The new year is an excellent time to revamp your digital marketing plan. Increasing sales is the key to success for every business, so using effective marketing to drive traffic and increase conversions will have a powerful impact on the bottom line.
The 10 Most Effective Hacks
- Identify your target audience—understanding your target market is crucial for effective marketing. Audience identification is something you will want to revisit from time to time as your business grows and changes. Things you should know about the target market for your business include:
- The age of your target demographic
- The prevalent gender of your audience
- The household composite of your audience—are they single, married, widowed, or families with young children?
- The annual income level of potential customers—if you are attempting to sell luxury items to those that can’t afford them, then you are wasting advertising resources
- Improve your “Contact Us” page—this is a simple fix but often overlooked, especially in B2B business marketing. You establish trust when potential clients or customers feel like you are accessible.
- Social media ads—The days of easy organic reach may be over for good. Social media remains the premier promotion strategy to boost online sales. Expertly crafted social media ads will also stir up social media conversations about your products or services, resulting in social shares to boost organic growth.
- Display trust icons on the checkout page—Building trust is essential in online sales, and the trust icons help establish your legitimacy as a business. A brief description of your security measures, along with trust icons, will reduce the number of abandoned carts and build consumer confidence in your site.
- Include testimonials with images—Testimonials are another easy way to impact sales on your website. People want to know that other consumers have had success with your products, and testimonials are an easy way to build confidence. Images of the people writing your testimonials take it to the next level.
- Offer a money-back guarantee—A money-back guarantee offers customers an insurance policy against any perceived risk in purchasing your products or services. Research has verified that businesses increase sales and make more money when offering a money-back guarantee.
- Create a sense of urgency—We know you have heard this advice ad naseum in the digital marketing world, but it is one of the most useful hacks for increasing your conversion rate. Promotions, sales, limited products, and cleverly worded text can all serve to create a subtle but persuasive sense of “missing out” if the customer doesn’t act fast.
- Simplify the checkout process—By removing steps in the checkout process, you acknowledge that your customers are busy people and recognize that there is always competition working to make it sleek, fast, and painless to purchase products. Each extra step in the checkout process results in a loss of sales, so removing as many steps as possible is crucial to improving your number of completed transactions.
- Personalization—Consumers have become accustomed to a personalized shopping experience at most major online retailers. They expect the same personalization level wherever they shop as it appeals to the basic human desire to be noticed and to feel important. Creating a one-on-one marketing experience for customers improves both first-time sales and the number of repeat customers you will have in the future.
- Infographics—Infographics are multipurpose in digital marketing. Infographics help establish brand recognition and authority, drive SEO appeal and increase link building to increase traffic. Infographics add visual appeal to your website, and they are relatively easy to create, making them an easy way to improve your digital marketing strategy.
These ten hacks are relatively painless ways to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategy. The above shortcuts will have a positive impact on sales that you will notice quickly and serve to improve your long-term digital marketing strategy.