Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media. Show all posts

Wednesday, 28 November 2012

How to make the most of your social media audience

When running an ecommerce store, no matter what or where you sell, you are going to gain a number of customers who will become happy with your service and will become dedicated members of your various social media pages. Rather than just leaving them sitting there and occasionally posting the odd status update, how can you get these customers to engage with you to not only develop your relationship, but also improve your site to help draw more customers to your store?

Competitions

Running a competition for your ecommerce store is one of the best ways to drastically boost your social media followers and something you should look to do on a regular basis. You may run a promotion giving away a product from your store for everyone who follows your social media page, likes a particular status or retweets something you posted. People will then come flooding to your social media page in the hope of being able to pick up a freebie.

While you will be giving away some products for free, the increased followers you will see on your social media pages make this more than a worthwhile endeavour. as your social media followers grow, you will begin to see more and more people transferring from your social media pages to your store, resulting in you making back any losses from the promotion prizes, as well as a nice profit on top. 

New product ranges

One of the hardest parts about adding new product ranges is deciding which product range to implement in your store and deciding now successful each product may be with your customers. The easiest way to find this out is simply to ask them before you definitively decide to add products to the store. You may come up with 3 or 4 different product lines that you possibly want to add to your store and place them on your relevant social media pages. Your customers will then be able to give you their opinion on which products they like. This will then mean that whatever product line you add to your store, you know that there will be customers out there who will definitely be interested in purchasing what you have for sale. 

New logos and website formats

The look and layout of your website not only plays a major role on your overall brand image, it also can be a deciding factor as to whether a customer decides to purchase from you or not. Just like when deciding to add a new product range to your store, you want a logo and a website layout that will appeal to your customers so just like the new products, simply ask them. 

You could place a number of different logo designs on your social media page and then ask your customers to pick their favourite. Based on whichever logo proves to be the most popular, you can then build a new website design that incorporates not only the logo, but also the colour scheme that the logo contains.

If you have a large number of followers, another idea to increase user engagement would be to create a competition where customers could design a new logo for you, They would then submit their designs and you would pick a winner. Whichever logo won would then go on your ecommerce software and be applied to your site and as an added incentive for people to enter, you may decide to give away some products from your store as a prize. 

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Friday, 16 November 2012

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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Wednesday, 14 November 2012

How to measure social media success

Every business, whether big or small, has their own social media pages in order to increase their brand image, engage with customers and promote various goods and services that they have on offer. While everyone is doing it, how do we measure if you are doing it right?

Well, the obvious way to check how successful your social media page is would be to look at the number of total followers you have on your various accounts. The more followers you have, the more successful you are. However, you can then break that down into a number of different areas. For example, if the total number of followers gained over the last few months is less than you have seen in previous months, it is possible that you are now doing something that you weren't a few months ago which is limiting the number of followers you are gaining. 

Another way to see how effective your social media presence has been is through the number of users who have actively engaged with you. While you may have a large number of followers, having users engage with you by posting things, sending you messages or commenting on things that you post is a great way to see that not only are they interested in your ecommerce store, but are also engaged by the various content you post. 

If you primarily use Facebook as your social media platform, you can use the built in analytics system to monitor various statistical data regarding your business page. This information looks at who is following you and their demographical information such as age, location and gender as well as looking at how many people are talking about you and how many of people were exposed to your content. 

To find out what people across various social media channels are saying about your business ,whether they follow you or not, you can use websites such as Social Mention and carry out a global search. You simply enter a keyword phase such as the name of your business and the page will scour the web and bring back all posts that mention these words. This will allow you to gauge public opinion regarding your business and also allows you to see users who you could potentially engage with to encourage them to follow you. 

Klout is another great way to measure your overall social media success. Based on your engagement, reach and amplification regarding your social media posts, your account is given a Klout score of 0 to 100. The higher your score, the more social media success you are achieving. Klout links your various accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger and many others to give you one combined score. While many people doubt the relevance of Klout in determining your true social media power, it is a great way to get an overall idea of how successful you are on some platforms and which others you may need to improve.

