In the year 2015, more consumers are looking online to find businesses to meet their products and service needs. While an SEO expert may tell you that they can help you show up in local search results, this is just the first step to building your total online presence.
A recent study in Forbes Magazine stated that 78% of sales employees utilize social media and other online tools to outsell their peers. Comprehensive SEO website, blogging, and social media integration significantly increases a sale’s likelihood of closing compared to outbound leads. In short, a company’s online presence can have a direct and sizable impact on sales growth.
What are the ingredients to a sales-driven online presence? Here is how your small business can start seeing results.
1. Set a Sales Growth Goal
In a capitalist market, the first step to success is outperforming your competitors. Your company should know the current sales growth averages for similar companies in your industry so you can set a goal.
Sales growth goals should account for budget limitations and the time spent generating leads and working with the buyer during the buying journey.
2. List Your Current Online Strategies
To translate online engagement into sales growth, you will need to cultivate a comprehensive presence. List your current online efforts so you can know which bases are already covered. This list may include:
• SEO optimized website
• Online reviews
• Online advertising
• Social media profiles
• Shopping carts
• Email communications
If you’re just getting started on building your online presence, your list may be limited to just your current website and a few social media profiles. You can broaden your reach by looking at what your competitors are doing and collecting input from your staff about online marketing ideas.
3. Get Customers to Search and Click
Showing up in targeted search results only progress the buyer’s journey so far. Your company’s web content needs to be crafted to pull in readers and generate prospects and leads. You can ensure your content is on point by keeping it educational, informative, and interesting.
Companies can determine if their content is persuasive and effective by tracking the conversion of website traffic into sales. This may include tracking the amount of calls received from the website and tracking the amount of sales growth generated by web searches.
4. Be Bold and Direct
All online marketing strategies should be results-driven if you want to increase sales growth. Bold and clear communication on all online platforms is a good way to generate results. Some tips for clear communication include:
• Choosing one method of contact for potential clients (email us, call us, chat with us, visit us, etc.)
• Keeping site navigation simple and clear-cut
• Use active language
• Focus on simple-to-follow tasks
Bold and clear communication should reflect sales growth goals. For example, if you want to increase revenue in a specific department, your online content should be tailored to promote that goal.
5. Balance Information with Sales
It may be tempting to saturate your online presence with sales pitches, but this can be a serious mistake. Without a balance of interesting and informational content, your search results can suffer, and potential clients can feel overwhelmed. You can create a balance by adding a mix of strictly informational pages, interesting blog posts, and fun social media campaigns.
6. Promote Specials on Your Pages
If your company runs monthly specials or is planning a sale, you can maximize sales growth by promoting these events throughout your online presence. Consider running a promotional module on your homepage and adding messages to your social media profile to get the word out.
Images are a great help when it comes to generating results online. Try to use professional looking and attractive images of your customers, products and other relevant aspects of your business to generate interest.
7. Add eCommerce and Lead Scoring
Allow customers to purchase when they need your products the most with an online shopping cart feature. By integrating e-commerce on your website, you can track the success of your online presence and discover new markets. With polling features in the buying process, you can determine how customers found you, their satisfaction levels, and if they will return.
For the modern business, information is power. Lead scoring allows you to gather important details about customer behavior so you can improve marketing strategies and hone outbound activities.
8. Cultivate Inbound Links
It is said that word-of-mouth is the most powerful sales tool. This idea is known in the digital content world as inbound linking. If you provide quality content through your online presence, other companies are more likely to link to it. When this occurs, your online reputation is strengthened, and your site traffic increases.
With more traffic, companies can achieve a higher sales growth rate. But, a strong marketing strategy is required. Visitors need to not only come to your page, but they also need to stay there and complete a targeted transaction.
9. Consider Discounts for Sharing on Social Media
Your target marketing may be active on social media. It is estimated that Facebook users check their feed at least five times a day. This means that there are ample opportunities for companies to enhance visibility and promotion.
A strategy that can be used to engage your customers with your online presence is to offer incentives to share and subscribe to social media feeds. When customers share a post or follow your page, they can receive a small discount on their products or services.
10. Go Mobile
It is important to fine-tune your online presence to be visible for any type of customer. As mobile phones become the standard for online viewing and messaging, there is a real demand for mobile-friendly, or responsive, website. Make sure all aspects of your online presence can be easily viewed in a mobile browser by optimizing your coding and using responsive web design
It may also be worth developing an app with convenient, customer-focused features. Because so much purchasing information is kept on mobile phones, it is a prime market to stimulate sales growth. Purchasing is easy, fast, and can be monitored by the customer.
Start Building Your Online Presence Today
Relevance is the name of the game when it comes to sales-driven online marketing practices. To see results, your current strategies must be up-to-date and systemized.
At Valens Point, we help small businesses achieve tangible sales growth. Let us help you translate your online success into monetary success.
Contact us today to discuss your short and long term sales goals with an online content expert.