Given 81% of shoppers nowadays research a product or service before making a purchase online, having an online presence to help foster sales is key. And with mobile commerce expecting to grow beyond $600B alone this year, it’s clear that businesses who can connect with their audience online will be well placed to experience revenue growth.
But where exactly is the best place to start?
Tactics like social media marketing, optimized blogs, remarketing, and search engines are all channels that can be leveraged to help. However, narrowing in your focus and ensuring that you have a solid strategy in place first will fuel your growth initiatives.
That said, here are some strategies worth looking at as you push to grow your business.
Build an Engaging Website
Your website is your home base and the hub of every advertising and marketing campaign you run. Often, the first impression a potential client may gain of your company is from your website. So before you do anything else, set aside sufficient time and budget to design your website right to ensure it can assist you to maximize conversions.
In order to compete effectively in your market, do your research and make sure that your visitors are getting the best user experience possible and that this experience aligns with the buyer journey. Here are some quick tips to consider:
- Make sure your website is clean, easy to navigate, and loads fast. Studies have shown that 40% of visitors leave a site that takes too long to load, with anything over three seconds considered too long.
- Make sure your website is responsive. Chances are, your customers use multiple devices to visit your site, so make sure that your site is responsive to tablets, mobile phones, desktops, etc.
- Make sure your content is scannable. Avoid using large blocks of text. Give information to your visitors in bite-size chunks that lead them toward your call-to-action (CTA) and that keep them on your site longer.
- Make sure you are creating distinct calls-to-action. Visitors should be able to clearly see how to contact you, such as phone numbers, contact forms, newsletter sign-ups, and links to your online store.
Have a Multi-Tiered Approach
From remarketing to multivariate testing and positioning ads based on lifecycle stages, the importance of meeting your buyers where it makes the most sense will help you better understand what’s working and what isn’t, in addition to where you should be allocating more of your ad dollars.
For example, remarketing allows you to target website visitors who left your site without converting into customers; so, as they continue navigating the web, they will see your ads on other sites they visit and will be reminded of their initial interest. These visual brand reminders are often enough to nudge those visitors back to your site and turn them into customers. In fact, the click-through rate (CTR) of retargeted ads is 10 times higher than that of a typical display ad.
More specifically, the more you understand the lifecycle stages of people who visit your site, up to those who have signed up with your newsletter updates, the better you’ll be able to segment and personalize your outbound marketing messages.
Embrace Social Media
Think of social media as an ongoing conversation between you and your customers. Social media allows you to reciprocate, offer insights into your company, and provide another avenue for customer service in real time. Nearly 90% of marketers report that social media campaigns have increased their exposure and traffic toward their business.
Choose the platforms where you can best interact with your target audience. One of the platforms I’m currently loving due to its high engagement and large presence in business profiles is Instagram.
Here are some stats to know:
- Engagement with brands on Instagram is at least 10x higher than on any other social platform.
- There are over 25M business profiles on Instagram.
- Over 30% of users have purchased something from Instagram using their mobile phone.
- 83% of users have discovered new products and services on Instagram.
Invest in Blogging
92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired at least one new customer and businesses that blog witness their monthly leads rise by 126% more than businesses who don’t.
Knowing this should help drive you to ensure that blogging becomes a weekly or monthly part of your business. The great thing about blogging is that you can leverage it to provide more insights about your products and services, including CTAs, to drive sales. You can also leverage it to include special promotions, feature loyal customers, or display testimonials, case studies, etc.
You can easily use your blog as a creative outlet beyond just text-based posts too.
Here are a few stats to check out
- 37% of marketers said visual marketing was the most important form of content for their business, second only to blogging (38%).
- When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
- 4X as many consumers prefer to watch a video about a product than to read about it.
Email Marketing
A healthy email subscriber list is a surefire way to engage with your existing and potential customers. Use email blasts and newsletters to share upcoming events, offer exclusive deals, share popular social media posts, and repurpose your blog content.
An engaged email subscriber list isn’t built overnight, but the ROI makes it well worth the time and effort. There are many ways to build your email list, but here are a few tried-and-tested methods:
- Create a newsletter signup form on your website.
- Use the sophisticated targeting of Facebook ads to hone in on your target audience and entice them with a special offer in exchange for their email details.
- Run a giveaway or a contest.
Wrapping It Up
Growing a business comes with its fair share of challenges but know that the more time and effort you put in, the better results your business will show. Be consistent and patient as these executions will take time. And lastly, make sure you are tracking as well as measuring everything so that you know which channel is yielding the best ROI for your business.
2 Responses