring the best results. Although online marketing is still a strong promotional tool to increase your business's brand and customers, mobile marketing provides you with just as many benefits, if not more.

vs Email Marketing



When you send out an email marketing campaign, you will find that on average, 88% of all the emails aren't even opened by the recipients. If you send out the same message via SMS marketing on mobile phones, 98% of all messages will be opened. As you can see from these percentages, the amount of people who will become aware of your brand and your message is substantially more through mobile marketing than email marketing. 

However, although the open rate for mobile marketing is much higher than in emails, you may find that the percentage of those people who do open the message, tend to read the information in the email more than they would do in the mobile message. Generally, most mobile users have the predisposition that if they receive a text message that is not from a friend or someone they know, they instantly open the message and then delete it straight away without reading it. In comparison, people who open up an email marketing message, tend to do so after becoming interested in what the email contains, through the subject heading. As opposed to opening the text message to then delete it, people open up emails because they wish to find out what information the email contains. 

vs Social Media


One of the huge benefits of social media is the ability to interact with a huge audience in a number of different ways. 49% of all people in the UK use Facebook on a regular basis. In comparison, 91% off all adults use mobile phones. When you compare these two numbers, you can see the how many more people use mobile phones everyday as opposed to social media sites. While social media's user numbers are less than those who use mobile phones, it is still a substantial audience that you should be targeting for your small business as it is a platform that you can use for free. Whereas, mobile marketing will cost you a certain amount of money to first set up and then employ a third party company to send the SMS marketing messages on your behalf. . 

While I'm not saying abandon online marketing and only market through mobile phones, you need to ensure that you spend a substantial amount of time researching the various marketing campaigns and tailoring your output to suit both platforms. Emails, social media and mobile messaging all have difference audiences which require a different style of output and a different type of message. Tailoring your message to each platform is going to give you the best possible chance of engaging as many customers for your online store as you can through each marketing tool. 

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Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Boost Your Brand Identity with Instagram

Instagram is the most popular photo sharing app, with millions of people sharing various pictures they take with others all across the world. However, while this is a great app for keeping track of your personal achievements and activities, how can Instagram help improve your online business? Well, what Instagram provides is a way to visually promote your brand and identity to a large audience. 

While traditional promotion methods involve writing blog articles, marketing emails or product advertisements, Instagram allows you to create your own message effortlessly as a image. After all, a picture paints a thousand words right? This image is then displayed to users who have decided to follow your Instagram account. The beauty of this is that the message is instant, your audience doesn't have to be redirected to an external site and they don't have to spend their time reading through various amounts of content, the delivery of your message through the image is instantaneous. 

If you have decided to embrace the current Instagram trend, the next question you need to answer is what do you take a picture of? The whole point of Instagram is essentially to capture random aspects of daily life. For this reason, you don't want to start taking professional images and sticking them on Instagram as they are just something that everyone sees everyday and don't truly harness the potential of the application. People who sign up to your Instagram account do so to allow them to see images that other people don't get to see. So, you need to create unique images solely to be shared on Instagram. These could simply be images taken around the office or random, funny things that you or your co-workers have come across. What this does is give your business a personal identity, allowing customers to relate more to your brand, while feeling much more connected to your business or online store as a result. 

However, what you need to remember is that, although Instagram is an easy and entertaining way to interact with your followers and provide them with images, you don't want to over do it. One or two pictures every couple of days is going to be entertaining and informative to your followers, but, if you start spamming follower's Instagram feeds with numerous pictures everyday, it is only going to annoy them, with the most likely result being them not following you anymore. 

It is the quality and innovativeness of the image that will provide you with the best results in promoting your brand identity, not the amount of images you post. Like all aspects of business marketing, spam tactics tend to simply annoy and alienate your target audience. 

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Monday, 16 July 2012

Online Marketing: What Not To Do

Although it is very unlikely that any online marketing will seriously damage your ecommerce store or business, some marketing campaigns can be more successful than others.

