Seven Marketing Strategies That Will Boost Your Online Sales

Now’s the best time to launch an online business. As of writing, brick-and-mortar shops may still be closed, and many more shoppers are buying their essentials online. If you’re a savvy entrepreneur, you should take advantage of this time to earn even more than that which you previously expected to. Plus, you can establish your online store from the comforts of your home.

Completing the first sale sounds straightforward enough but it can pave the way to better and profitable business years ahead. While this may sound like a challenging thing to achieve, the Internet today is fair to all and gives everyone an equal chance to prove their worth no matter how rich or saturated one is with resources. Whether you run a Happy Cakes retail business or a huge e-commerce website like Amazon - Increasing online sales must be your primary goal as it not only contributes to sales and profits but also helps in brand awareness and keeping the flow of traffic consistent throughout.

Thus, here in this article, we will be exploring seven of the best marketing strategies that you can make use of with minimal spending to help you with the overall development of your business.

Creating Value For The Customers

You probably might have heard of terms such as Inbound Marketing or Content Marketing as many marketers acknowledge the importance and benefits of the same. Such marketing trends focus on creating value for the prospects.
In this competitive market, the consumers are the ones who make the rules. Consumers want additional value and not just products or services. So how to create this value?

Creating value is the act of offering additional and relatable content, that is useful and relevant to the consumer (e.g. blog posts, e-books, videos, webinars, infographics, etc.). The content is mainly designed to solve consumer’s problems and help them find what they are looking for.

It has been proven that those brands who can create value for their consumer’s gain their loyalty, but that does not mean anything and everything will work. Creating value does not mean snowballing every piece of content with the qualities your product offers. It is about understanding the buying process, which consists of 3 main stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

• During the first stage, prospects identify that they have a problem or a need.
• During the second stage, they begin to look for all the possible solutions to the problem.
• Finally, they evaluate different providers to see which one can offer them the best deal.

The idea is to create relevant content for each of the different stages of the buying process. Something which can solve the problems of the prospects. Something people on the web can relate to or something that can lure them to buy your product or service.

To start with, you may ask the help of expert agencies to achieve this. A bonus tip is to make that switch from PSD to HubSpot so that you can create more effective websites. With this advantage, customers will come chasing through your site.

Pay Attention to Stats

The behavior of every visitor right from the entry to exit on your website can be tracked, and you should know to use it to your advantage. This refers to your website’s stats, which will show you what prospects are doing on your site including which pages they enter, the time they spend on particular pages, and the route they take to leave your site.

Moreover, it will not cost you a penny, either. Google Analytics is a completely free service, allowing you to measure your traffic in more ways than you can think of. When this is a tool that’s immediately at your disposal, why not take advantage of it and use it right away. Otherwise, you’ll be missing out on so many benefits of using Google Analytics.

Creating A Sense Of Urgency

There is no rule against creating a sense of urgency to encourage prospects to buy from you right now. Many users respond positively to the deals that create a sense of urgency, but only if you know the right tricks. The key is to start by giving your target market all the reasons why they have to patronize your online store right now, particularly when there are also a lot of online stores out there.

Urgency is a strong catalyst, but it does not stand up very well on its own. Prospects will only deliberate over whether to buy your product only if he/she see value in your offer. Do not think urgency to work if you cannot leave the prospect of guessing and wondering about the offer.

However, if you cannot tempt the prospects with an urgency offer, maybe you can offer a financial incentive to customers who commit to a purchase right away, such as free shipping or a discount.

User-Generated Content

Customers can create the most valuable content for the firms that are beneficial in boosting sales. User-generated content (UGC) is content written by an audience related to a brand in some way or the other. Anything from social media, testimonials, reviews, blog posts or forum posts can be termed as UGC.

According to Business Insider, consumers who come across UGC are 97% more likely to convert than those who do not.

Here is an example, a testimonial on CDR-Report.com

User-generated images (images created by customers featuring your products) are especially powerful. Such content usually influences other people as friends, families and your enemies. In fact, when online shoppers were asked to choose between UGC (like people post to Instagram) and expensive professional images on product description pages, the overwhelming preference was for 77% to 22%.

Research also shows that UGC is 50% more trustworthy than traditional marketing technique and why would marketers not want a slice of that action.

Offer A Contest or Giveaway

Everyone loves free stuff no matter how small or big. If you are looking to build up some trust, a contest or giveaway could help you do just that. Not only can contests and giveaways help you build valuable inbound links but are also a great way to show potential customers that you can be trusted and that your brand is serious.

Moreover, it is not important to start big. Running a simple contest on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can help you build valuable traffic (only if the contest is fun to play). Such contests cost no money to run and can be initiated in a few minutes.

Getting Used To Comparison Shopping Engines

In this technology-driven world, competition is all over the place due to factors like the ease in doing business and location independence. Every other business niche you can think of has 2-3 competitors where one with the lowest price and best quality is more likely to win the prospect.

Many, if not all, consumers like to shop around before making a purchase, and that includes a visit to comparison shopping engines. Popular engines include Nextag that allows comparison of thousands of products so that you never miss a great deal.

To get noticed, you just need to play by the rules of each engine. Stay competitive in terms of price, while you experiment to find out which engine suits you the best and gives you the best ROI.

The Right Hashtags

Social media monitoring tool Hootsuite can help you find, like, retweet and reply to posts under several hashtags. Moreover, you can use a tool like Hashtagify to find other hashtags related to the one you are trying to target. However, do not treat hashtags the same on every channel.

Twitter posts with a single well-placed hashtag can generate more engagements than tweets with three or more hashtags.

Instagram posts, on the other hand, see the most engagement when using more than one hashtags, even 10+ in a single post.

Facebook posts do better without hashtags.

Here’s a bonus tip for you. Out of all the three major social media sites, it pays to put a lot of emphasis on Instagram. For marketing, it’s one of the easiest, cheapest, and most effective social media sites to use.

Final Word

If you’ve recently launched an online business, these tips can greatly help you in facing the extreme competition that’s right ahead of you. No business is ever going to be easy, but with the right strategies, you’re going to make it big and well.

Do remember that no success ever comes overnight, so you’ve got to be willing to put in a lot of effort and hard work. Start by applying these tips, so that you, too, can enjoy reaping the benefits of higher sales.

About the Author:

Himanshi Goel has been associated as a Social Media Expert with Thanks For The Help since its start. She really loves to pen down her thoughts on mental constructs, habits, personal development and anything that pleases her eyes.