Getting the sales up is the dream for any entrepreneur, and it can be one of the hardest things to achieve even if your marketing is on point, that’s why many online business owners are tuning into black-hat practices that are damaging their brand, but the key to boosting online sales is patience and organic growth.
Boosting online sales requires a holistic approach, and it all starts with understanding your audience, optimizing Amazon advertising the best you can, getting your website on point, and planning a good social media roadmap!
Here’s an overview:
Understand Your Audience
The most basic thing to do and yet most people fail to do right or are not doing at all is understanding your audience. Yes, getting the Google shopping feed API to optimize and automate your listing is a MUST too but, it won’t have too much impact if you are targeting the wrong audience.
Understanding your audience begins with creating detailed buyer personas, and fictional representations of your ideal customers.
Here’s how to go about it:
- Demographics: Gather information about age, gender, location, and other relevant demographics. Are your customers predominantly young professionals, parents, or retirees?
- Psychographics: Dig deeper into their interests, values, and lifestyle. What motivates them? What challenges do they face?
- Behavioral Patterns: Analyze their online behavior. Where do they spend time online? What platforms do they use? Do they prefer mobile shopping or desktop?
Don’t worry about getting all the data 100% accurate, at the start it will be hard to do it. That’s why you can start with a broad mental image of your buyer persona and research the points separately.
Later on, you can do surveys to build a detailed buyer persona of your product or brand.
Segmentation
After you have your overall audience and buyer persona ready, you will likely need to segment them further, and here it will likely go into two main paths:
- Geographic Segmentation
- Behavioral Segmentation
Now you can use this segmentation to personalize marketing messages, and copies, send targeted emails, or recommend different products based on geographic or past behavior.
Optimize Your Website
Now, your buyer persona is ready and done, you set ads everywhere and visitors start coming to your landing page or website, but there are no sales. This is actually common and while each case is different a good starting point is making sure your website is top-notch!
Make sure that your website’s navigation is intuitive and easy to follow, most of the visitors should find what they’re looking for without frustration.
Also, keep in mind that speed matters! Slow-loading pages lead to high bounce rates, and that’s a sales killer (in a bad way). Optimize images, which are the first culprits in a slow website, and use browser caching to reduce load times.
Something that most people seem to miss is the checkout process, it needs to be simple and straightforward without forgetting about your and your client’s security. Remember that fewer steps mean fewer chances for users to abandon their carts.
Leverage Social Media
Don’t overlook social media, and don’t focus on one, if you’re starting the best option is to try them all. It seems like a lot of work but that way you can truly see what works and what doesn’t work for your brand.
Focus on a good content strategy, create engaging content, and remember that different social media platforms cater to different audiences. Tailor your content accordingly, and use high-quality images, videos, and graphics. Visual content grabs attention.
Create storytelling, and share behind-the-scenes glimpses, customer stories, and product journeys. People connect with narratives.