This is the seventh part in our series on “How To Increase Your Sales… Without Increasing Your Marketing Budget”, a series of articles we’ve put together to help you make the most of your existing marketing budget generate more sales. The other parts of the series can be found below:
Here’s our seventh tip/tactic, we hope you enjoy it.
#7 Maximise Your Traffic From Free Sources
While paid advertising is an effective method for driving traffic to your offers o products, if this is the only way you are attracting prospects, then you are missing out on an opportunity to grow your business for less cost.
Nowadays, people are just as interested in what a brand has to say and what it stands for, as they are in what products or services they are offering. Not only that, there’s a desire for businesses to reflect the personality of their owners, to some extent, as this makes businesses more relatable to customers.
And while you can pay to get these types of message in front of prospects, you are also able to attract people through free channels, such as social media, by engaging with them on these sites.
Granted it’s not for everyone to be super active on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, but this is where many of your customers are going to be. So at least having a presence and allowing people to find you on these platforms is going to benefit your business.
Taking the time to participate and share with your audience will go a long way to building trust and establishing you or your business in the minds of these consumers. It doesn’t have to be complicated and best of all it can be free.
Social Media
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat etc. It can be a long list of potential sites to be on when it comes to social media and interacting with potential customers, so take your time to choose where you’ll start.
If you’re a regular on Facebook then make sure your business has its own page and take the time to keep it up to date with the latest news and offers.
Alternatively, if you’re an active Twitter user, then get a profile set up for your business and use it to follow other businesses and influencers in your market, the goal being to gain followers in return and growing your audience.
The great news when it comes to taking part in social media is that you are opening new opportunities to make sales. Recommendations influence what people, with 23% of consumers saying they’ve made a purchase based on them.
Furthermore, 30% of consumers say they would make a purchase directly through Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat and brands are taking advantage (with one seeing an 8% increase in revenue on Instagram).
But social media is not the only way you can generate free traffic.
Blogging
Put simply, blogging is good for business, as the following graphic illustrates:
(Source: Ignitespot Accounting)
By creating a blog for your business, you are creating a resource that will help you to drive more traffic to your website, convert visitors to customers, build your authority in the marketplace and deliver long term results.
Every post that you write becomes another page indexed by the search engines, which means it’s another opportunity for you to show up when a customer searches for information relevant to your products or services.
You can also reuse the content you produce to post to the social media sites I talked about earlier, so you are able to do the work once and use it in multiple locations to build your online presence and growing your audience.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Whole books have been written about SEO and the benefits that a business can receive if their content and website is optimised for their target audience. This is because it simply helps, it is a proven method for driving traffic to a website and it’s going to remain so for as long as customers are searching for answers.
SEO comes with a range of benefits. The quality of traffic is usually higher as you’re providing helpful content customers are searching for, natural search results get more clicks than PPC (even though the ads appear above them), and it can help with your public relations efforts by getting links from others.
Granted it can be a somewhat complicated topic and the search engines are constantly tweaking their algorithms to serve up better results for customers, however investing time into SEO will pay for itself over and over.