If all else fails you can't go wrong with using Google Analytics. The free platform from Google allows you to monitor a range of webpage information and while many primarily use it in combination with their ecommerce software to see data regarding their online store, you can set it up to also record all of the information to do with your social media pages. 

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Thursday, 1 November 2012

Facebook testing new way to sell online

According to an article published in the US, Facebook are currently testing a new way to allow users to sell their products on the social media site, in the form of classified advertisements. 

The project, dubbed "Marketplace", will allow users to create their own advertisements on items they currently have for sale and then have them appear on their friends news feeds. While this seems to be very similar to Facebook's current promoted post feature, it is believed that the new feature may allow users to add pictures, specifications and other information a person may need when deciding to purchase a product.

How could this help a business?

When you first read what the project is looking to provide, it seems like it will be more of a tool to help causal sellers get rid of one or two items they have lying around. However, from the perspective of an ecommerce store, this could be a great way to give your more popular products a boost in sales and awareness.

With fast Christmas approaching, you may have a few products in your store that sell better than others. There are the products that you would use within this "Marketplace" feature. People who follow your business would then be exposed to these products, allowing them to either visit your ecommerce or your Facebook store in order to purchase the product or view similar products you have for sale. Not only that, the fact your product can be see by users on their news feed, they have the option to then share your product with all the friends on their friends list. This means that this feature can allow your products to be exposed to literally thousands of people within seconds, dramatically increasing the traffic and sales your store will receive.

Just like the promoted posts, this feature will require the user to pay a certain amount in order to have the classified advertisement appear on the news feeds on your followers. The exposure your products could achieve, emphasises the need for all businesses to correctly engage with their social media pages to ensure they get the highest number of followers possible. 

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Thursday, 25 October 2012

How to handle to negative comments

No matter how successful your business is, you are always going to find that there are people who are going to either have a bad experience or just put a negative comment on your site for the sake of it. Particularly on your social media pages, one negative comment can have a detrimental affect on your business. However, it is how you respond to the negative criticism that is going to determine it's affect.

Don't respond straight away

If you are the person who set up your ecommerce store and spent hours and hours building it up from the ground, any negative comments people have about your business is going to be taken more personally by you than it would anyone else. When you do come across a negative comment, don't respond to it straight away. Give yourself to take in what they say and relax. You don't want to act on your emotions and say something that may harm your business in the long term.

Don't just delete all negative comments

As you want your business to have nothing but positive feedback in order to give it the best chance of being as successful as possible, it's easy to simply delete a negative comment as soon as you see it. However, just simply disregarding someone's opinion is one of the worst ways to handle the situation. Firstly, if that person is commenting on a problem they found when using your online store, just deleting the comment doesn't allow you to potentially solve the issue, meaning more people in the future will also come across this problem. 

Secondly, there is very little chance you will be able to delete a negative comment before anyone else has seen it. Deleting a comment will not only annoy the original poster, compelling them to post again, it will damage your credibility in the eyes of your other customers as just deleting the comment makes you seem much less trustworthy.

Provide alternatives

If someone leaves a comment either on your store itself or on your social media pages with a problem they encountered or an issue they had while visiting your online store, do your best to try and remedy this problem for them or find suitable alternatives. Not only does this give you the best chance of having the customer return to your store in the future to try and make another purchase, it also allows everyone else who either views your store or followers your social media page to see that you have made every possible attempt to solve the users concern, improving your business's public perception. 

Remember who's watching

Particularly on forums and social media sites, you need to always remember that, although you might be answering the concerns and issues of one individual, there are many other people who haven't commented who are also watching. When responding you should be professional and courteous, having one person posting negative comments about your business is one thing, but other people taking offence because of something you have said in response to a comment is a problem you want to try and avoid. 

Carry out some research

If someone has left a negative comment about your business or service on a forum for example, check not only your ecommerce software to see what transactions they have carried out on your store, but also see what other things the user has commented on within that forum. You may find that isn't just your business the individual has commented on. If they have left a number of negative comments about a number of other businesses then you know that person is just writing a negative comment for the sake of it and you can simply discredit it.

