The internet has become a natural and integral part of our lives. With the help of the internet, one can acquire new knowledge and take exams, register with doctors, obtain passports and other documents, and shopping becomes as routine as going to the nearest grocery store with a few clicks.
Online shopping is a convenient form of interaction for both buyers and sellers. On the one hand, it eliminates geographical barriers (one can shop in other cities or even in other countries) and saves time in searching for the desired product and in paying for it.
For the latter, it opens up infinite possibilities to serve a large number of customers 24 hours a day in parallel. Provided, of course, that it is possible to persuade and convince site visitors to buy using effective marketing tools.
Selling Goods via the Internet: How to Increase Efficiency?
The promotion of goods or services on the Internet must be done taking into account the general rules and patterns of online marketing.
First of all, you need to set up a target, identify your target audience (CA) and direct the advertising to them. For example, if a company sells trucks and targets small and medium-sized businesses, the targeting should be set up according to gender (male), age (30-50), and the region where sales are to be increased via the Internet (geo-targeting option).
The customer profile is totally different when an eyelash correction offer in Ryazan is advertised. Women between 20 and 40 years old who are interested in such a procedure can be informed via the advertising system in social networks.
Age and circle of interest in popular social media can be easily determined by filling out the registration form during registration (users enter this information themselves),
Secondly, for a successful transaction, it is important to engage your potential buyers, start an interactive dialogue with them, and involve them in the sales funnel. For the convenience of customers, it is advisable to use as many interactive communication channels as possible.
After all, someone is more accustomed to calling regularly or writing a message in a chat on a company’s website, while someone prefers to send a question directly to an Instagram account or messenger like Viber. Staying in touch with the customer at all stages of the sale and follow-up is essential.
For example, a low-key birthday message (along with a personalized discount) can translate into repeat orders and loyalty for years to come. But anything is good in moderation.
Third, there is another “whale” that supports Internet marketing. This is web analytics, which provides information about the effectiveness of actions taken. Analytics allows you to determine the effectiveness of specific advertisements and advertising campaigns as a whole, i.e. to relate the financial resources spent to the result obtained (customer growth, purchases made).
Depending on the specifics of the company and marketing tasks, the most valuable information is conversion – the percentage of certain targeted actions (e.g. calls to a certain number, clicks on a banner ad, transitions to an online shopping cart, etc.) in the total number of visitors to the resource.
By seeing exactly which steps lead to increased conversion, you can make your marketing strategy more effective and attract more buyers at a lower cost. If you find that a previously well-established promotional message is no longer generating leads (i.e., it any longer leads to the actions expected by the target group), it can be quickly replaced or corrected.
The basic components of online advertising ultimately influence the key performance indicators (KPIs) that drive online sales growth. The largest advertising system, Yandex. Direct and Google AdWords, offer their own web analytics services that generate reports on dozens of different criteria.
Some indicators are visual and “lie on the surface”, but relying on them alone can create a distorted picture. For example, two competing online stores place ads. One advertiser will get a thousand hits a day (which seems like a great indicator), but at the same time, no user will ever make a purchase.
The second site only gets 500 visits per month, but the conversion rate is 50 (i.e., every other visitor will make a purchase).
So, it’s important to look at traffic in conjunction with other metrics, such as conversion, conversion costs, average bill per sale, the cost to acquire a buyer, etc.
Working on performance indicators means above all ensuring regular monitoring: according to the principle “prevention is better than cure”. Monitoring the dynamics of Internet marketing is a preventive measure to identify weak points and avoid crisis situations.
And if a problematic situation has already occurred, it is important to identify the causes and remedy them at the root. For example, if conversion rates are down, you need to identify and change ineffective channels and strategies. If the number of abandoned purchases increases in the checkout phase, you can analyze the reasons (form usability, technical issues, etc.) and think about how to eliminate them.
Answers can also be suggested by the referral sources: from which advertising channel do those who do not bring the transaction to the checkout more often come. Sometimes customers click on a link with a discount promotion that is no longer valid and, seeing a higher amount in the cart than promised, leave disappointed.
As a result, the company not only wastes its advertising budget but also ruins its reputation for its own money.
Internet Marketing Tools: A Use Not to Be Neglected
Let’s briefly analyze the main tools that an online marketer uses to build a sales pyramid.
The first thing recommended for business promotion: SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Best Local SEO Consultant Company will recognize all of your business loopholes and try to make strategies to cover them all. In this case, the optimization is aimed at the texts of the pages, as these are indexed by search engines and produce a list of websites that match the users’ queries.
For example, if a search is performed in Yandex for “pool repair”, the first lines of the search result will contain pages with a detailed description of typical pool problems and ways to solve them, with the search term repeated several times.