The last thing you will want to do is spend a your time planning and implementing a marketing strategy, only for it to have little or no affect in raising the awareness of your brand. 

When carrying out your marketing strategy you should look to avoid the following mistakes:

  • Marketing to a large demographic - Sending out your marketing promotions to anyone and everyone. Not only will this take a lot of time and potentially resources, you could be sending them out to people who have no interest whatsoever in your business. This is a waste of time to both you and them.
          • What you should do - Focus your marketing promotions on a niche audience. These are people who you know will be interested in your product/service to some degree. This greatly increases the amount of traffic and awareness your business receives. 



  • Basic, cheap looking website and promotions - While you may be looking to save as much money as possible, the look of your website and marketing promotions is very important. If you have a website that looks cheap and unprofessional, the likelihood is that it will put off any customers from visiting your store.
          • What you should do - Assign a budget for your website and promotional material that is not too expensive but still allows you to create something that is professional and appealing to visitors. Remember, first impressions count, so make the right one with inviting promotions.


  • Poorly written content - The home page for your online store is the first port of call for all potential customers. If you have a website that has a number of different spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes, it is instantly going to make your business look unprofessional and unappealing.
          • What you should do - Once you have completed your website content, ask a number of people who you trust to read through the content and see if they can see any mistakes you have made. This then allows you to make sure all of the content is spelt correctly before it is published.  


  • Not monitoring website traffic - Knowing how many people are visiting your site, how many of them stay on it and how many are going to other pages on your site is vitally important. If many people are visiting your home page and then leaving straight away, it tells you that something about your home page is putting them off. If you don't monitor your website's traffic, you will struggle to truly maximise the potential traffic and business your site can achieve.


  • Not using social media - Believing that simply using emails, leaflets and other promotion material to advertise your business is only going to get you so far when creating a brand awareness. Within online marketing, social media is everything. With millions of people using social media every day, it is a form of marketing you cannot afford to ignore.
          • What you should do - Create accounts for your business on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Create details about your store including what services you offer and how people can access your site. Generating followers across these social commerce platforms will result in your business gaining a large amount of public awareness in a very short space of time. 

There is a fine line between success and failure when carrying out marketing campaigns. Make sure you take the time to correctly plan your strategies to ensure the best possible results.

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The Pros and Cons of SMS Marketing

Exploring different marketing avenues is always key to maximising the coverage and awareness your business will gain. Similar to email marketing, text message marketing (SMS) is a great way to reach a large audience instantly and depending on your SMS distribution agency it could be very cost effective. However, unlike all marketing campaigns, there are things you should do and things you shouldn't.

When deciding on the type of text message marketing, there are two types; 'Broadcast' and 'Narrowcast.' 'Broadcast' involves sending out messages to the general public whereas, 'Narrowcast' involves sending out messages to a small, targeted audience. 

If you are looking to reach a whole new audience then the 'Broadcast' option would be the way to go. However, if you are looking to create repeat business and advertise your current offers and sales to your existing customers, 'Narrowcast' is for you.

Positives

        • Can be cost effective marketing - Employing a mobile phone agency to send out the text messages on your behalf can by much cheaper than printing and distributing other forms of advertising, such as flyers.
        • Easy to create - Requires no HTML, no images, you simply put the text you want the user to read and how they can access your store. 
        • High reliability - Unlike email marketing, SMS marketing is not subject to filters. SMS marketing ensures your message will be delivered to the customer and will not be subject to being filtered out as spam or junk. 
        • Ecologically friendly - Unlike leaflets and flyers, there is no use of resources such as paper or plastics. SMS is green source of marketing!
        • Seemingly limitless market growth - With the number of mobile users growing at a rapid rate each year, the number of customers you are able to reach is endless. 

Negatives

        • Users think it's spam - Some of the users will think that the text message is just spam and will delete it without looking at it. 
        • No title - Unlike emails, you cannot have a subject title to draw the audience in. It simply displays the text in the message straight away
        • Limited space - The information you can include in a text message is limited to a specific number of characters. While this makes your message more direct, it can result in you having to leave out other information.

