How you can take advantage of the internet to boost your sales
Digital marketing. How abreast are you? If you are taking advantage of digital marketing, no doubt you are beating your competitors. Why? They spend much more money on advertising with traditional platforms. You spend less on advertising while targeting your specific demographic which allows you to grow and expand.
So if you are not using digital marketing, I am going to break this down as simply as I can. Newspapers, magazines, radio and television do not target specifically those who can or want to buy from you. It is "blanket advertising." Digital marketing can target specifically by demographics such as age, income levels, or even interests such as "has pets" or "likes seafood."
How do you get started? You can use Google Adwords which can be confusing for anyone starting out or you can call a company like ours which does it for you for a little extra. I tell business owners to use Google Adwords if they want to "do-it-yourself" and generally they call me within an hour. What should you do this? Simply, it puts ads (that you build) on websites that people use every day such as your favorite news sites. Your ads are seen repetitively. Have you ever shopped for a car online and after you left their website, you see ads for that dealerships cars on every site that you go to? Something to keep in mind, you have to build the ad so you will need to use a program that you can build the ads with the correct pixel sizes and have a means to use quality graphics and an eye for creating an engaging ad with a call to action.
What else do you need? You need to set up Facebook pixels and a retargeting code that you can place on your website so that you can retarget those who visit your website with more ads. Make sense? This is where I want to add my first "lol" - 'yes laugh out loud.' If you are not savvy with digital media you may be thinking, "what?" You can buy me a cup of coffee and I will explain more.
Email addresses. Do you know why everyone is offering you something for free online as long as you give them your email address? Do you know why stores want your email address? In the past it was used to email you with all of their glorious offers and sales. Now, it is used much more thoroughly. You see, most people who have an email address, also use it to log on to social media. Digital marketing takes your email address, inputs it into social media who looks for you and 'BAM,' they found you and can specifically target you with ads. They know that you have already visited their store. Advertising is about reminding you to go back. "Don't forget about me when you need another 'widget.'" This also means that they don't have to blanket advertise with traditional media to get you to come back. They specifically target you and it's cheap to do it. Now you also want to send emails to your target markets, but there are tricks to send them or they will be deleted before being opened. Ask me for more.
Cell phone numbers. They can also be used to target you on social media. But an even bigger phenomena is that if you send a text message to your target market, 98% of them are opened. Here is the catch, if you do not offer a great deal such as buy one get one free or 50% off, they will opt out of getting text messages from you. You don't want that. So save it for the times that you may especially need some sales though I would suggest running at least one campaign a month. To get cell phone numbers and email addresses, you need a system. It's inexpensive but you should more than make up for it with sales. There are more robust systems to capture more but their use depends on the type of business that you have and if your business won't benefit, I would not suggest it. I will help you get set up. Just give me a call.
Listings. How is your business listed? What shows up when you google your business? You want that first screen to show nothing but your business. Sites with your reviews, blogs, and more. If a listing website gives you a free listing on their site, take it. Get on all of them. There are numerous sites that you can get on. You also need to make sure that you are on all of the search engines, google, bing, yahoo search etc... You do not automatically populate on those places. Though you can do it yourself one by one, we have a system that we input your info once and it populates dozens of sites.
Finally, SEO. Business owners dread those words as they have paid thousands of dollars for it. I tell business owners that you were robbed. Why? SEO is easy. For most websites, you can do it yourself. In fact, for all of our clients, we do SEO for your website for free. Why? It takes less than an hour to do generally and other than a quick monthly check to see how you are listing compared to others in regards to key words, there is nothing to it. I beg you, do not pay for SEO which will not bring you the amount of clients that you want when you can pay for our marketing services AND get SEO sometimes at much more inexpensive rates.
The things above are what you must do at a minimum to stay competitive. If it seems confusing, we will sit down with you and show you how this is all done. I do not consider this a "nice thing to have." This is essential.
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