Marketing is essential when it comes to attracting people to your business. And if you don’t have a marketing team already set up, you may be thinking, how can I market my business to the best of its abilities. You don’t have to hire outside help to get the job done. There are plenty of easy and cost-efficient ways to market your business. There’s no need to spend a fortune trying to get more customers to your site. You have great products to offer; you just need to get your name out there and grab people’s attention.
Create a Strong Site
Your site represents your business, it is the window into who you are as a company, and you want to give your customers a great impression. And while it might not be a marketing tool directly, you want to make sure you have an excellent site for potential customers to come back to and reference when looking for their printing needs.
When setting up your site, keep your customer in mind. Think about it as if you were a customer and found a site that felt unorganized and hard to navigate; you would probably move on to another site that was easier to use.
You want a site that looks great, is easy to follow, and easy to use. Customers will automatically associate using your site with doing business with you, so if your site isn’t easy to use, you could be seen as not easy to use to work with, even though that is not the case.
Your primary site pages should be filled with informative and original content. Homepage, about us, policies, should be places where the customer can get a feel for who you are as a company. When setting up your product pages, keep in mind that this is where you can focus on marketing within your own site. Each product should be well presented with photos and descriptions.
Content marketing within your site is geared towards attracting customers and getting their attention to your site and products. Your site should have 80% informational content and 20% promotional content.
Blog
To go along with content marketing, writing a blog is another way to lead people directly to your site. Blog posts will connect people to your site even if they are not an existing customer. They could be someone looking for help with a related topic and, after reading your blog, end up becoming a customer.
You want to make your blog more relaxed and casual. You can write posts specific to your sites, like how to use certain editing tools, but you should also write about generally helpful topics to attract people from outside your customer base.
Having a place to produce consistent content on your site will boost SEOs, and running a blog is a cost-efficient marketing technique since everything can be done in-house. It can also save you a lot of time having an archive for customers to reference. If they need help navigating a part of your site, you can point them to previous blog posts that run through the information they are looking for.
SEOs
As mentioned above, SEOs (search engine optimization) is one of the most important methods to use when improving your eCommerce website by making sure it’s honed for search engines.
You want to make sure your site is constantly updating with relevant content that is free from errors and improves user experience (UX). This is where having a blog will help your site and your SEO. It will add helpful information to your site which will be relevant to what the public is looking for.
Keywords within your content are a great way to make sure your site is a matching result in search engines when users are looking for something specific.
One way to help build your SEO traffic opportunities is to have a FAQ section with many of your keywords. When creating your FAQ, think of questions that customers may have or would be prone to search that you can answer quickly.
SEO is organic, so there are generally no direct costs involved when producing results. Overall, it will help ensure that the right customers are being led to your site by matching them with the information provided directly from your site. SEO is meant to improve your chances of getting a customer by having a higher quality and quantity of click-throughs to your website.
Social Media
Being active on social media is a great way to advertise your business since it is widely used and accessible to anyone. You’re able to reach a large group of people at once and have a space for mass communication so you can update your customers/followers on things like new products and upcoming sales.
The more you post, the more people will see your content, leading them to your account and then to your site. But with social media, you have creative freedom because it focuses on visuals, with the main focus being photos and videos.
A great way to make sure the right people see your posts is by using hashtags in your captions. People can search a hashtag and see the content posted with it attached.
Interacting with other posts and accounts will bring attention to your own posts and account. Liking and commenting on similar content will put your name out there, and people will begin to explore your page.
You want to know your audience and make sure anything you post and interact with is relevant to your audience and business. You don’t want to be too narrow or too broad. Keep everything in line with your business, so you’re able to grow your customer base.
You can also consider making and posting informational videos directly within your social media pages and/or on your website. Video content has become very popular, and it is a great way to demonstrate/give instruction step by step.
