GoForth Guest Blogger, Author at GoForth Institute Blog

7 Ways to Promote Your E-commerce Product without Being Salesy

Online commerce has become an extremely important sales driver in the last few years. E-commerce sales will skyrocket to $2.86 trillion in 2018, making up 11.5% of annual retail spending. This fact clearly suggests it’s a huge piece of market share that you just have to utilize in order to increase the sales of your products.

But how exactly can you do it? The competition in this field is harsh and you need to indulge customers without being too salesy in your promotional activities. Contemporary consumers don’t want you to manipulate or persuade them. Instead, they want to feel appreciated as your partners in a long-term relationship.

You need to approach prospects delicately and keep them informed about your products. The goal is to educate them and improve their knowledge about the brand. This way, customers can compare different items and analyze prices, quality, or special offers.

After all, the whole idea behind content marketing is to strengthen relationships with your clients. Content creators write blog posts, shoot product tutorials, publish images and live videos to get the followers acquainted with their products and services or with a company in general.

It’s a well-known and two-fold principle of infotainment. This sort of promotion essentially has two objectives:

To enlighten and instruct customers so they can understand and use products to the fullest extent.
To keep followers amused and entertained. This is a more human side of the business and it’s always less formal than the first objective.

Besides infotainment, online commerce marketers use many other tricks to grab the attention of potential customers. There are dozens of psychological triggers that can successfully influence the feelings and behavior of an average shopper.

But it is very important to learn how to make a balance between promotional and educational e-commerce activities. The easiest way to avoid mistakes is to follow the old 80/20 rule. Namely, your online content should stay informative in 80% of cases, while it can promote sales directly in not more than 20% of situations. This may sound like a complicated endeavor, but it’s actually much easier once you really start thinking about it.

The most important thing is to find a good e-commerce manual and follow instructions. Online sales specialists at College Paper designed a data-driven infographic to show you 7 ways to promote your e-commerce product without being salesy.

7 Ways to Promote Your E-commerce Product without Being Salesy

Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, business consultant and helps people to turn their dreams into the profitable business. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. Also Lucy has her own blog Prowritingpartner.com where you can check her last publications. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on Twitter.

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Best ways to anticipate your customer needs

Businesses are facing a profound challenge that becomes increasingly relevant every day: anticipating customer needs. The market is changing lightning-fast these days, so if you are not planning and preparing a solution for tomorrow’s customers, you may be heading for a big disappointment and don’t even realize it.

Why should one plan solutions for tomorrow’s customers when one has a lot of business today? Well, there are always new businesses and startups planning their arrival on the market tomorrow. Who knows, maybe a new Steve Jobs and Elon Musk will enter your market tomorrow? Chances are they will have much better solutions than you do.

Besides, the brand new world of customer lifecycle management (CLM) replaces the current marketing concepts: the calendar and the funnel. Tomorrow, they will become more irrelevant and outmoded because they are unresponsive models organized around the business, not the customer.

For example, they don’t account for numerous daily opportunities to engage with the target audience, which means losing millions of dollars. Clearly, it’s better to use updated strategies.

CLM is a responsive model that focuses on the customer and their needs. It takes advantage of advanced analytics, encourages businesses to listen for the signals from customers, and respond to them quickly, profitably, and relevantly.

Do you want your customers to be impressed by responsive, highly personalized, and relevant experiences with your brand as well? Then take a look at the infographic created by Proessaywriting.com below.

It offers eight updated ways that business owners can determine and develop with future trends. The ways are backed up by data provided by studies of the U.S. market – however, this advice is highly valuable to Canadian entrepreneurs as well. Each technique described in the infographic comes with helpful tips for you to improve your ability to anticipate the needs of your target audience.

An effective use of these techniques will help your business survive and compete with the next Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. You’ll learn that in addition to listening, staying competitive requires using CLM and taking initiative, planning, and seeing things that your target audience will need, even if they don’t know it yet.

All right, let’s now learn how to put your business in a unique position of knowing exactly what customers need…

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Useful Tricks That Will Help to Create Facebook Ads That Stand Out

Keeping in mind that Facebook has over two billion active users every single month, it is no wonder it became the place to be if you want to promote your company or business. As a matter of fact, there are sixty-five million companies who are currently advertising on Facebook, and you should definitely be one of them. So what made Facebook a popular place for marketing?

Firstly, Facebook Ads are not super expensive and you will be able to create a buzz without investing a lot of money. Secondly, the process of creating and putting together your ad is very straightforward and you can do it quickly. Thirdly, your ad will appear to your target audience which will eventually lead to more interest in your brand or business.