Personalise their issue

When you get someone leaving a comment regarding a genuine issue they are having, you don't just want to essentially brush them off, giving then the usual script and leaving them to go on their way. When someone has a concern you want to try and make them as valued as possible, meaning that you may decide to contact them personally through their email or give them your own personal email address for them to contact you and give you more information about the issue, rather than just asking them to send a message to your generic sales address and wait for a reply. While this may not help you keep that user as a customer, it limits the amount of negative publicity that user will give about your business to their friends and other social media followers.

Sometimes don't respond at all

While you want to try and respond to all comments in a polite and professional way, sometimes it is better just not to respond at all. Especially on your social media pages, people write negative comments about your business just because they can and nothing you say in response is going to change that. The more you comment, the more other people become aware of it and before you know it the comment has escalated so much that it begins having an affect on your brand image. Sometimes it's just better to let it die and for people to forget about it, rather than attempting to change their opinion.

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Wednesday, 24 October 2012

Pinterest better than Facebook?

With an increase in interactivity, content and total users, is Pinterest becoming a better social media platform than Facebook in being able to drive customers to your ecommerce store and bring in sales?

In the UK alone, Pinterest has seen a growth in visits of 786% in the last year from 901,761 to 7,985,316. As we have said time and time again here at eSellution, for any business big and small looking to achieve online success, Pinterest is a social media platform that you must be taking advantage of and incorporate into your marketing campaign.

According to a research carried out earlier this year by jewellery and accessories retailer, Boticca.com, Pinterest is now a better social media platform at driving sales than Facebook. Figures released by the site showed that not only did Pinterest make up 10% of their online sales, compared to 7% from Facebook, the average amount spent per user was more than twice as much spent as by Facebook users.

Why is Pinterest doing so well? 

The success of Pinterest when compared to Facebook comes from in the ease in which you can have a customer engage with your products. Facebook has limitations meaning, although you can post status updates and links, if you post a number of different product images on your news feeds, your followers are only going to be able to see a maximum of 4 of these images unless they decide to open up the album and view the rest. Pinterest's board allows a business to post as many images as they like on to a board, meaning when a user views that board, they are instantly exposed to all of the product images the online store has on show. 

The fact that a user can see more products on Pinterest without having to actually click on anything, means that it is more likely you are going to interest different people in different products. This interest then encourages more people to visit the only store and thus is what is causing the higher conversion rate than Facebook.

However, although Facebook's conversion rate was lower than Pinterest in one case study, you shouldn't count out the social media giants. After celebrating reaching the 1 billion monthly users mark last month and having a number of new advertising features being integrated into the platform each day, Facebook is still is very important channel for increasing your brand image and driving traffic to your site. 

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Tuesday, 23 October 2012

A detailed guide to increasing your Christmas sales


With Christmas fast approaching in just over two months, many ecommerce stores are now gearing towards getting ready for the festive period. However, with literally thousands of online stores in the UK alone, what things can you do to help get any many sales as you can this winter?


  • Change your website layout - You might want to think about changing your website design so that it is more geared towards a Winter theme. This will not only get visiting customers in the Christmas spirit, it will let them know that you have a Winter line available for them to purchase. While you may not have a substantial amount to spend in redesigning your ecommerce store, you could use some free ecommerce and eBay templates, such as those we provide here at eSellution. Just remember to change your design back to the old version once the festive period is over. However, if creating a whole new Christmas themed website is just too much effort and too costly, you can just simply look to create a Christmas themed landing page which gives users all the information about any special festive promotions and offers you are running, then redirecting them to your current store.

  • Free delivery - Offering customers free delivery is a great way to provide them with an incentive to purchase from your store. You could offer free delivery on all sales or on total orders over a particular amount, the decision is entirely up to you. Although this would cost you more in terms of having to pay for the shipping yourself, the extra orders the promotion would bring in would make it a profitable endeavour. 

  • Delivery guaranteed before Xmas - When a customer purchases a product from you over the Winter months, 99.9% of the time they are going to want it in time for Christmas Day. If you can't guarantee delivery before Christmas, the likelihood is that the customer isn't going to be interested in purchasing from you. When a customer visits your website, if you can offer guaranteed delivery before Christmas you should state it. You should also state what the cut off date is in terms of when a customer must make a purchase to guarantee delivery before Christmas.

