Setting up an eCommerce store front for your existing brick and mortar store is pretty exciting. Or maybe you have a product or service that’s only available online, paving the way for a new era of B2C relationships and processes. Both are great steps in the right direction, but you may be having trouble directing traffic to your site.
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Don’t feel bad if you have less-than-great traffic or sales- there’s an entire industry and millions of dollars devoted every year to figuring out the magic formula of content marketing. Fortunately, there are a few easy steps you can take to make the most out of your marketing strategy and start driving traffic to your site, even without a big budget.
So, what can you do to boost traffic and increase sales to your eCommerce site? No matter what you sell, these tips are essential to any marketing solution.
Encouraging and Utilizing Reviews
They may seem like a simple thing, but reviews are a two-pronged tool for online marketers. In addition to the vast majority of consumers trusting product reviews as if it were a personal recommendation, reviews are a cornerstone of a targeted, customer-based marketing strategy.
Consider these facts:
- Over 80{881ed96bc2b3f74deefab0bdd1d9de50ba52fa862f6c49cd106b87e5ad6f8e27} of consumers read reviews to develop opinions about local businesses.
- Both positive and negative reviews highly affect consumer’s buying habits. Overall, reviews are influential in 88{881ed96bc2b3f74deefab0bdd1d9de50ba52fa862f6c49cd106b87e5ad6f8e27} of buying decisions, good or bad.
Clearly, reviews influence a customer’s decisions, but it goes further than that. Local search engines usually highly favor high reviews, and even universal search engines like Google are thought to take reviews into high consideration for query results. Having a bad review, or possibly worse, no review, on your products means they are more difficult for consumers to find.
Make it easy for your customers to post reviews, and target individuals who are likely to leave good reviews. Send emails requesting reviews from customers who received their orders on time, or under special circumstances. Some sites offer “points” for every review, where the points can be used for a discount on their next purchase. Other sites, like Amazon, send Thank You emails to encourage future reviews.
Optimizing Social Media
The fine balance a commercial institution must strike with their social media followers is difficult to strike. Even big companies struggle with making engaging content and keeping up with demand, quality and cost-effectiveness. Here’s a quick guide to keeping up your social network:
- Content marketing and growth hacking focus on finding, nurturing and developing loyalty among highly targeted leads. Simply put, it’s identifying your audience and creating highly catered content relevant to that audience. This is thought to be the key to successful social media campaigns and should be your focus too.
- Do research about your audience beyond your product to develop and deeper relationship with them and to broaden your bank of possible content. If you sell kayaks, an engaging post like, “The team at ABC Kayaks just got back from Yellowstone. What’s everyone’s favorite National Park?” with a nice picture of the event would be highly relevant, without being perceived as blatant advertising. Your followers get to be interactive, and you build trust with them that your content is worth reading.
- Influencer marketing refers to using other people’s credibility to support your products or services. It can be used very well with social media, as there are plenty of taste-makers on sites like Instagram and Twitter who are open to collaborating with companies like yours. Do some keyword searches on your social media platforms to see who influences your audience’s buying habits. Reach out to these people with free samples, requesting them to blog about your product or write an official review. This will raise loyalty in existing customers and bring a whole new set of eyes from a highly targeted audience.
Chances are you’re already using reviews and social media, so now it’s time to step up your marketing efforts to reach new audiences and develop stronger relationships with existing customers. These efforts will drive traffic to your site and ensure conversion. Use a winning combination of customer review and customer relationship management to grow your business organically.