And the announcement that the children’s pool is closed for repair is sorted by the search engine as irrelevant and offered to the user as a last resort. The first step is to create a list of the main search queries that customers use to look for the advertised product (you can use special services such as Google Analytics and Yandex. Wordstat for this).
The second step is the use of these words in the website texts. It is important to find a balance between SEO and the readability of the text, i.e. the text should be lively (not a mechanical jumble of keywords) and be deemed suitable by both readers and search engines.
The advantages of optimization are Availability and relatively low cost (you only need to pay once for quality text preparation to reap the benefits of your efforts for a long time), as well as a wide range and the possibility to reach the target audience.
Among the disadvantages of this method, only one is significant: it is a slow process that requires careful preparation and does not produce results as quickly as paid advertising on the same topic. A certain amount of time is needed for the analysis of the referencing, the writing of adapted texts, and their indexation by the search engines.
In order not to be left behind by competitors, more operational-tactical tools are usually included in the optimization in parallel.
Targeting is a Powerful Weapon in Online Advertising
This time we will look at its variations and characteristics.
Website Retargeting
advertising that “follows” a visitor who has already asked for the price of a product on the website, but left without making a purchase. The technique is as follows: After visiting the advertiser’s website, the potential customer receives a cookie code that is a kind of “tag” for the advertising system.
By automatically recognizing this tag, the system is instructed to recommend the product he or she has recently visited. A repeated reminder of a possible purchase is effective when a person is distracted from the buying process and after seeing an advertisement for an interesting product for a few days, they are ready to make the transaction.
Search targeting means showing ads to users who have entered a keyword that matches the advertiser’s parameters.
Social Targeting
This means that customers are targeted by an ad attack based on gender, age, location, hobbies, and other data they have entered into a social network). So, if you fill in the “kids” column, don’t be surprised to see ads for children’s clothing or paid daycare, or to see ads for themed communities in your feed.
Behavioral Targeting
Is the most subtle type of targeting and, when used correctly, the most promising. In this case, the advertising system collects information about customers with the curiosity of a private detective. People’s Internet behavior is analyzed, their interests (based on the classification of frequently visited resources), information about online purchases, videos watched, and music added to the playlist is carefully “classified” in the file.
If a young man subscribes to the snowboard association and certain ski resort communities, and regularly watches videos of freestyle competitions on YouTube, he is a candidate for a promotional sample of snowboard equipment.
And his transitions to car pages and his views of video content about car refurbishments of a certain brand are a sign that it makes perfect sense for him to offer ads for car services, CASCO insurance, etc. in addition to sportswear.
Targeting can be a great sales tool. The key is to identify and adapt to the target group and its characteristics.
Banner ads are a direct and eye-catching form of advertising for services. This is both its advantage and disadvantage. If it is unnecessarily intrusive and interferes with the viewing of content, users will disable it via the settings or simply stop responding to it. At the same time, a quality design and a well-timed ad will lead an interested customer to a click with a subsequent purchase.
Contextual Advertising
Is a simple way to target a visitor with an ad related to their search query. These are paid ads that appear above the organic listing and are not much different from the following free entries. For the search query “wooden houses”, for example, 3-4 contextual ads appear first, followed by SEO-optimized articles on the topic of construction, ranked according to the search query.
The Internet marketer’s arsenal also includes SMM promotion, affiliate programs and projects, e-mail newsletters, and other ways to convert customer interest into Internet merchandise sales.
21st-Century Technologies: A Professional Look at Internet Marketing.
Those who underestimate the possibilities of online sales marketing may at least slow down the development of their business and lose some of their profits. And in the long run, the Digital Marketing Agency runs the risk of sharing the fate of the mammoths.
But despite the fact that online sales are relatively new, in some areas they have almost supplanted the appeal of offline sales. For example, most people would rather “put money on the phone” or buy airline tickets remotely than go to a communications room or airline ticket counter to do so.
Products, building materials, electronics, and more are ordered via the web. The migration of buyers to the internet has not only been felt by gas stations. But they too are shifting the bulk of their marketing activities from traditional to Internet channels. And this is not a fashionable tribute, but an urgent necessity.
Successful online marketing in the 21st century requires constant research and implementation of effective technologies that enable a company to achieve the financial metrics it needs. It is not limited to the standard tools offered by advertising systems.
Alternatives are often more sustainable and provide significant budget savings. For example, placing high-quality native ads on a high-traffic website can lead to conversions comparable to a combination of contextual advertising, targeting, and SEO.
The Donalds system, for example, works on this principle, partnering with popular media to provide leads with contextual-level conversion and well-targeted organic search traffic.
The well-known adage “he who owns the information owns the world” can be paraphrased in terms of 21st-century internet marketing technology as “he who correctly presents information to his audience makes online sales”.
This means adopting internet marketing to the company’s format and characteristics, regularly checking its effectiveness, and juggling all available web services and tools.