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It is vital in business to know your target market. Regardless of the product or service you supply, you need to have a profound understanding of who to point it towards, where you fit as a business, and how to keep generating revenue or ROI so investment can be ploughed back into the business, and the cycle can begin again. Marketing, in its most primitive form, has stood the test of time. Even the marketing campaigners from the early 20th century understood the vitality of a poster that was well-designed and well-placed in order to generate sales and profit. Times have moved on since those classic Coca-Cola posters and Lucky Strike adverts, but the fundamental goals have never changed, and they will never change! The only difference now is that the platforms have changed, and the stakes have been raised. Harnessing the power of the Internet is not such a big magic trick anymore, there are thousands of ecommerce sites popping up every month. So in getting your own ecommerce business to be heard, you need to make sure that you shout a bit louder, or you need to be seen a lot more clearer. The Internet is a powerful communication tool, if you know how to use it properly. With the amount of small home-run businesses asking their friends to share their Facebook page or to retweet may generate a few sales in the early days, but as a long-term marketing method, this is not feasible. What methods are commonly used to communicate with a customer now?
SEO
Short for search engine optimization, the fundamentals behind this are in relation to certain algorithms. Search engines, such as Google, will display your website in its rankings somewhere. It is not randomly selected where you would be on the list, or if you are a newer business, this does not mean that you are higher up the rankings, nor does it mean that you are lower down the rankings! Search engines analyse specific keywords on your website, and as people use search engines to find what they’re looking for, if your website contains a lot of the relevant keywords, then the higher up the search engine results ranking it will appear. A small caveat to this, it is not that simple! There are other approaches that you need to take into account, including web traffic, appealing content, and the list goes on. You can use eCommerce SEO companies to help you go through your website and marketing techniques to understand where you might be going wrong in appealing to customers. SEO is a hot topic in any business now. Make sure that you are well versed in it.
Pay-per-click
Pay-per-click advertising is a process that operates in similar ways to SEO as it is based on the keyword approach. The difference between SEO and this is that as SEO is a more organic process, PPC results are the outcome of payment that you would give to a marketing firm. PPC results are those which show up in yellow boxes on Google. Business owners are drawn into PPC marketing because of its effectiveness at a relatively low cost. This method allows businesses to reach out to people who are very likely to be interested in what the business will sell because PPC ads will appear on websites and search engine results that are related to the product searched for.
Social Media
Despite it being the go-to method for small businesses, it has its place in being incredibly effective for attracting potential customers by using discounts or offers on your page. Social media such as Facebook is a very good way to encourage word of mouth via the Internet as Facebook is an incredibly common communication tool now. And with the analytics and marketing tools that can be provided via social media, you are able to increase your word of mouth.
Links
Having other websites link to your webpage is similar to having a referral. The websites that would have your link on their page is akin to a personal recommendation, as they would not use you if they didn’t think that you were a reputable supplier. Much like word of mouth is excellent on social media or in person, asking or paying other websites to link to your own is business common sense.
Reaching out to the customer is an incredibly mammoth task, and these are just a few that you can employ. With time, effort, and the perfect marketing campaign it will result in incredible profits, and, more importantly, a reliable brand name.