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Wednesday, 11 July 2012

Twitter - A Powerful Promotional Tool

If you are looking to help your small business grow, creating a brand identity is key in helping to develop your customer base. If you are new to using social media, the site 'Twitter' is one you should look to familiarise yourself with as soon as possible.

Twitter is a free online microblogging service that allows you to post a variety of status updates that are up to 140 characters in size. The site currently has in excess of 100,000,000 active users worldwide. When creating a Twitter account, the more your business grows, the greater number of followers you will get. Followers are people who have become linked to your Twitter account and will be sent any status updates your business posts. 

These followers will consist of people who are interested in the products you sell and customers who have previously purchased from your store. The next step is to draw them back into your store as repeat buyers. Direct links to your store within your Twitter status updates are a great way to achieve this. This allows users to instantly access your store with one simple click. 

Another strong marketing tool when using Twitter, is the ability to provide followers with various promotions and discounts. One-third of all people who follow your Twitter account will be doing so simply to see if you place any promotions on your feed. Discounts and offers are a great way to draw customers to your site. These offers could be a sale on a number of different products or a discount on one product. While you may feel like you are losing money by selling a product cheaper than you previously have done, the increased number of sales you will gain by offering this promotion will most likely result in you making a larger profit than you previously have done.

One good offer posted on your Twitter account can result in your brand recognition growing considerably in a short space of time as a large audience becomes aware of your promotion instantly.

Social commerce platforms also allow to build up that initial relationship between yourself and customers before they have even made  a purchase. Opening up these channels of communication instantly allows you to build up the trust levels in your customers, making them more likely to buy something from the store in the future.




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Monday, 9 July 2012

Email Marketing and its SEO Importance

While email marketing is used to help provide customers with information about the business and services on offer, it can also help increase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your business, by creating a number of direct links to your website. 


The more direct links you have to your online store, the more traffic your site will receive. As your store receives these greater levels of traffic, it will result in your website rising within a search engine query ranking. In turn, this will cause even greater traffic to the site and more sales as a result. 


The links placed within the emails could be used to help show customers new products that have recently been placed on your online store for sale or highlight blog posts which have been posted on your site.


Blog posts are articles which give your audience information about a specific topic. For example, if you are running a fashion store, you may look to include articles about the latest fashion designs on your site. At the end of this article you can then place a link to some of the items in your store that are similar in style to the clothing described in the article.


This allows you to bring in customers that may have never heard of your online store but simply wanted to read the article about fashion. 


Numerous blog posts about topics that relate to the services your store provides is a great way to increase the amount of traffic visiting your site, improving its SEO significantly.

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Offline Brand Promotion for your Online Store

While the success of an online business comes in creating a large online following, you must make sure you not to overlook the benefits of good old fashioned offline marketing. If it worked long before online marketing was created, surely there must be some positives to it, right?

When looking to promote your online service through offline methods, you must consider not only, what is the most effective way to reach a large audience? but also which forms of promotion are cost effective to your advertising budget? Although many people are beginning to favour reading the news online, there are still a large number of people who read their local papers. Placing an advert about your store and the products you provide within your local paper, is a great way to make your customers aware of your online store's existence.

A quarter page advert in your local newspaper would set you back around £250, but when you consider the potential sales and brand awareness it may deliver, you could quickly turn a profit on your initial investment.

Throughout your area there may be a number of different local business events and seminars that allow you to attend in order to promote your business. These events enable you to interact with potential customers and discuss what your business has to offer. During these events you can also give out leaflets explaining what your business is, the products you offer and how customers can access your store. Leaflets are a much more effective tool than just speaking about your business.

If printing out hundreds of leaflets costs more than you would like to spend on advertising, you can look to simply give out business cards. These are a cheaper alternative than leaflets, providing the name of your business, a logo or slogan and the address of the business such as the web and email address.

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