Digital Marketing for an Online Store

Throughout the pandemic, the internet has been the sole equaliser for the masses. It has been responsible for saving existing businesses, inducing growth in some, and even managing to revive markets in a downward spiral. Small businesses were able to survive only by taking their businesses online, where they had to contend with online sales giants. They were able to survive and scale up because of their intuitive marketing and advertising.

As a Small Business owner, Digital marketing is perhaps the most crucial portion of your online business. It drives your sales and makes you a viable competitor in Online Marketing. This is a guide for small business owners that will help you ensure your sales keep going up while the expenses remain manageable. It will allow you to survive competition from tech giants while still managing to grow and prosper.

Clean up your SEO game

SEO is an integral part of ensuring visitor traffic remains steadily increasing in your Online Marketing venture. You have to be able to recognise and use keywords effectively. Keywords are the words in your web page post that people are most likely to search for. As of May 2020, Google searches were responsible for 67% of all search traffic, while 93% of all website traffic was through search engines. They are responsible for ensuring traffic for your site by helping you reach the top of search results. This doesn't mean using a keyword in just about every sentence of your store's article. Keywords have to be present in four to five instances, more than that, and we have strayed into spam territory, a big no-no for Search Engine optimisation. Two seconds is all that you have to entice a user, anything above that means an increase of 50% in bounce rates. SEO optimised content can drive Online Marketing blog traffic up by about 2000%, as per Google Adsense statistics.

Now for which keywords to use. Keyword research is tantamount to success in the online world. You have to always hunt for the most searched keywords on search engines and assess their usability on your Online store. You can also use Search Engine Analytics provided by Search Engines to have a specific idea of the number of visitors that you might receive from particular search engines.

Start a Blog

Web traffic analytics have shown that about 400 million people read 23 billion blog posts on popular platforms every month. 90% of searches don't have a specific brand in mind. There's a lot of content out there; you cannot hope to compete without quality posts on your store's blog to drive traffic. Top 5 lists, reviews, and opinion pieces on products, as well as other engaging content. These blog posts will act as a natural segue from blog to product, boosting your sales as well as cementing your reputation as a dependable and reliable service. If you feel that Blogging is not your forté and you can't make the time, there are thousands of freelancing bloggers available at reasonable rates and available to work regularly. You can even hire content creation companies to create blogs for you for a nominal fee.

Social Media and Forums

Digital marketing's major factor in the new decade is how much of a following you possess on Social Media platforms. Facebook Groups are a great way to keep your customers in the know about products, drive discussions on topics and keep your company at the forefront of your customer's worldview. 50% of social media users rely on social media advertising for their shopping preferences. About 4.57 million people are traversing through some type of social media at any time. You might also arrange for your products to be advertised or mentioned in a general way in larger groups to allow more people to enter your customer base.

Online forums are the mine that is responsible for delivering just about everything viral on the internet. Whether they are memes, jokes, or viral videos, online forums are most likely the origin. Having a presence in these forums would allow your business to increase and diversify. Another thing that might help you create hype is hiring social media influencers that use your company's resources and theirs to keep your company in the overall discussion.

Building an Email list

Social media aside, something that just about everybody on the internet has is an email address. It's the essential thing you need to function on the internet. You will be hard-pressed to find someone, and it's almost impossible that it will be someone who would buy from your store. So you must invest in Newsletters and regular promotional emails. Promotional ads or links shouldn't take more than 15% of a user's purview, or else it might irritate them. Practice patience and minimalistic mails. This keeps you in your customer's minds and will make you the first choice for their requirements. They are consistently more successful and likelier to generate clickthroughs. You might also be able to generate revenue by including ads for products that you might host in your store.

Another thing that you might do is to do guest posts on another industry blog. This might be achieved by either paying a fee to the website or negotiating a blog on your site in exchange for one of yours on theirs. This will allow you to scale up and reach out to new markets and customer bases. They also work towards creating hype around your company and adding credibility to products.

Hire Freelancers

Hiring Full-time employees requires you to ensure that they have all amenities provided to them and take care of their health insurance and transportation. This can be sidestepped by hiring freelancers to create content for you and handle odds and ends. This can be done by merely advertising for hiring freelancers, or better still, joining the various freelancing portals available in abundance. They offer a wide variety of services in a plethora of manners. They may either be curated and selective in their approach where you may demand content but won't have control over who creates the content and how much they're paid.

Another type of Freelancing portal is essentially a social network of Freelancing where the portal certifies and assesses an individual's talent but will allow absolute freedom as to who you want the content creator to be and how you connect with them. This will also enable freelancers to dictate their terms and payment and accept specific requests and requirements. Freelancers also don't require you to provide anything other than the funds that you offer them. They possess the equipment that is necessary for creating any content that you may need. You are also free to hire or fire any person whose work you might or might not like.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is indispensable for online marketing stores that want to scale up. You have to let people know about your products, customer service, and quality control to survive in a market that is all about hype. As a small business owner, you can use this guide to use minimal funds to market your products. Mind that this doesn't mean that if you use these techniques exclusively, your growth will be limited to a point. Our advice would be to use these techniques to a point where increasing your expenses would increase your profits by a considerable margin so that you make back all the money you spent.

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