Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

How to Use Blogging to Benefit Your Ecommerce Store

Monday, June 27th, 2011

BloggingThe problem with blogs is that so many companies that have them do not know what they have them for.

They know what it is, they have spent money on building one that looks nice and works well but when it comes to actually putting content on there, that’s where the problems arise. This is such a shame as a good blog can be an excellent tool for boosting online sales.

Most Common Mistakes

There are a few common mistakes which it is good to clear up first and foremost. Probably the most common is to use your blog as a way to display every single new product as it becomes available. This may seem like a great idea but it is not what people will come back looking for. If they want to find your new products they will look in your shop, not on your blog. You can turn this around though by occasionally writing something interesting and useful about any new products while avoiding just posting that they exist. This more wholesome method is far more likely to get your online credit card processing system in action.

Another common mistake is not using them. Nothing looks worse to someone trying to find out more about a company who makes the effort to visit your blog only to find a big empty page. ‘Is this company still operating?’ they will ask.

So How Do You Use Your Blog for Good?

Think of your blog as a place where you get to know and interact with your customers. If you keep this as your basis and you won’t go far wrong. Customers will come back to you for more interesting information and only then should you think about slipping in some sales orientated information, preferably towards the end of your post. Remember don’t push people towards your payment gateways. Just give them the best information to get there themselves.

Get to Know Your Customers

Before you write anything, get to know your audience. This may seem obvious to you but do a bit of research into what sort people actually go online who may be interested in what your business offers, and think about what sort of information will be appealing and of use to them. Tailor your blog to answer their questions before they ask them and they will (hopefully) become regular visitors to your blog.

Social Distribution

Using your well written tailored blog as information to distribute via social channels will also be of great benefit to your store. If you have ‘followers’ then you can use them to great advantage using your blog. Try ‘tweeting’ a link to each blog with a clear message of its benefits for example and see how many people start turning up at your site and maybe even buying something.

Blogs are incredibly powerful when done properly so be sure to dedicate enough time to them and pay them the respect they deserve.

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Do Your Online Customers Trust You?

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Ecommerce TrustTrust is one of most important things for shoppers. Gone (well practically) are the days when we can walk into a shop and be sweet talked by a savvy salesman into buying something we don’t want. Shoppers know their rights more than ever and are also particularly careful with their money. This is especially true online as we have no reason to stick around and read or listen to anything about something we don’t definitely want to buy.

So if your shoppers won’t listen to a salesman, who will they trust when looking to buy something online?

Social Media

If you were in a shop and you did not believe what the salesman was telling you about how good a particular product is, and then your best friend walked in and confirmed what the salesman was saying, would you not be more likely to make a purchase? This is basically what social media integration with you website does. If you have these social elements plugged in, that little ‘like’ button and comment box which show up next to products that your friends have already purchased are key to offering you an immediate injection of trust.

Professional and Reliable Sites

Another thing online customer’s look for in order to trust your website is how they look and how they work. One crucial aspect of this is your method of payment processing. Continuing the analogy, if you walked into a shop and it was falling to bits, the door wasn’t working and the salesman was being sick in the corner, would you trust the company? Likewise if the shop wasn’t open when it is supposed to be would you bother to come back? A professional, functional website that always works and looks smart instils that crucial element of trust your customers need. Hand in hand with this goes the quality and respectability of your websites payment service provider.

Honest Sites

Similarly, if your site has inaccurate information or has key conditions of purchases hidden until much later in the buying process, you may be seen as being dishonest or at least seen as withholding the truth to some extent. Be honest and upfront and your customers will trust what you tell them all the more.

Mobile Apps

With more and more consumers using mobiles to buy online, having a good quality mobile app is important for your business. You must ensure that your trustworthiness extends to this app too as it is an extension of your website and must still encourage trust. Make sure it is slick and professional, works perfectly and is upfront about everything.

Get all this right and your customers will trust you, and hopefully tell their friends to trust you too.

