If you’re anything like me, you’re trying your very best to improve your business and land more customers every single day. If not, you probably should ask yourself whether you should be doing this at all.
A critical aspect of business growth is the marketing process, which whether we like it or not and whether we’re good at it or not, will influence our business performance.
In the current digital age, we can get access to almost every bit of information and tool out there. We’re surrounded by software, plugins, social networks, gadgets…and it’s all connected.
Now, you might be wondering where am I heading with this?
Well, if you want to improve your business quickly, effectively, and without spending a ton of money, you should focus most of your marketing efforts to increase and generate traffic to your e-commerce store.
Read about how to test your e-commerce site for conversion here.
In today’s post, I’m going to be sharing 7 places to find customers for your e-commerce site.
1.Search Engines – Organic / Paid
Search engines are pretty much always the first thing that people open up when they are looking for a product or service. Especially if your business offers services that satisfy information needs, you should focus your attention on Google.
Content, SEO, and social media channels go hand in hand. If you start doing content marketing, you should also focus on SEO because almost the same efforts will give you twice the results.
Search engines can help you get a heck of a lot of leads. Get your website and pages on top of Google’s/Yahoo’s/Bing’s results, preferably in the first 3, and you’ll be flooded with traffic.
Don’t feel ready to master the SEO game yet? Check out Google’s advertising options. Their tool for audience personalization is great because it allows you to tailor your ads very specifically.
There’s also the option to pay for SEO services. However, I’d advise you to be careful. Every company that promises you very specific results, results that may seem “too good to be true” at first sight, you should become skeptical. SEO is not an activity that can be mastered “just like that”. Unless you pay hundreds of thousands, I guarantee you that nobody will take your rank #99999 site to #1 in one week, especially if the competition is fair.
2.Social Media Networks – Organic Traffic
Every social network is extremely valuable. When marketers complain about certain social media channels and their “profitability”, you should immediately disregard those comments because they’re not based on truth.
The problem lies in the marketer who cannot identify the proper social media network for his own business and his own target audience, which is unique by nature.
First off, identify what platform would work best for your business. If you’re selling info services, you should probably stay away from Snapchat and Twitter.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn would work better.
Once you decide on what to focus on, you should give your full focus, energy, and time to develop one social media account at a time. Post content consistently, improve your strategies every day and engage with your audience all the time. Soon enough, organic traffic will start flowing towards your eCommerce products and services in a passive mode.
3.Social Media Networks – Advertising
Social media networks are perfect if you’re the type of entrepreneur who likes to risk in order to win. I see social advertising as one of the most challenging (and rewarding) types of digital marketing at this moment. Every social network gives you SO many targeting tools to play around with so that it becomes a craft.
If you use the retargeting feature wisely, you’ll be able to cut your customer acquisition value down to half. That, of course, if you have the necessary knowledge and the will to practice.
For any type of services, I’d recommend you start promoting your content on LinkedIn. Do it in a non-intrusive way and educate your future B2B clients. Connect, engage, discuss, and then pitch.
4.Niche Forums and Q&A Platforms
Niche forums and Q&A Platforms such as Quora and Yahoo Answers could be a perfect marketing strategy if used in a smart way.
Most e-commerce owners assume that “forum marketing” means free backlinks or free traffic in a short period of time. Well, that’s the wrong perspective to have, and I’ll explain why.
A niche forum is meant to be a place in which like-minded individuals connect in order to share information, solve problems, and get in touch with each other. If you want to be respected and perceived as worthy-of-attention in any forum, you will need to make your name known. – Garry Hugs, Marketing Manager at Essay Geeks.
In this case, your brand’s name and logo should be clearly visible whenever you post new answers and threads. It is extremely important that you promote your information non-intrusively because forums are not the perfect place to trigger negative responses.
Regarding Q&A Platforms, it works the same. You must build your reputation by providing valuable, helpful, relevant, and concise answers. You shouldn’t waste anybody’s time and nobody will waste yours.
5. Pretty much Everywhere on the Web – Just Pitch
The internet. That’s the best place to find your customers. I know that this may sound vague but hear me out.
Now, if you want to improve your business performance, you must stay focused. Obviously, staying focused is harder than it looks when all sorts of distractions come along. The hardest part is that you come across so much information, out of which only a very small percentage is actually going to help you.
What’s my point?
You got to stop for a second and reflect on what you’re doing. How are you acquiring your customer leads right now? Are you over complicating your job more than necessary?
I’ll give you a really good example of a situation I’m currently in right now.
At this very moment, I’m trying to promote an MLM system. I have encountered resistance everywhere around the corner up to a point. I realized that I had to change the places I go to connect with potential investors. Even though this product that I’m promoting can be an opportunity for everybody, I tried to pitch it to Internet marketers because I thought they would take it and fructify it.
But then, I saw that the people who identify themselves as “internet marketers” are extremely hateful with MLMs. Therefore, I wasted my energy creating a great post for an IM forum that wasn’t even appreciated.
The lesson? Keep things simple.
Here’s what I’m doing for a while now and it’s working superbly:
Instead of trying to get 10 leads a day, I focus on getting 2 leads but those two leads HAVE to be extremely good for my business.
What I found is that marketing your services online is all about knowing how to make the first impression. If someone reads your “money making opportunity” ad on a Facebook group, it will perceive it as a scam. If you take the time to personalize a small message, connect personally, and then pitch the same money making the opportunity, your effects should look way better.
Takeaways
Finding customers for your e-commerce services is surely harder than most people would think. I know, I’ve been there, I’ve gone through the struggles and it’s okay. The challenge is, what keeps us wanting to move forward.
When you get stuck with strategies or are not achieving good results, simply move on and try the next thing. Trial and error, trial and error, trial and error and you’ll use your learnings to eventually find the best-suited strategy for your business!
About the Author: Chris Richardson has been working as an editor at a publishing agency in London, UK for 5 years. He is also a professional content writing expert in such topics as career growth, self-improvement, blogging, and technology innovations. Feel free to connect with him on Google+.