  • Christmas discounts - Just like free delivery, offering discounts on specific products allows you to entice customers to your store. You may decide to add a discount to your most popular products or add it to products that have not sold so well in an attempt to boost sales. Shoppers love a bargain and no matter what products are part of this discounted offer, you will see a traffic and sales increase as a result. 

  • Festive advertisements - You know you now have your Christmas range in stock, customers visiting your store know it, but what about everyone else? To keep users up to date with what's going on in your store, you should create some banners, send out emails and post content on your social media pages to give people all the information they require to bring them to your store in order to make a purchase. 

  • Generous social media offers - Anyone who follows your social media pages are doing so to keep up with any new products, offers or discounts you are currently running. Look to use this to your advantage by rewarding people who are following you and also enticing new users to also follow you. You can do this by placing a discount code on to one of your social media pages which followers can then use when making a purchase from your store. This code could be a free novelty gift, a discount off particular products, free shipping or anything else you wish to add to a service through your ecommerce software. Thus encourages people to visit your site and make a purchase, as well as encouraging new users to follow your social media page in order to find out what this discount code is.

  • Returns Policy - While there is nothing wrong with the quality of your products on sale, as some of these products are bought for people as gifts, you may find that people who receive the gift simply don't like what they have been given or want to exchange it for something else. Having a good returns policy in place will allow people to exchange products for an alternative or get money back in terms of store credit. While this is an inconvenience to you, being flexible for your customers making their experience much more pleasurable and making it more likely that they will return again to make a purchase. 

  • Monitor competitors - With so many different stores all looking to increase their Christmas sales, you should look at what your competitors are doing in terms of what products they are offering and any promotions they might be running. Keeping an eye of what they are doing, allows you to alter your own store so that what you offer is more enticing that your rivals, ensuring that customers decide to purchase from you and not from them.

  • Get your stock levels right - As a busy Christmas period will bring about an increase in traffic and sales, the last thing you want to do is miss out on many of these sales because you haven't got your stock levels right. While for most of the year you should look to make sure you don't have too much left over stock, Christmas is the time of year where you can look to over stock slightly to ensure that you have enough products to complete all orders. If after Christmas has passed you have left over stock, you simply run a New Year sale to help get rid of the leftovers. 

  • Draft in help - More orders means more work for you in being able to process these orders and get them shipped out to customers in time for Christmas. If you run your business on your own, you may have difficulty managing this influx of orders. To help get through the busy period, you can look to draft in some friends or family to give you a helping hand to complete all of your orders and get them all sent out. 

  • Christmas orientated stock - Novelty Christmas stock allows you to take advantage of those hardcore Christmas buyers. This could include small stocking fillers as presents, wrapping paper, Christmas trees and many other items. Unlike stock control for other products in your store, you don't want to over stock these novelty items. While you can still sell these at a discounted price after Xmas, the price you would need to reduce them to in order to actually get the sales would provide very little profit on top of your costs.

  • Offer a gift wrapping service - As the majority of customers will be buying these items as presents, one of the packing services you could offer is a gift wrapping service. This would involve you wrapping it in stylish wrapping paper and possibly placing a bow or customer message on the gift. This is a little extra revenue stream for you as it will only take a short amount of time to gift wrap each product and you can charge an added fee for it.
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How a Facebook store can improve all areas of your business

When setting up your ecommerce store, we understand the difficulties that sellers face in being able to stand out from the crowd, get people aware of your business and generate interest in what you have to sell. Although Facebook has seemingly ensured some hard times in the last year, the social media site stills offers a Facebook store option for all businesses to take advantage of.

However, many businesses tend to believe that this selling platform is only beneficial to large brands who have a large interest and followers on their Facebook business page. While in some regards this is true, it doesn't mean that a Facebook store can't be beneficial to smaller businesses in a number of different ways. We at eSellution provide everyone who signs up for a free ecommerce store, also with a free Facebook store as we believe having a Facebook store provides any business with a number of benefits.

