Tag Archives: website traffic
We all make mistakes – we’re human, after all. The unfortunate thing is that we often tend to make the same mistake over and over again – especially when it comes to marketing our ideas. It doesn’t matter whether you’re marketing a B2B product or a B2C product, the following mistakes could put a major snag in your online outreach efforts.
Five Online Marketing Mistakes To Watch Out For
1) Forgetting About Your Niche
A niche is not a demographic – if you’re marketing to a demographic online, rather than a niche, you’re making a rookie mistake. A niche can be described in various ways. Wikipedia defines it as a “a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.” Simply put, a niche is a group of people that have come together due to a common problem. A demographic, on the other hand, is just a group of people. Women over the age of 40 is a demographic; women over the age of 40 who are trying to lose weight is a niche. The more you can narrow your niche, the more successful your online marketing campaign will be. Why market to a million women over the age of 40, when only 600,000 are interested in your weight loss solutions?
2) Forgetting to Collect User Details
Once you’ve started marketing to a specific niche, it’s imperative that you start to capture visitor details in order to retain customers. The simplest way? Set up an email newsletter. Encourage visitors to sign up for your newsletter by offering a free report or ebook. Once you’ve captured their name and email address, you can continually market new products, ideas, and articles straight to their inbox. Of course, email marketing isn’t 100% foolproof – open rates are often dismal statistics to review. But, for ever six people who ignore your email, another two might open it, click through to purchase a product, or forward information to a friend.
3) Mistaking Traffic for Results
Clients are constantly asking me how they can drive more traffic to their small business website. And while traffic is great, it’s not the defining factor that you should be basing your online marketing strategy on. Focus on the conversion rate first. Sure, 60 visitors a day doesn’t sound like much, but if 58 of those 60 visitors are converting (making a purchase, contacting you via a form, signing up for your newsletter etc.) you’re onto something great. Once your marketing strategy has the proven ability to convert visitors into customers it’s time to start going after more eyeballs.
4) Don’t Be Cheap!
Anyone can slap a blog up on the Internet today and start “marketing” online. Need some graphics? Stock photography sites sell them for pennies. Business cards are practically free on sites like Vistaprint, and content can be syndicated from any number of sites. Talk about easy, eh? Not exactly. If you’re trying to build a reputable online presence (and business), you don’t want to look cheap. Setting up a free Blogger site with chintzy graphics and copied content makes you look a) lazy, b) broke, and c) unprofessional. Sure, there are corners that you can cut in order to save money and keep costs down. Just try and avoid them if they will reflect badly on your online image.
5) Settling for One Angle
Finding a single message that resonates with a large segment of your customers is tough. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you’re going to leave a significant portion of your customer pool feeling indifferent. Shake things up when you’re marketing online, especially across different platforms. Your Facebook fans are different from your Twitter followers, so why market to them in the same capacity? Segment your efforts on different platforms and in different niches (see #1). Sure, it creates more work for you, but that extra work could help increase your conversion rate (#3), and will make your company appear more professional and polished (#4) – makes sense to me!
What other common online marketing mistakes have you encountered online? Leave a comment and let us know!
It’s Christmas time! Well, not according to the average calendar, but if you’re a retail business gearing up for the holiday season, November 1st marks the start of the busiest shopping season of the year. Whether you own a clothing and accessories store, or a bath and body boutique, now is the time to start rolling out your biggest and best holiday promotions. The same goes for online retailers. If your online store has been struggling in the past few months, now’s your chance to turn things around by attracting and retaining new customers.
Make a Plan
The first step in a successful holiday marketing strategy is planning. What sort of promotions do you want to offer? What items are popular this season? Should you feature a new item every day or every week? Is your shipping center capable of handling increased demand? Do you have enough stock on hand for the holiday rush? All of these things need to be considered before you can start designing your campaign.
Five Online Holiday Marketing Campaign Ideas
Need help coming up with a great holiday promotion for your online store? Here are five great strategies that practically any e-commerce store can implement:
1) Bounce Back Incentives
What’s better than one holiday sale? How about two! Successful online holiday promotions are designed to capitalize on increased traffic numbers. How? By offering incentives to come back and purchase again. Reward holiday shoppers with 10% off their next online purchase and watch how quickly one sale turns into two. You’d be surprised how many of the holiday shoppers become year-round customers.
2) Bundle It
Make holiday shopping easy for your customers by offering bundled gift options. These types of offers are popular for a number of reasons: 1) they’re convenient, and 2) they’re perceived as being more cost-effective. The value of a product bundle can be perceived as greater than the sum of its parts, satisfying bargain-savvy shoppers. These types of promotions also help you move stock from your store, which is always a good thing.
3) Give a Gift
The holiday seasons are all about giving, so why not join in the fun? Give your online customers a special gift item once they’ve met a threshold order amount. Not sure what your threshold should be? Take a look at your average holiday sales from last year and then bump it up by a few dollars. Just remember to make sure you offer a suitable free gift – no one wants to spend $200 in order to receive a chintzy magnet!
4) Run a Clearance Special
Everyone is after a bargain during the holiday shopping rush, so why not provide your customers with a deal they can’t resist? Showcase your clearance items prominently on your site, and make sure you include the original ticket price in the layout. People want to see just how much they’re saving by shopping your sale. Not sure how low you should go with clearance items? Well, how much do you charge your customers for shipping? People hate paying extra for S&H – if you can discount your item enough to cover the shipping costs (and maybe a little more), your customers will be happy to oblige you with a sale.
5) Run a Shopper’s Choice Promotion
Want to really wow your customers this holiday season? Then ask them to supply you with a holiday promotion idea. Have your shoppers submit or vote on an item that they would like to see featured as part of a holiday special – the item that receives the most votes gets a price cut and prominent feature on your website. What better way to guarantee sales than by giving the people what they want?!
How are you ramping up for the holiday shopping season? Share your ideas with the CIK Blog readers!