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Get Ready For the Bounce Back After Catastrophic December Retail Figures

Thursday, January 27th, 2011

2011 Profit GrowthStatistics recently announced across the national press have shown just how disastrous both the coldest December in 100 years and the lingering atmosphere of the economic downturn has been for the UK retail sector.

In a depressing report the Office for National Statistics explains how retail sales volumes have overall dropped by 0.8% from November and how the regular December spike in spending basically didn’t happen this year. What’s more, there doesn’t seem to have been a rush by consumers to try and beat the VAT rise which many retailers had hoped would have filled a significant shortfall.

All sectors have been affected too including fuel, clothing, household goods and food so no matter what business you are in; the chances are you have not had a happy December. However, what traditionally happens after a big fall, is a big (or at least a significant) rise in sales, just because people tend to need stuff and will feel more inclined to spend their money when conditions change and retailers lower their prices to entice them back.

So what can you do to make the most of this situation?

Assuming you have a website already (if you don’t, stop reading now and go get one) there are a number of things you can do which will help you capture disaffected customers looking to spend without spending too much. Ensuring that your website has secure payment gateways provided by a respected payment service provider is also critical.

Improve PPC Budget

Pay per click (PPC) is a great way to target highly motivated customers in a place where you can appeal to their desires directly. Basically, paying for a link to appear at the top of search engine results pages for keyphrases which people will be typing in if they want your product cheaply will give you a greater chance of pulling in traffic than by many other means. By increasing your budget in this area you can make sure you are at the top. All you need to do is write an advert that appeals to tired consumers looking to start spending again and keep tweaking it until you get results.

Social Media

Social media is the modern day word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth is an important way of getting your products out to the right people. By developing a social media marketing portfolio, including Twitter, Facebook etc, and by offering incentives, you can open up a large network of potential customers in a short space of time. Timing your incentive offers just right will help you to ride the wave of consumers flocking back to their traditional spending levels.

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Which Social Media Network Is Worth Tapping Into Most?

Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Which Social Media SiteDid you know that social media locations have become the number one place for people to spend their time online? As people find staying in touch a more and more enjoyable experience and a better place to hang out than in front of the television most businesses have wised up, got themselves a website and payment gateways and started to try to build a social bridge to their customers.

Big companies will have the budgets to attack every social network they can find and draw all their customers on there too. But for a smaller company they may have a limited amount of money to spend on social marketing and may be forced to choose a couple, or even just one network to address.

Here is an outline of some of the big social networking sites and whether you should pick them as your social network of choice or not.

Twitter

Twitter is a micro blogging site that limits users to small amounts of text to make their point. While this may not sound like an ideal way to get your carefully worded marketing message across it has become a medium which holds a lot of weight. If you can get enough people following your twitter feed you will have a lot of people with eyeballs on your message that could potentially buy something or even send your message on to someone that they think will. In essence get the mob to do your marketing for you in a highly targeted way.

Facebook

Facebook is the biggest social network which has infiltrated the lives of billions and is a rapidly expanding place for businesses to meet face to face with their customers. The main problem Facebook faces is that people don’t really go on Facebook to buy things; they go on to hang out with friends. What you can do with Facebook is incorporate it into your website. Giving your visitors the chance to see what their friends think of your products at a glance may well sway their opinion. Plus, you can encourage people to become ‘friends’ with you on Facebook using incentive schemes that builds your network of followers and increases your chance of sales.

Google Me?

One massive company which has been dipping its toe in the social media waters for the last few years is Google. They have tried and failed before to launch social services but as yet they have not worked, allowing Facebook and Twitter to get where they are. However, if Google does succeed one day, their already established place as an organic and paid advertising medium may mean it will be the best network for you to be a part of.

Getting socially active with your business is reaching the stage where it is practically as important a prerequisite of being successful online as employing a good payment service provider. Basically get out there and get interacting with millions of potential customers. It only takes a few minutes.

