So you have already made a website, purchased products and established a scheme of their timely delivery, make sure that your prices are the best on the market. Why do buyers not call you by phone every time and why does the number of letters in the mailbox not increase either? Maybe it’s, because you have completely forgotten how to advertise yourself? Perhaps, the budget does not provide the item for this. Well, in our time, it is absolutely not a problem. One describes below most low-cost options to promote your online store, and is in your hands how to use them most effectively.
So You Start SEO, SMM and Contextual Advertising
Social Media Marketing is promotion through social networks. Such promotion can be organized only by the enthusiasm of your employees. Start with the making shop profiles for social networks (Facebook, Twitter). Fill them with relevant content — photos, contacts, conditions of payment and delivery. However, not only this must attract and keep visitors on your site. Share news and announcements that may be of potential interest to your audience. Ask the opinion of readers; tell them about you, your business, your product with love and inspiration. You are free to invite to your group or community of people, whose interests coincide with your target audience. Another option is running contextual advertising in social networks in order to bring visitors to your site. Stimulate the activity of users. Let them talk about you to their friends through the posts on their home pages.
Social media marketing implies also the activity in various forums where people could potentially be interested in your products.
Email Marketing means using email to spread your marketing messages. The most popular form of the marketing is to create your basic recipients, whom from time to time you send a standard newsletter, sort of facts, announcements, etc. Your customers or partners can also become acceptors of these digests. If you have an online store, you perhaps should tell your potential customers about new arrivals, promotions and announcements. If it’s clothing store then tell them about the order of the day, if you have a bookstore — about the literary prizes, if the technique — here the news can be written everywhere. Just remember, the cornerstone of successful email marketing is its quality content and useful or interesting information. Only then your readers will perceive you as a professional and a possible partner.
E-Mail marketing advantages are the following:
1. Low price
2. Speed of sending and receiving incomparable with conventional newsletters
3. Ease of use (both for you and for your customers)
4. Use of “push” technology when you effortlessly remind about yourself
5. Personalized form of address. The more information you collect, the more personality-oriented are your letters.
6. Viral forms. If you focus on content, people will start to send your news digests for their friends and will become thus your «ambassadors.»
7. Opportunity of tracking. Thanks to the mail service, you can track when the recipient has received the letter and when he opened it.
8. Testing of other methods. You can try to implement in your letter images, video clips, interactive blocks, hyperlinks.
9. Nice addition to other marketing activities.
But remember risks also:
1. You can earn a reputation as a spammer. Do not iterate with the length or frequency of messages.
2. E-mail program may filter your emails as spam. To avoid this, consult and use the right techniques of mailing.
SEO or search engine optimization
is a set of measures to make your site more «visible» and relevant for search engines and for their users. It is obvious that the higher the position of a site on search results, the more visitors come to it. The main parameters that are considered by the search engines while calculating the website relevance (ie, the degree of its conformity to your query) — is the density of keywords and website citation index. If the link to your site will be published by someone popular blogging platform you will get «like» from search engines.
Proper promotion begins with the correct search engine optimization, mainly with improving internal and editing site content. Pay particular attention to the relevance and quality of content, and to improvement of its design and functionality. Think about how to add your site not only into website directories of search engines, but also, for example, into Google Places.
Contextual advertising. Here pay attention primarily on contextual advertising in GoogleAdwords for international searches or Yandex Direct for Russian, Ukrainian and CIS search optimization. If your target audience in the most its part has profiles in social networks, also the contextual advertising works well in Facebook or Russian network called Vkontakte. You will pay the defined price for each escape to your site from a click of the ad. It will depend on the competition and the theme of your business.
Register and organize partnerships with websites that specialize in comparing prices for the products of one category from the various online stores. But here you have to be sure in your competitive prices or confident that in the sales peak of a popular item it will always be on stock. For example, before winter mountain skiing vacation demand for equipment sharply increases. Even if your price is slightly higher than the average market price, but the product will be available – the customers will be yours.
Do not forget also about the possibilities of offline advertising. It can be leaflets that will be distributed in your target audience’s gathering places, sponsorship of some events, the conclusion of exclusive agreements with suppliers, distribution of the discount coupons in any form.