With technology at our fingertips on a regular basis, it is often obvious that using the Internet is a great way to improve sales for your business and gain new customers. However, many business owners have no idea where to begin! Here are some tips to help you best utilize the Internet to find new customers and increase sales online.
- Social media platforms are excellent marketing tools for business owners. However, simply having one or several social media outlets is not enough. You need to use these to their full potential in order to see lasting and significant results. Whether you use Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or another social media source, you need to be consistent about posting content to your business’ page daily. You should be posting at least once a day on Facebook and about 4 to 6 times on Twitter in order to reach your audience and get customer attention.
- Utilize images within your posts. People need visuals.Visuals stand out and help people to remember information. It enhances the experience so that they will better enjoy the experience while reading or skimming a post. Plus, these will pop out at them while they are surfing the web, making them more likely to stop to check out your page. Often pictures on Facebook receive over 50% more likes than a post with only text. This can really help you to promote your site, information, a product, or a particular post.
- Make it easy for viewers to share your posts. Word of mouth can happen even online. In the social media world we take note of what our friends like, re-tweet, or share via the Internet. Therefore, you want to make it easy for people who like something on your page to tell their friends about it. This is basically free advertising! To make sharing easier, be sure to include social buttons at the bottom of your posts. You can also insert these social buttons at the head of a site or blog, in a newsletter, as your email signature or within the text of blog posts. These are small icons that allow visitors to click and instantly share the post or article with others in their social network within seconds.
- Engage your audience. It is important that a social media page is not treated like a television commercial. TV commercials are one-sided campaigns in which the company informs the audience in order to convince them to purchase a product or service. Social media is more like a conversation. Both parties are involved. You need to be sure to open up a dialogue with your social media followers in order to effectively use these sites. Pose questions in order to gain feedback. Encourage users to comment about what they like about your product or how they use it in their everyday lives. Showing your audience that you are a company that wants to see their customers satisfied, makes people much more likely to become customers in the future.
- Finally, make sure you blog titles are accessible to the average web user. The title of your blog post is sometimes more important or just as important as the content in the post itself. Be sure that your titles use every day language, and make sure they are not heavy with technical terms and jargon. Also, keep titles positive and short so that they are simple and to the point, enticing readers to want to know more.
Even if your website has every bell and whistle from a directory script to a search bar, most social media sites are ineffective for businesses unless they are properly utilized. If you want to gain the attention of new customers and increase your sales online, you will have to be sure to post content regularly, use images and photos, incorporate social media buttons, interact with your audience and keep blog title concise. These tips will help ensure that you attract more business for your company online effectively and efficiently.