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It’s Never Too Late to Add Features to Your Website

Thursday, October 14th, 2010

Website FeaturesWhen you look at your website what do you see? A business card you are proud to direct your potential clients towards? A valuable platform which reliably sells all your products? A shaky place where you are either too scared or too technologically unsure to change anything for fear of erasing the internet? However you might view your website you may not have changed anything or have even touched it for a while. Time to act!

The best thing about online businesses compared to brick and mortar premises is that when you want to expand you don’t have to knock down walls, get planning permission or call in an architect. Your online presence can be boosted in a number of ways without too much hassle. With the rate at which online commerce is accelerating, if you want to keep up with your competition you need to be constantly evolving your website. Here are some things you should be thinking about…

Online Payment Service

Obviously Lancore knows a thing or two about online credit card processing. As well as having a host of other very useful online business tools which can massively increase the profitability of your website, Lancore is the perfect company to help you start taking credit card payments directly from your website. They take all the hassle out of taking payments and provide you with regular reports, full security and professional advice. Without this service you will be lagging way behind your competitors.

HTML 5

Upgrading your website to HTML 5 will open up video and audio to your visitors with ease. If you are currently operating in the older version of HTML you will have to ask your visitors to install a plug-in in order to play a video, but with HTML 5 visitors won’t have to do this. Being able to grab your visitors long enough for them to make a purchase should be your goal. Video is an excellent way of doing this. Look into it now…you know it makes sense.

Social Media

There is no escaping the social networking revolution. If you haven’t done so already it is important for you to start building a social brand now. Starbucks for example appreciates the erosion of trust felt between customers and big businesses over the last few years and has worked hard to focus its main advertising push through social networking. Facebook and Twitter are a good place to start. Remember: your company needs friends on both side of the business divide. Otherwise your payment gateways might end up with more cobwebs than a witch’s cauldron.

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How to Get Your Online Business on Twitter and Why?

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Social NetworkingYou may have one of the best websites in the business, with all the latest Flash functionalities and interactive charts rinsed through your site, but if you don’t have an active Twitter account for your business you are already missing out on a significant number of potential customers.

Why Get Twittering?

Twitter has approximately 75 million users worldwide. While this is some way behind Facebook’s over 400 million users, 75 million potential customers is not to be sniffed at.

Once you have an account you can directly interact with your customers and provide them with direct links to deals, promotions and offers.

By providing unique and interesting insight into your products and services and not just doling out offers, your customers will feel more involved with your products, even if they haven’t purchased them yet.

Twitter has just updated its format, allowing you to not only post tweets, but to post videos and images and other interactive content thanks to their partnership with the likes of YouTube, DailyBooth, TwitVid and USTREAM. This provides you with an incredibly immediate and direct way to provide compelling content for your potential customers. The new format will also entice more people that don’t even intend to Tweet messages to sign up with Twitter just to be part of the relentless newsfeed.

How to Get Twittering?

So first things first, you need an account. Go to www.twitter.com and Sign Up. Add a picture and select a user name. Either make the account personal or have it as a company account. I would suggest having more than one account and more than one person tweeting about different facets of the company, as well as a company one handing out offers and promotional stuff.

Next, use Twitter Search to find out who is talking about your company or your name and other words related to your industry. Build up a following and become a follower. A good balance usually works best.

And you’re off! As explained above, try to have a good mix of company sales info and personal inner office info and personal stories from employees. People like to feel emotionally attached to a brand and by showing off your happy and involved staff you will help people to view your company in a more appealing light.

With Twitter and other social networking functions incorporated into your site, as well as a good solid payment service provider, business merchant account and reliable payment gateways, you will be able to use your new Twitter account to encourage sales from some places in the world you never even considered.

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Social Media is Becoming a Major Business Channel

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Social Media

While we mentioned in a previous post how social media can be a valuable tool for online businesses, new statistics have arisen which show just how big a part of our lives they have become. Two reports, one by Hitwise and one from Econsultancy show some remarkable results.

