Article: Make sure your website is up, working well and very attractive before you invest in pay-per-click marketing, social media managers or anything else that is designed to funnel traffic to your website. If people are unable to use your website, they will not buy. Post free content on your website, such as short video clips, tutorials, interesting articles, blogs, advice or a free e-book. Make a landing page, so that they you can get their contact information to offer them specials and promotions in the future via email. Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest and Twitter are valuable ways to attract new customers. Post sales, new products and links to sign up for your free content on the social media pages.  Social media accounts are free; however, there is some cost in time and expertise in maintaining them consistently. Just like blogging, the value is in frequent use. Follow other businesses and try cross promoting on Facebook or other accounts. Blasting your followers with specials every day may not be the best way to get regular readers, but posting other interesting content between sales posts is a good marketing strategy. Try the Facebook ads and promoted posts to get new people interested in your site. You can use behavioral marketing to target your ideal customer demographics. Think of social media as a way to connect with your customers. You will attract reliable, repeat customers if you develop a relationship with them. You will increase the “instant gratification” of the purchase and convince potential customers of the value they are getting.  Make sure you can afford to offer the shipping. Consider that sometimes adding a free product or shipping will work just as well as taking a discount. People like to have value added to their purchase, but still feel like they are getting a quality product. Give something to people who purchase your product via email or Facebook. They are likely to be more pleased with their purchase and refer others. Search engine marketing requires you to create an account with Bing, Google, Yahoo or another engine and pay a small fee to have results on the first page. Use your products and customer preferences to choose your keywords.   PPC marketing asks you to bid for a per click price. You may be outbid by other companies for the same keyword or keyword combination. Your website will appear higher and attract more customers and clicks if you fine-tune your keywords over time. Remember that very common key words may be too expensive to justify with a small business marketing campaign. Try long-tail keywords (2 or more words) that are more specific to your region, products or brands. Use WordStream’s free keyword tool to research popular keywords before you bid for them on Google AdWords or Microsoft Ad Center.
What is a summary of what this article is about?
Spend money on the back end of a website. Offer them something for free. Start social media accounts. Consider offering free shipping. Give a well thought out loyalty bonus. Buy pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.