As a company, marketing is one of the biggest facets as to whether or not you’re successful. If you want customers to visit your website or purchase your products, you need to market to them effectively.
Most companies have realized that online marketing or social media marketing is the way to reach their consumers, so they’re actively creating websites and other digital marketing tools in order to reach out to these consumers. Some companies, though, make the mistake in thinking that as long as they have an online presence, the customers will come a-running.
What they fail to realize is that online marketing is still marketing – it’s not a miracle – so like all the other marketing tools that your company uses, you still have to work at it.
If you want your online marketing campaigns to be effective, you have to understand and initiate the following.
1. Know the habits of consumers
Consumerism in this day and age has changed drastically from years before. Customers are making more online purchases, they’re being influenced by peers on social networking sites – basically, they’re using technology to their advantage.
Rather than traveling to the store, customers are researching products they want online. They’re reading customer reviews from other people who have purchased the product, they’re asking their Facebook and Twitter friends for recommendations, and they’re using online tools or apps in order to find the best price.
Your company is no longer competing with your known competitors—you are now competing with the Internet and anyone on the Internet who sells your product.
A simple Google search of the product they want will yield hundreds of results from online merchants selling the product, and if your company doesn’t rank on the first page, or if someone else offers it at a better price, you’re going to lose the customer.
At the chance the customer does travel to your store, they’re using apps on their mobile device, such as ShopSavvy or Barcode Scanner, to scan the barcode and find out where it can be purchased for cheaper. You may have got them in the door, but if your price wasn’t the cheapest, you didn’t nail the sale.
In order to get these customers coming to you, you need to implement a great deal of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) tactics to get these people to your website to buy your product. Plus, you constantly need to monitor your competition in order to check out prices offered by others.
Investing in your SEO and SEM is a great way to attract customers, but SEO and SEM need to be actively monitored and assessed to make sure that you’re getting the most out of your efforts. If the keywords you chose aren’t working, change them. Play around with your options until you find the best fit.
2. Be prepared for the mobile takeover
More and more people today are shopping on their smartphones and tablets instead of on an actual computer. This means that your website and blog need to be optimized for mobile devices.
If a customer tries to access your site on their iPad, but it’s not optimized for mobile use, that customer isn’t going to move to their computer to look at your site. Instead, they’re going to go to another website with the same product that they can access from their mobile device.
Not only do you need to invest in optimizing your site for mobile, but you need to make sure that if you are creating digital advertisements, they are also being seen on mobile devices.
GM pulled their contract with Facebookafter realizing that they were spending a great deal of money on ads that weren’t being seen by every Facebook user. If you notice that the sites your ads are on are not optimized for mobile, find a site that is.
3. Get creative
Online advertising does not only refer to websites, SEO and digital ads. It includes everything that is related to the Internet, so get creative with your marketing. Create a social media contest to drive traffic to your social media pages or your website. Invest in gamification if it will generate traffic to your site and interest in your company.
Start a blog if you have a wealth of knowledge you can share with your customers. There are plenty of things that you can do that are more creative than simply having a website and creating some online ads that will get people interested in your company and your products.
The Internet is the place to be when it comes to marketing, and today’s consumers are using it to their advantage. Make sure that your company is using the right tactics and actively investing your marketing budget in the right places in order to remain successful.
I have a website and its getting difficult to make money out of it. Read your article and I think the customers point is one that I have clear out.