First and foremost, it exposes all of your followers, whether they are customers or not, to the products you have to sell. Now, while a Facebook store may not be a fantastic selling platform, the channel compliments your ecommerce software package enormously by being a great marketing tool. Many people who follow your Facebook business page may be doing so just to see any offers or promotions you run and as they may be doing this for a number of different businesses, they would be reluctant to leave Facebook and view an external site just to browse through your store. Like I said earlier, your Facebook store allows Facebook followers to view your products without having to leave the social media site. If they do then find a product that they like the look of, they will either purchase it through the Facebook store, or this initial interest in a particular product will compel them to visit your ecommerce store and make the purchase there. 

With your products appearing within the social media site, your Facebook store also allows you to improve your brand awareness, as customers will be able to share any products they view in your Facebook store with friends linked to their account. As the link to your store is within Facebook, the friends that do receive this link will be more likely to click on it as they will see it as much more trusting than if it were just an external link. Again this is great product exposure and could result in some of these people deciding to also make a purchase as they look to gain recognition for their peers by shopping at the same place.

A Facebook store is very simple to set up and run. Like all of your ecommerce platforms we offer here at eSellution, it can all be managed through our easy to use dashboard. There is no extra worked required at all, the items that you have imported into your ecommerce store will simply be replicated into your Facebook store. 

With over a billion active monthly users and an average of around 300 friends per user, you can image how many extra people your products can be exposed to simply by having a Facebook store. 

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Tuesday, 16 October 2012

Is Pinterest the best for your business?

Okay, so you've decided to embark on a social media campaign to increase the social media standing of your online store. When prioritising which platforms to focus on your decide that Facebook and Twitter is the best way to go as they traditionally have been the best platforms for success. However, is Pinterest now usurping Facebook and Twitter's dominance as being the best social media platform for an ecommerce business?

While Pinterest has a substantially lower average monthly usage than the other two social media platforms, it can be a much more efficient tool for your eBay, Facebook store or any other ecommerce store you may have, as it's overall package can be much more efficient in helping improve your business as a whole. 

Although Facebook allows you to post a variety of content such as videos, images and status updates, Pinterest allows you to not only promote all of the products your store sells, but allows people who aren't linked to your account to stumble across them and then use your account as a gateway to purchase from your store. 

The success of Pinterest comes in its minimalist design, relying on purely a visceral appeal through its images, rather than using text or any other content to add weight. Added to that is the levels of engagement it creates as users are able to visit and ecommerce store of a product image they have discovered, share it with friends or leave a comment for others to read.


From the perspective on an online store, this is a great marketing channel to use in conjunction with your ecommerce software, allowing you to increase your brand image, as more users can view your products and potentially share them with their friends, increase traffic to your site through the profile links placed on the image as you originally "Pinned" the image and increase your conversion rate as you know anyone visiting your store through this channel has done so because they are already interested in one particular product. 

While you shouldn't overlook other social media platforms and focus solely on Pinterest, the success of any business social media campaign lies in being able to  effectively incorporate Pinterest along with all other social media platforms in equal weighting. Whenever you have a new product or range added to your store, you should update your Pinterest content to ensure that any new images are placed on your relevant boards.

The success of Pinterest's layout is emphasised by the fact that eBay are employing a similar layout style as their new home page design within the coming weeks. 




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Monday, 15 October 2012

It's not what you say, it's what your customers say

According to figures released at the BAI Retail Delivery conference in Washington, consumers are 12 times more likely to believe something that a person tells that as opposed to a brand. This staggering figure demonstrates the importance for online businesses to use social media to it's full potential in order to generate as many sales as they can through social commerce.

Whether you are setting up a new ecommerce business or have been running an online store for a number of years, you shouldn't overlook the importance of regular social media engagement.

Engaging with the followers of your various social media channels can come in a number of different forms such as sharing blog posts, images, status updates, offers and various products that your ecommerce store provides. Having variety in terms of content ensures you are able to broaden your message as much as possible in order to achieve the highest reach. However, as stated at the start of the article, true social media success for your business will come in your customers sharing information regarding your business between themselves. 

While you can't control if your customers do decide to share content regarding your store either by word of mouth or social sharing, you can encourage them to do so by placing social commerce buttons across your various pages allowing them to not only share the page on their social media account, but also have the option to email content to their friends who don't have social media accounts.

