Finally you have created beautiful, complete online store to sell your products. The creation of your store likely required a lot of reminiscence and effort. You worked hard so that your website visual appearance would be unique and different from the other online stores to stand out. The domain is registered and the online store is published. Fulfilled with thrill and excitement you are waiting for your first customers. Laying back and hoping that most important job has been done and dozens of customers now will flood in. Everything would be great if that would be as easy as that.
Nowadays the online store competition is so high, that we have to fight to take our place in the Internet business environment. If your products or services are already well known, because you are offering them offline, you definitely already have a base of regular customers, who will be more than pleased that they can now buy your products online. It's going to attract your current customers because the possibility of purchasing your products online makes their lives easier. This is great, but sure you want to attract new customers too.
In this article, you will find effective marketing tricks, that will help you to raise the popularity of your online store as well as income online.
1. Influencer Blogging
Blogging is very effective, non-investing method. Through regular practice, blogging can substantially increase visitors and followers of your business. Every time you write a new blog post, it's another indexed page for your website. That means websites bigger likelihood to reflect in search engines like Google. Post writing also helps to get more followers on social network platforms. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc. by now are the most used by businesses. After posting a blog post on your web-page, it's good to share it on your social network page too so more people get engaged. It's important that your articles are entertaining and good quality.
People are more likely to follow up business, that provides them with useful and interesting content. If your followers find your content worthwhile to share with their friends, the possibility is that new people will get aware of what you offer. This way, without investing money, you can reach the audience, that did not have the slightest idea about your business.
Keep in mind that the articles you have created are not going to disappear unless you decide to delete them yourself. That will provide the content on your website and social media in long term.
2. Giveaways and Competitions
Everyone loves free stuff, so creating a competition can draw more followers than it might seem from the first point of view. But before picking up the winner, it's important to choose the right platform for creating competitions. We can suggest you trying this free to use platform: https://gleam.io/app/competitions.
After the end of the competition, you will have contact details of several new potential customers. Don't forget to add them to your existing customer contact information list. By having this information, you can continue marketing to them in the future. Ever wondered why are there so many companies on Facebook making competitions that include rules like and share? Well, now you know the answer. After the competition has ended, it's a good idea to send, for example, a discount code to those that have not won the prize. In this case, the discount value should not be bigger as the cheapest product in your store, because that way you'd be offering a free product. After all, we want to sell more, not to give away more.
3. Create Customer Loyalty Program
Many coffee shops use quantity based loyalty programs - buy certain amount and get one for free. This marketing trick works incredibly well because on your way to work in the mornings, you'll visit that specific coffee store, to get that long-coveted free coffee. As with the competition/giveaway method, the principle is that everyone involved here wants free stuff.
Most customers choose brands that are already well known by them and remain to be loyal. So that your customers would remain happy in the long term, would suggest you to their friends and family, and would buy from you even more, it's worth to think about loyalty program. A loyalty program can include free stuff, discounts, gifts etc. Good if those offers for your loyal customers would be sent on the regular basis so that your most valuable customers keep being loyal to products you offer.
4. Create an Affiliate Program
Affiliate programs are simple, investment-demanding, but very effective way to attract new customers and increase the number of visitors to your online store. The affiliate marketing system is a reward-based system. The goods you offer are advertised by the affiliate in return for the commission. Basically, the other person is doing your job.
The commission is paid only for each successfully sold product and the commission interest is set by you. So, if the potential product advertiser will be satisfied with the commission percentage you offer, let's say 10%, isn't that an excellent passive source of income?
5. Guest Posting
This means that you create a blog post, that is published on another website. You are going to be mentioned as the author of the post as well as your website will be linked to that particular web-page you have guest posted for. Guest blogging is very effective for marketing your brand and website. Even if after reading your blog post and visiting your site the customer will not purchase anything, you can keep promoting your products with retargeting ads.
Retargeting ads is a form of online promoting that can help you to bounce traffic after your site is left by a visitor. This means that potential customer might see your ads on other websites he visits. Also, guest blogging plays a huge role for SEO, because the link to your webpage is linked in another site. Having a backlink increases the ability of your site to reflect on the search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo.
When deciding to do guest blogging, you should consider the fact that the website owner of the site most likely will require a high-quality content and also might determine the fee for placing an article on his site. However, paying for plain link posting on other sites is prohibited under Google's terms, so we recommend avoid to do that just to get traffic to your site. To track if the link posted in the guest blog is still active, you can use one of the SEO tools, such as Screaming Frog.
6. Facebook Ads for a Specific Audience
Once you have a small customer base, you can continue to advertise your products by uploading your customer contacts on Facebook and create Facebook Ad. You can choose your target audience from your uploaded contact list and also by manually setting target audience by adding potential customer interests, age range, education etc.
Facebook offers many and different target audience filters, providing the right ad for the right customer at the right time. Showing the ads to the right customer is wise because you will not be charged for an ad that is shown to a bunch of people who might not be interested in your product at all (why would a 19-year-old girl care for anti-age cream, right?).
7. Promote Your Product on YouTube
YouTube has more than billion active users. That's why YouTube is a very effective marketing tool. By creating a short video, you can present your products and introduce your audience to your business. Provide customers with a tutorial on how to use a certain product or inform your customers about the upcoming event.
This type of marketing requires investments such as a good camera, microphone, camera stand (unless you plan to use the web camera), good lighting and video editing software. It's important to genuinely care about your customers and not only try to sell. This is important with any of marketing methods, but with YouTube, it is an integral part so your viewers would be interested to watch your videos.
8. Instagram Marketing
Instagram currently has 8 million business accounts and around 700 million private accounts. About 250 million entries are published daily, and many businesses use that for their advantage. Despite the fact that more than 50% of users are between ages of 18 to 29, with good marketing, any business has great potential to reach its audience. About 70% of all users follow at least one Instagram business account.
Unlike other social platforms, Instagram does not allow to add links to posts, so it's important to make the best possible and attractive profile picture for your business, bio, and link.It's important to choose the right content to publish. Those can be photos of behind the scenes of your company, a photo of your service/product, a product demo/presentation, instructive articles, funny images, customer stories, introductions to company members etc.
The hashtags play an important role in boosting followers. They help others to discover accounts to follow. Statistics show that articles with at least 11 hashtags are much more engaged.Recommendations stand for posting at least one Instagram post a day. Initially, experiment with different content to understand what works best for your business.
These are only 8 ways to promote your business online and there are many many more. We might tell you about other ways more detailed other time, however, these are the best to start with and stick to them, even if by the time you start to use other marketing tools too.
Right now you have an overall understanding where you can start. At first, it might seem that nothing works and you might feel like searching for other ways, that at the end most likely will lead to the same feeling, because of too high expectations. You have to expect that it will get better, but not everything comes immediately. That’s why it’s important to stick to your chosen methods and give them a time to start working for you.
We promise, with persistence, passion and good planning, you’ll get that desired effect.
