Little time and low budget? Here are the 3 essentials you need to boost sales for your small business online:
- A website with an interesting and compelling call-to action
- Smart email marketing
- Search engine visibility
You might be wondering about social media? Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter are usually most helpful in engaging and strengthening relationships among the clients you already have. They are powerful supplemental tools. They should be used to drive traffic to your website.
Let’s take a closer look at the essentials you need.
Your Website
The goal of your website is to turn browsers into buyers.
Did you know you have just 3 seconds to make a first impression and to capture the attention of your visitor? When visitors land on your page, they immediately begin to critique you, establish an opinion of you, and determine whether or not you are worth getting to know. Most importantly, they’re evaluating if they should do business with you.
Tell your visitors exactly what you can do for them, and why it matters. Prospects want to know the benefits of buying from you because that’s what will inspire them to stick around.
Create an intriguing call-to-action and place it above the fold. Make it simple, easy to understand, and most importantly . . . make it so good they can’t believe you’re giving it away for free. Your goal is to offer them so much value, they won’t hesitate to give you their email in exchange. If they click away before you capture their email address, they may never come back.
Smart Email Marketing
What many small business owners don’t realize, is that website visitors aren’t ready to buy on their first visit. They look around for a few minutes, and then usually click away. Your goal is to immediately capture their attention and get their email with your call-to-action before they leave. Then you can begin to build trust, relationship and quickly sales . . . right from their inbox.
Your email list is your biggest marketing asset. Your ideal customer has given you permission to market to them directly to their inbox. If something happens to your website or Facebook or Twitter accounts, you’ve got your email list if you have to start over.
Smart email marketing will get you more customers, and more importantly, better customers.
Take the time to set up an autoresponder, a sequence of email messages that offers valuable content to your customer. You want to benefit your customer and help them solve the problems they came to you with.
Your interesting and valuable tips build trust and relationship, as well as keep you top of mind. So when they do need you they’ll come back to buy.
Rule of thumb is to send out 80% valuable content, and 20% sales pitch. If your content is truly helpful to your customer, they will look forward to opening it up and will welcome your sales offers as a solution to solve their current challenges.
Search Engine Visibility
It’s important that your site shows up in the search engines when people are searching for you.
You need to know the terms and phrases (keywords) that people search for, to make your site friendly to the search engines. If search engines can’t find your website, then you are missing out on opportunities to drive traffic to you.
A good way to discover what words real people actually use in their search, is to search in Google. Use variations on different words, and see which ones get the most results.
Google Adwords has a free Keywords tool that is helpful for identifying the words and phrases your customers are likely to use.
Once you know what your customers are looking for, you can use these phrases in your content. Blogs and headlines are great places to do this.
For optimizing your local search, make sure to claim your local business listings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yelp. Fully complete your business profile.
Once these 3 essentials are in place, your online visibility and sales should grow.
Have questions? You’ll find me over on my Facebook page, and I’ll do my best to get you an answer quickly!