Reviews
People love to read reviews before making a decision about a purchase. They want to get a feel for what it’s like to be a customer without fully committing to that action. Generating reviews will help bring attention to your site and the products you offer.
Having a way for your customers to review your business and products is a great source to know how to improve. Keeping up with your customers is essential for meeting their needs. Receiving reviews will allow you to fix any problems and expand your business in areas that may have a higher demand.
Customers don’t always leave a review on their own, so you should consider reaching out to them via email. Keeping in touch with your customers through their ordering process is important, but when it’s all over, so is any form of communication. Reaching out to them is a convenient way to get their thoughts while letting them know that not only do you care about their future business with you, but how you can improve for next time.
Email Blasts
Staying in touch with customers or anyone engaged with your site will remind them that you care about their business. Let them know you’re thinking about them with an email that focuses on what they may need from you. You can send different types of emails, and you want to make sure the email you are sending is somewhat personalized to whoever is receiving it.
This is referred to as inbound marketing, a business methodology that attracts customers by creating content for them specifically. It’s about forming connections with customers and solving any problems they already have.
Great emails to send:
Progress emails – check in with them on the progress of items they are creating, ask if they need any help or guidance. Keep them on track to avoid projects being abandoned and never fulfilled.
Post-purchase – follow up with a chance for them to fill out a survey or write a review so you can stay on top of improving customer experience. You can also use this email to spark future interest and repeat business by offering similar products to what they purchased.
Current discounts – Whether they are a returning customer or someone who has yet to place an order, sending an alert about any sales or discounts is a great way to increase business – everyone loves a good deal!
Changes to your site – If you update or add any new features, sending an email to let your customers know that exciting changes are being made will pique their interest and drive traffic to your site.
Abandoned cart – it’s not uncommon for people to add things to their cart and never make it to checkout. Send them a reminder of the items they left behind; they loved them enough to put them in their cart. Sometimes all they need is a gentle push towards purchasing.
Emails should only be sent to people who have signed up for them. You don’t want to risk the chance of your emails ending up in a spam or junk folder. When setting up your emails, you want to make sure they include eye-catching subject lines that aren’t too long/wordy; you’re working with limited space—within the email, having some visual aspect that adds to the message. It’s important to put a lot of thought into how your emails will be viewed since you’re trying to pull the reader in with a mostly one-sided conversation.
Pay-per-click ads
Also referred to as PPC, is an online advertising tool where advertisers pay when someone clicks on their ad. There are different types, but the most common is the paid search ad. Similar to SEO connecting your site to specific search keywords, PPC gets your ad to appear when someone does a commercial search using an online search engine.
The beauty of pay-per-click ads is that your business is only charged once someone clicks on the ad to redirect them to your site, hence the name. So you don’t have to pay for ad space, just the business brought to your site.
You may be wondering, if I don’t pay for the ad space, then how does my ad appear on the results page? Your ad will go through something called an Ad Auction, an automated process performed by the search engine. You, the advertiser, will bid on certain keywords to have your ad associated with, then the search engine will determine which ads are displayed in a specific order.
It’s important that you choose the right keywords since you pay per click; you want to optimize your ad to get the most business out of it. From there, make sure you have a solid landing page.
When using digital ads, you need to have a tailored landing page that the user will be brought to after clicking the ad. You don’t want them getting lost within your whole site when they click an ad for a specific reason. Make sure the landing page you have set is informational, concise, and has a clear tie to the ad they clicked on.
Set goals
In order for any of the tools listed here to work, you want to set clear goals so you can accurately track the progress you make. Of course, you want to increase your profits overall, but by setting more specific goals, you’ll be able to see what is working vs. what isn’t and make any necessary changes. You’ll continuously improve by tracking your growth and constantly working towards reaching a particular milestone.
Keep an eye on your analytics and always look at ways you can increase your organic growth. Nothing will happen overnight; it’s going to take time to see the results you want. In the meantime, there is a lot to learn when it comes to your customers and how to get through to them.
