In a testing economic climate, the need to promote your business is greater than ever, but with marketing budgets being cut, how can you possibly achieve this?
One way is through the web. The latest technologies not only allow you to reach out to a larger client base but they also enable you to measure the cost effectiveness of every advertising campaign and every sale made.
- Utilise your website better as a sales tool: You may not have the budget to hire a sales team, but your site can act as a virtual sales rep, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, by including useful information relating to your business such as frequently asked questions, videos relating to your business, product / service fact sheets, case studies and any other useful information you may have.
- Use email newsletters to keep your clients informed: These can be used in conjunction with your website for sending out news alerts. They are a quick, effective and low-cost way for you to reach out to contacts on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis, no need to worry about the cost of printing or postage costs. With the click of a button, you can send a newsletter to an unlimited number of recipients. Visitors can be directed back to the website by including links in the emails. Best, because the email template can be re-used or used as the basis for further emails in the future, and because there is no limit to the number of emails it can be sent to, it is a low-cost medium. Best of all, you get value for money as you can access email statistics that reveal how many recipients actually opened your email and clicked on the links.
- Sell online: By trading online, you are not only saving yourself the cost of a premises, but are making life much easier for yourself with the ability to manage products, stock and prices from any location that has an internet connection. The cost of trading online has plummeted with companies such as Paypal charging no set up or monthly fees, with costs as little as 3.4% + £0.20 GBP per transaction. Paypal allows you to create your own buttons – and add them to your website yourself. You can be up and trading within minutes.
- An email a friend facility will enable visitors to alert friends to any page on the site that they find of interest (or email pages to themselves). There is no cheaper or more effective way promote your site than via your own clients!
- Search engine optimisation: It doesn’t cost you any money when a customer finds you on Google, so what are you doing to improve your search engine ranking? By simply following Google’s own guidelines, you can go a long way towards achieving that goal. Keep your website relevant and rich in content, and make sure that there are other sites linking to you. You can read Google’s guidelines here.
- You can complement your search engine ranking by investing in pay per click advertising. Google Adwords will position your website prominently when someone searches for a keyword relating to your business. The cost would not be prohibitive as you only pay if someone actually clicks on your ad and you can set up a daily limit for how much you are willing to pay.
Experience has shown that this method is extremely effective for websites operating in a specialist area. An account can be set up within minutes, and we’ll include a training session showing you how to maintain a Google advertising campaign. You can also monitor how effective your advertising is, by measuring the conversion rate of every advertising campaign, essential in these frugal times. - Live Chat Software is an instant messaging application designed specifically to provide online assistance to users of a web site. By using this type of software, you will be able to interact with and win the trust of more of your visitors that will in turn help you to convert more of them into clients. And it could be a lot cheaper than the cost of another phone line!