The results produced by Hitwise show that in the UK in May, there were more people using social networking sites than search engines. This is an alarming statistic for some as it shows the extent to which social networking has grown, to where it can attract more visitors than the giant search engines. From a business point of view this brings up the question, where should your investment in advertising be made? And if social media is going to become a consistently more visited medium than the search engines, will people be as easy to pitch to when they are chatting to their friends about a product as opposed to when they are actively searching for a something they want?

With this in mind, Econsultancy’s 3rd annual Online Measurement and Strategy Report handily shows that since 2009 there has been a 9% increase in the number of agencies using social media monitoring analytics. This is the biggest increase in all types of analytics, proving that people are now beginning to appreciate the power of social media and are looking for ways to use them to help their business. The report shows how organisations use a variety of methods to monitor social media including free to use feeds and dashboards, web analytics tools, paid for reputation monitoring tools, a mixture of all of these or of course, none of these. It seems business is going social in a big way.

However, Hitwise’s statistics when broken down show that Google on its own is still the most visited site in the UK. This may be just a sign that Google is beating its rivals into submission leaving a space in the stats which happens to be filled by a social networking site (Facebook is second, 2% behind), but if you look at it another way, people may be getting from social networking what they were looking for from search engines, plus all the fun and games on top. Why go back to a search engine?

Whether these stats herald the beginning of a new age or just signify a blip being followed up by a conscientious tech savvy business community, only time will tell. But if companies are to move to a more social media centric forum you can be sure that Lancore will be there ready and waiting with all the online multi-currency payment processing required.

As an intrinsic part of the Lancore team Martin Able is specialised in arranging secure payment gateways for quick and effective money transfer services.

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Top 5 Ecommerce Applications Of Social Media

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Social Media is big business and with the right plan of action and a delicate touch any site can utilise people power to improve their ecommerce. Here are a few brands which have made a big difference to their ecommerce growth using social media.

Zappos

Zappos is an online shoe and clothing store which uses their company culture to sell their products. They believe that their company culture is strong enough to sell their brands by using Twitter (400 staff tweeting) and other social media outlets to project their lifestyle. Their blogs for example contains more information on their day to day life than about product updates and new releases.

Dell

Dell asks its customers to help shape its brand and even its products. A while back, some might say it was in the bad books of the social media world, but if its websites navigation is anything to go by they now make a strong statement about their commitment to community and service. They are active in every social media sector and have over 400,000 ‘Twitterers,’ or is it ‘Twits’ or ‘Tweeterers’? Most interestingly, Dell has an idea generating community called ‘Ideastorm,’ from which tens of thousands of ideas have been generated. 200+ of which have been implemented.

Best Buy

Best Buy has a mantra of radical transparency. It is also a company of regular Twitter users, but its use of an open application interface is awesome as this provides developers with access all its catalogue data from their ecommerce website to allow them to use it to test and create new applications.

Wet Seal

Wet Seal is a clothing store which has an online gallery where customers can create ensembles from their catalogue in order to best judge what to buy. However this catalogue is also a community forum where people can publish their ensembles and get reviews from other customers. This is a step beyond a normal review by being imagination driven and brings in visitors motivated by social validation. The idea is taken a step further when you visit a store physically. Customers published ensembles are searchable, so your choice of outfit could be a tool to sell to another customer – user generated merchandising.

Build A Bear Workshop

How can you use social media to sell something like a teddy bear? – Primarily, an experience centric product. Well ‘Build A Bear Workshop’ created an online world for its, largely child, patrons. This online world is basically a ‘Facebook’ for kids. From this interactive world customers can chat and share online items from each other and have access to staff from ‘Build A Bear Workshop’ to answer questions and buy online goods.

Social Media is an important and growing part of the ecommerce universe, and when used with innovation and sincerity it can be a powerful tool. How could your business use social media to better sell your product?

Martin Able is an e-commerce professional experienced with money transfer services and cheque processing for internet retailers.

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