As in all aspects of your online store, true success comes in being able to deliver a great overall experience to all customers who visit your store. It's no good having a large number of social media followers and deliver a poor service to the majority of your customers, all this is going to do is seriously harm your public image as most people following your social media page will be doing so just to complain about your service.

For many online businesses, their social media page is the first port of call for potential customers, who look to not only if they have any offers currently running, but also what other customers think of your store. If the majority of people had a pleasant experience, this new user will be more likely to turn into a customer. Read: 'Beginners guide to social media' for information on how to improve your business's social media standing.


Get your free ecommerce store now: http://www.esellution.co.uk/pricing.html


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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, 5 October 2012

Why 1 billion Facebook users is good for us all...

Yesterday, Facebook announced that they had finally reached the one billion mark of users who were actively logging into their accounts each month. Looking at it globally, that's around a massive 1 in every 7 people on the face of the planet logging into the social media site.

Although the majority of these users use the social media site to interact with friends, post status updates and add photos, within Q2 , around 84% of the site's revenue was generated from advertising and with the number of new advertising features that have recently been added, this figure is set to increase in the coming months and years.

While you may only be able to reach a small percentage of these people, a small percentage of 1 billion is still a significant number and having your brand exposed across this platform is a great way to not only make people aware of your online store, but also increase the number of sales you can achieve, helping your business become a greater success.

In recent months, the public troubles Facebook have faced in terms of their falling share price and waning customer satisfaction, many people have questioned the sites future and it's ability to truly help any business. However, the recent introduction of added marketing platforms within the site, serves as a great way to help give your ecommerce store that much needed boost in brand awareness.  

The truth is while people are growing annoyed with the new timeline feature and the new advertising additions, many users both store owners and customers need Facebook to still be a huge social media platform. For startup businesses that doesn't have much to spend on advertising and marketing, having a free social media platform with 1 billion users to target is invaluable, making the difference between whether your business gets of the ground or struggles to do anything at all. 

From the perspective of the consumer, the more users actively getting involved with Facebook each month, the more resources brands are going to put into making the social media platform a success. This means customers will be exposed to more stores and come across more great value prices as well as find out about the various offers that are running across different stores. In terms of business promotion, Facebook is a win-win situation for both buyers and sellers alike. 

While everyone knows that in order to achieve either social media or social commerce success within Facebook, you must first create your own business page. However, in terms of self promotion, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook also boosts a number of different added marketing channels to advertise your business such as promoting your ads so that they appear at the top of the search bar and or within users newsfeeds, having users share your relevant pages with their friends and having any articles or content you produced appear within the trending articles feature on users newsfeed page. 

Although some of these added marketing features require you to actually pay from them, as opposed to only having a business page that allows you to post status updates and content for free, these added features allow you to advertise your brand beyond the people who follow your business page or are people who are friends of people who do. The features allow you to reach people who you may have struggled to reach through other methods and while these definitely aren't for everyone, they are just things you should consider when running your online business. 

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Wednesday, 3 October 2012

eBay thinking pink this October

As this month is National Breast Cancer Awareness month, eBay are looking to help increase this awareness by giving sellers and buyers the ability to pledge a donation to help get involved. 

If you would like to play your part and have your eBay store participate in this initiative throughout October, you can choose to pledge a percentage of each of your sales to non profit organisations such as Bright Pink and the Avon Foundation. The minimum percentage must be 10% or more but there is no maximum limit. If you are feeling incredibly generous this month, you can look to give 100% of all your sales to charity. If you do decide to give away a certain percentage of your sale, eBay will refund the insertion as listing fee up to that specific percentage. So for example, if you decide to give away 10% of your sale, eBay will refund 10% of your insertion and final value fee

However, giving away a percentage of your sales is just a little more than you can afford to give, you can still look to make a contribution by pledging a specific amount as a donation through the eBay Giving Works section. 

You can also look to get involved with the charity drive through eBay's Facebook page, allowing you to carry out a number of different actions to help play your part. Every act you carry out will result in a $1 donation being given to eBay's non-profit partners up to a total of $20,000.

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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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