Customers can be hard to find and keep, so internet sales and marketing teams need to stay on their toes and zero in on where their customers hang out.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO is the practice of refining your company’s webpage and keeping an eye on where it appears. Until it is one of the sites that pops up first when prospective customers type in some keywords from a search engine, your team will need to keep refining the keywords used by comparing them to the ones searched by users, and keywords used on the more successful sites. Your ideal team will keep daily track of where your company’s page appears. If it’s buried somewhere on the 4th page, it will be the job of the team to keep tweaking it until it shows up sooner, ideally on the first page. Maybe you automatically think of Google when you hear the words “search engine”, but there are actually many other popular search engines and your team should learn about them because they might perform even better for you than Google.
Granted, Google currently captures the highest level of internet traffic. It may not be the best place for you, though, because it has started replacing actual links with “snippets” in the hope that searchers will find what they want right there without having to click on anything. Google’s main competition is Bing. It looks similar to Google but gives points for links followed and purchases made. Now that you know this, if you’re looking to attract thrifty customers, Bing might be the place for you. Of course, your goal in SEM or Search Engine Marketing is not to have people just get to your pretty website and look at it. You are working on lead generation, that is people (leads) who you think might be interested in your product.
2. Make Good Use of Social Media
Not all of social media is the same. You will have to choose the best place to showcase your business based on the type of lead generation you’re looking for. There are many sites to choose from, but a bit of research will need to be done and it will have to be up-to-date in case your audience’s attention has started to shift. If your team is only going to choose two social media sites, though, you can’t go wrong with either Facebook or Instagram. Instagram, in particular, has an option for users to give feedback on ads by clicking such things as “it’s irrelevant” or “it’s inappropriate” when they ask for a particular ad not to be shown again. Users can also “like” the ad by touching the heart icon. This means they will keep seeing your ad. Ideally, the members of your sales and marketing teams are involved with social media themselves and have a feel for where your product’s advertising should go. It would be a total waste of time to pay for ads that the wrong audience will see.
3. Send Email Newsletters
A great way to get a list of potential customers is to offer a discount if they give their email addresses. Even if they were only mildly interested when they signed up for email newsletters or sales notices from the marketing team, the emails will not let your company slip their minds. Great email newsletters that are eye catching and simple to read will ensure your company is present in their lives and may even be forwarded to friends and family, increasing the lead generation with no extra effort on your part. Don’t worry that you will be annoying potential customers with too many communications. Just be sure that you give them an option to receive them less often or to unsubscribe. Of course, you don’t want that but if they can’t they’ll be annoyed with you and will still not be part of your customer base.
4. Make YouTube Videos
Don’t forget about YouTube as a place to market your product. Unbelievably, YouTube gets over 30 million visitors a day and is now the second most visited website in the world. Think about how many chances there will be every day for a potential customer to see your product. The catch? Since YouTube is for videos, your marketing team will need to become skilled at making professional-looking ones. Of course, there is a bit more to internet marketing and sales than this, but these steps are a great start. As long as the team does its homework and keeps track of the traffic being generated, there is a whole world of future customers out there.
