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Marketing an online business is essential
to its success. Building a decent e-commerce website
is relatively easy - but attracting the right people
to the site at the lowest possible cost per visit, and
persuading the highest possible number to spend the
maximum amount, on repeat visits, is the difference
between a profitable online business and a virtual white
elephant.
Your planning should start with a market appraisal.
You can use keyword research to identify how many people
are searching for the products and services you're planning
on offering. The research, if you use a service like
www.wordtracker.com,
will also tell you how many web pages are competing
for the phrases that people are using.
Competitor research is important. If you are to persuade
more people to buy from your online business rather
than from your competitors, you need to offer a more
compelling marketing proposition than them.
Marketing is an investment. Your budget needs to be
sufficient to enable you to test and measure a range
of traffic building and sales conversion tactics over
a period of at least 3-6 months. When you have tested
how well your site converts visitors to customers, you
will be able to calculate how much you should pay for
a visitor. Paying more than your breakeven figure -
your sales conversion rate multiplied by your average
gross profit per sale - will be unprofitable. That may
be acceptable while you build market share but you won't
want to continue with such a strategy forever.
There are a range of online and offline activities
that you should include in your marketing plan - from
pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimisation
to affiliate marketing and opt-in email subscriptions.
The critical thing to include in all of your online
business planning is to set aside time for testing and
measuring. The tools that you'll need are available
for free. Google provides a very good Analytics service
that will tell you how many visitors you get, where
they came from, the keywords they used to find you and
so on.
Finally, don't forget that you need to plan for all
the usual activities that are essential to the running
of any business, online or offline. Customer service,
delivery systems and returns policies are just as important
as getting new customers - a happy customer is more
likely to buy again.
To find out more, call us on +44(0)845
456 5342
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