The following are 7 surefire ways to help your business be more successful online in 2009 and the in the years to come. Each of these concepts is used by the most successful companies online. Are you applying them?
1. Budget for Customers – Regardless of economic conditions, you need to always be on the lookout for new customers and taking care of those you already have. With this said, start spending where they are. More than likely, more of your customers are online than you may have expected. Whether they’re actually shopping or keeping up to date on topics related to your industry that interests them. Do some quick research on this with Forrester or any other major research company that focuses on this topic. Remember the online universe touches direct online sales as well as in-store sales and phone orders. Don’t leave these valuable opportunities on the table. Your smart competitors aren’t.
2. Make the Most of Social Networking – Online social networks are a great place to “network” to cross promote your business with other companies and to get your brand in front of potential customers. Particularly when they may currently be more active online than they are spending money off-line – go where the fish are. Those that effectively create strong social networks now will be ahead of their competitors that continue putting such efforts off. Remember, the Internet is not a fad – and neither is social networking online.
3. Apply Your Analytics – Actively review your web analytics at least once a week to help gain insight into improving your site. Look for clues to increase your conversion rates, page views, keywords for the search engines, etc. Simply looking at your website’s stats without developing plans of action is useless. These are not the times for useless actions – carefully define the results you want to achieve and keeping working towards them.
4. Email with a Clear and Direct Purpose – Do away with the chit-chat newsletters for the sake of sending a newsletter and focus on gaining insights and generating sales. For your next email newsletter, offer a product your customers would really want to buy (not something you’re just trying to get rid of) and make the offer too enticing to pass up. Also, ask your customers about what interests them, what they want to hear more about and even how often. The more you can understand and segment your customers – the higher your conversion rates will be.
5. Make Organic Search Marketing Your Friend – Gaining significant traffic through the search engines via pay-per-click advertising is ongoing, unpredictable and expensive. Although SEO doesn’t produce results as quickly, it is critical to the long-term success of any website. Also, look into additional paths of search engine marketing such as marketing through online shopping marketplaces such as Google Product Search (AKA Google Shopping). Search marketing is something you can try for yourself. However, for quicker and long lasting results you are better off to hire a professional search marketer that is experienced with the in’s and out’s of search engine marketing. In addition to producing quicker results, this path can also save lots of time and money in trial and error efforts.
6. Use User Generated Content to Your Advantage – Does your website allow your users to leave reviews of your products? Does your blog allow visitors to leave comments about your wonderful insights? If the answer is no to either, or both, you’re missing out. User generated content can increase your search engine rankings due to additional on-page content, help build your brand through interaction, and even close more sales by allowing your customers to openly review the items you sell on your site. There’s a reason why the most successful companies online do this – it works. If you’re not doing it, what’s your reason?
7. Share Your Content for Maximum Exposure – All of us have some content that others are interested in and we should make it easy for them to receive it and share it with others. Syndicate your blog posts with RSS and provide content for others to use and share such as articles that link back to your website. As the old saying goes, “The more you give the more you get”, which is especially true online. The more links and references to your site and brand, the more successful you will be.
The days of “if you build it and they will come” never existed. Therefore, you need to be making a constant effort at increasing your reach online in order to succeed now and well into the distant future. Considering the millions of potential customers searching online for the products or services your company offers – what did you do today to gain their business? Hopefully your answer includes some of the 7 concepts above.