But there is a downside to the fact that Facebook Ads are in demand right– the struggle to stand out from the crowd. Users do see many ads during the time they spend on Facebook, but are they going to click on every single one of them? The answer is no. So what you need to do is to create a unique advertising campaign that will stop a user while they scroll through their feed, and make them see what your product is all about.

Invest a lot of time in the visual side of your advertisement. This means choosing the right image that will spark an interest from a user. But don’t forget to add meaningful content as well. An interesting Facebook ad should be a combination of various factors that will attract your audience, and intrigue them. It might sound difficult if you have never advertised your business on Facebook before, but it really isn’t.

Once you cover the basics that explain how Facebook Ads work, it is time to move on to some useful tricks from the experts. The infographic made by Assignmenthelper shows all the different layers of research and preparation you need to complete if you want to make an outstanding Facebook ad that will beat the competition. You will notice that there is some psychology in it as well!

There is no reason why you shouldn’t try Facebook Ads to make your business more successful. After all, companies of all sizes advertise their products on this social media site, and that is for a reason. Start by going through the infographic and reading each point carefully – you will create an amazing Facebook ad in no time!

Lucy Benton is a marketing specialist, business consultant and helps people to turn their dreams into profitable business. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. Also Lucy has her own blog ProWriting where you can check her last publications.

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These Are the Best Digital Marketing Channels for Small Businesses

Small business owners often don’t know where to start from when it comes to promoting their company, and many marketing-related problems stem from the fact that their budget is usually very limited. However, there are high-converting methods that don’t require costly tactics and huge investments, and that can increase their visibility and help them reach their target audience. Building an online presence is essential for generating qualified leads and growing a customer base.

Start a blog

This simple strategy has numerous benefits and it’s vital for driving traffic to your website. However, if you want this to work, you need to offer high-quality content that will engage your visitors and make them stick around. Research your target audience, find out what their interests and pain points are, and create the content that addresses all these topics in a relevant and helpful way. Basically, your visitors want to learn how to solve some of their problems, read the latest news from the industry, and last but not least, be entertained. A good marketing strategy that will provide your target audience with original, fresh content on a regular basis can be a game-changer for your business. Your blog posts need to be interesting, well-researched, and frequent. The importance of frequency can be corroborated by the latest statistics according to which companies that publish 16 and more blog posts per month get almost 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish between 0-4 blog posts monthly. Guest blogging is another good idea that can increase your visibility and traffic, so make sure to join forces with other fellow bloggers from your niche.

Email marketing

This old-school marketing channel still rocks. Its ROI varies between 3800% and 4400%, which means that for every $1 you invest in your email marketing strategy you’ll earn between $38 and $44, which makes it one of the most profitable digital marketing channels. Besides, the average order value of an email is 17% higher than that of social media. This is evidently one of the most effective and cost-effective channels for digital marketing, which makes it perfect for small business with shoestring budgets, but a word of caution is necessary. As you most probably know, CASL three-year transition period ended on July 1, 2017. This means that businesses operating in Canada will have to obtain express consent for sending all types of commercial electronic messages, including emails, to people living in Canada. The latest and final provisions of this legislation certainly make things more complex for companies, but this by no means marks the end of email marketing in this country. There are steps that have to be taken before trying to contact your target audience by means of an email or text, and all you have to do is make sure that your marketing efforts are compliant with CASL.

Social media

“Pics, or it didn’t happen” is a catchphrase that perfectly illustrates how dependent on social media we have become. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn can actually make it or break it for any business big or small. The impact of social networks is tremendous, and the first thing that your potential customers do when they learn about your company is check it up on social media channels and see how many followers you have, what your existing customers say about you, and whether you publish engaging content. That’s why you need to understand how to harness the power of this incredibly influential digital marketing strategy. Besides regular posting and keeping in touch with your audience, it’s also crucial to understand how to leverage Facebook Ads, and drive more online sales.

Improve your SEO

Search engine optimization is still a mystery to some business owners, which is a great shame since this strategy can help them reach their target audience by boosting their website ranking. It can be costly, but the results make it worthwhile. Bear in mind that SEO won’t work if you observe it as a one-time attempt to boost your rankings. In order for this strategy to be successful, it needs to be persistently and regularly implemented over a period of time. High-quality content and linkbuilding are the most important things that Google takes into consideration when it comes to ranking a website. Studies have also suggested that longer content scores a better ranking, and a point that illustrates this is the stat revealing that the average first-page result on Google has 1,890 words. The first page of Google’s search results gets 92% of all traffic, while the first spot claims a whopping 33% of overall traffic.

Each of these channels will make a big difference for your business, but if you combine them you can expect really amazing results.

Nate Vickery is a marketing consultant and author mostly engaged in researching the latest marketing technology trends and practices applicable to startups and SMBs. He is also the editor at Bizzmark Blog and an author on The Next Web.

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