There’s a person called Henry who’s a small business owner. Let’s have a virtual look-up into a day of his life.
The alarm clock ticks at 6 a.m. in the morning……Tweeeeeeeet tweeeeeeeeeet tweeeeeeeet….
As usual, he presses the snooze button to 15 minutes and finally manages to wake up at 6.30 am.
Then brushes his teeth, goes out for jogging and stretching out his muscles and while relaxing for 10 minutes, he puts up a mental plan in his mind of what he’s gonna do for his business that day. Feels happy and with a positive mind, he reaches home.
Now the time is 7.30 am. His wife’s ready with a hot cup of coffee and while sipping off his coffee, he gives a quick glance into the newspaper having a casual chat with his partner.
At 8 am, he goes in for a shower and by 8.30 he’s at the dining table for breakfast…finishes it off…goes in and gets ready grooming himself…gives a sweet hug and kiss to his kids and wife…and there he’s all set to greet the day at 9 am!
From 9.30 am, he’s seated up as the boss of his apparel shop with one employee by his side, waiting for customers.
You know what? He’s already invested lots of bucks for marketing his business locally by giving ads in newspapers, giving off pamphlets with seasonal offers and referring to friends…all that he can with his full might to make his shop known to people. And now he’s resting his back on the seat waiting to sell products to customers.
The whole day, with short breaks in the middle, there were a couple of customers who walked into his shop and had a look. And just one sale of a dozen hankies worth $10.
Man, he has invested nearly $1,00,000 in this business and all he has got in one day is mere $10! He returns home pale-faced.
Yes, there are lots of Henrys over the world not knowing where they’re lacking in their start-up and what to do about it.
The main reason why he wasn’t able to get a good number of customers for his shop in this digital era is his marketing strategy. He has done everything manually but nothing online.
Online marketing is the only thing that gives new wings for your business to fly all over and make good customers.
Let’s see how this works.
1.Online Marketing – Your Sales Robot
Marketing is actually communicating with your customers and making them buy your product. In direct marketing, it’s that 5 or 10 minutes of spending time talking to them about your product and handing over your brochure. They may just slip it off and walk away dude.
But online marketing makes you stand in the web platform firmly and becomes your sales robot doing the marketing job very efficiently. It creates brand awareness for your business. All you have to do is
- Create a nice website and sign up on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Post updates on a daily basis and sit up and watch the number of followers and visitors to your website
- Build up an informative blog providing lots of guidance and tips on what your customers desire. Also, participate in online forums and express your thoughts and views. Let people come to know about you.
- Integrate SEO tactics into your website by seeking help from content writers or SEO professionals; or you can even do this on your own if you do some self-study on the subject.
- Startup e-mail marketing campaigns by sending promotional emails on a frequent basis to your target audience.
With less marketing investments, you can adopt online marketing techniques so that it’ll act as your marketing assistant or robot bringing visibility to your business. Do all these and just forget about your sales. It’ll act as an automated sales machine running round the clock for you.
2.Online Advertising – Your Marketing Guy
Did you know that once you advertise your business online, it’s like having your own marketing guy who’s doing everything for your success?
As a small business owner, you gotta rack your brain a little and adopt a wise marketing strategy that will make you reach your customers within no time. Online Advertising is proven to have given great sales records for most companies all over the world. Just make sure you use the right tools, services and way to implement online advertising for your business.
- Video / commercial production
- Blogging
- Social Media
- Online Paid Ads
With these simple strategies at the start, you can slowly see how your online ads are marketing themselves about your product. It’s more like hiring a marketing professional for free!
Come on, no more of the daunting task of printing hundreds and thousands of flyers and distributing among the streets.
No more of hiring special Marketing professionals to go around publicizing your business.
No more of even taking time visiting tradeshows and showing off your face and products to make people buy your product.
Sit cool and catch up with online advertising!
3.Focus More Towards Your Target Audience via Online Marketing
Long since Marketers and business owners invest their time and money researching on how to market their product and how to attract their target demographic.
Register this in your mind: “Move towards social media and strategize your company’s marketing efforts towards the online consumer behaviors, because this is exactly the place where you can find most of your prospective customers.”
The following facts may help you decide why to choose online marketing to focus more towards your target audience.
- Most of the online consumers are spending 1 out of 6 minutes in social networks. Since they spend a significant amount of time online, your strategic marketing plan should be such that there’s an everyday dose of online marketing via emails and social media posts.
- Content is what really matters. Marketing is all about two-way communication such that your customers would really be attracted towards your products and respond back. Couple your online marketing with good content that will trigger discussions from your target demographic.
- If your goal is to engage your consumers via social networks, then the right place to land is Facebook. Facebook captures almost 14.6% of Internet users’ time when compared to a combined 2% for all other social media sites.
- With the advent of more gadgets like smartphones and ipads, people are getting more engaged in mobile devices. Make sure that your website is mobile-optimized. Frame up a mobile strategy and create content that’d be easy to view and respond for mobile users.
Target marketing is just about attracting customers who will buy what you sell and the easiest way to do this is through online. Once you identify your niche market by researching on who (Demographics), where (Geographics), why (Psychographics) and how (behaviors), you can reach your target audience easily sitting before your PC / Desktop.
4.Website – Your Virtual Shopfront
You would very well know how much important it is to have your own shop where you can display your products. What matters is not just about owning a shop, but the footfalls! Yes, how many customers checked in to your shop and purchased your stuff.
You don’t be surprised by hearing that a good website will be the best virtual shop front for developing your business. When your product/service are easily accessible to customers, automatically there are more chances of sales success with it. Much of the retail world now exists in the internet, and so for a strong footprint of your brand image, your business should enter online, via a website first.
Some key points that justify the website as your virtual shop front are as follows.
- Owning a website is one thing and having a more visible website is another thing. Make sure that online location is everything and build up your website such that your potential customers can each easily reach you through search engines.
- Appearance is the next step of making your brand popular. The color, style, and background of your website speak tons about your brand’s professionalism and credibility.
- Content is the true key for any business website. How well you’ve clearly stated the details about your product makes you stand out of the box and generate leads for your business.
Ensure that your virtual shop front gets good traffic so that users can step into it and become customers.
5.Video – Your Business Salesman
If you’re going door to door knocking to sell your product, it’s not going to work out in this internet era.
People are getting more interested in watching videos online. Short 5 to 6 minutes of video advertising your product would get you more attention from your customers. Videos are proved to be the best salesmen for businesses as they speak for themselves giving both visual entertainment and information.
- 50% people say that they trust video in making purchasing decisions for products.
- 70% of the top results in Google search are videos.
- 92% of B-B customers watch online videos.
Why do you even wait when you have video marketing to use as the perfect salesman for your business?
6.Online Payment Providers – Your Accounts Manager
Business is all about money finally, which is why you’re into it. And it’s a headache for you to manage your accounts, the payment transfers and so on. But when there’s facility for monetary transactions online, why do you have to worry about it much?
When a customer visits your website and likes your products displayed for sale, he/she would immediately place an order (if you have an e-store) and transfer the money. For this, you gotta setup payment gateways like PayPal or WePay or Gumroad by which money automatically comes in and fills up your bank account.
Customers are also more interested in purchasing when there’s an automated payment provider in the website itself rather than going for other options like manually depositing money to your account. So, why not let these online payment providers take control of your accounts and taxes?
Follow all these online marketing options for your business and sit back and relax independently while your business automatically gets visible over the web. Hope now you know where our Henry lagged behind for his business’s failure.