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Marketing Guide
Written by Shopster's Marketing Team
Once you've built your Shopster store (RShop), how do you promote and advertise it? Perseverance and ingenuity go a long way towards a successful marketing campaign. Shopster is here to help you along. But, you are your own boss. How you market and promote your store is up to you. Here are some tips and strategies to help bring customers to your store.
Online - People
Tell your friends
Word spreads quickly. Word-of-mouth is the most effective way to promote and advertise your store. It's as easy as it sounds. Tell your friends (online and otherwise) – they're the most difficult customer for your competition to take away from you.
Remember, everyone likes to feel like they're getting special treatment; this goes double for your contacts. Create a coupon just for them and send it out. Encourage them to take advantage of the discount and get them to help you spread the word with their contacts.
Brand Your Store
Branding your store will bring you an advantage when it comes to marketing. Determine how you want to represent your store and seek some unique selling proposition that includes a brand name. Plan and research your brand name by running it past friends and researching it on your favorite search engine. By creating a unique selling proposition that includes a unique brand name you are setting up your store for success within the Search Engine Marketing Wars.
Although it is good to have a unique URL it is better to have a Unique Brand Name that you can advertise offline and that you know will be found by the casual internet user who may think or feel that trying to remember a URL is too difficult.
Most high-traffic, well-known sites have their own domain names. You don't see too many instances of "http://monster.example.com" or "cnn.example.com". Monster, CNN, and any other website that commands a large number of unique visitors tends to have it's own domain.
With Shopster, we provide you with a sub-domain (.secure2u.com) free of charge. Having your own (.com) domain is cheap (only about $10/ year) and can go a long way to help brand your store and make it more credible. To purchase your own domain, click here.
Ask visitors to bookmark your site
A quick, low cost strategy is to simply ask your visitors to bookmark your site, or save it in a "Favorites" list. Visitors who've bookmarked your site can find it faster, and are more likely to visit again. The best way to get these visitors to return is to make regular updates to your site.
Take advantage of others' forums and blogs
There are innumerable forums, discussion lists, blogs, and news groups online. These are comprised of people with specialized interests. As such, you'll be able to find quite a few that are dedicated to what you're selling. Register and post about your RShop. Be sure to read the posting guidelines – you don't want to violate the community standards. As well, be careful not to spam. Some of these sites have sections dedicated to ads and other commercial posts. If you're unsure, contact a moderator or administrator for that site and ask permission first.
Set up affiliate relationships
Set up links with sites that have visitors who would be interested in what your store has to sell. Links to your store from other sites will increase the traffic headed your way.
Start a blog
A blog is attractive for two reasons. First, they're "in". It seems that nearly everyone has a blog right now. Celebrities, columnists, and virtual unknowns all generate traffic solely for the updates provided on their weblogs.
That's where the second reason comes in: People tend to visit sites that are updated with content on a regular and frequent basis.
Blogs give you the opportunity to provide your visitors with new, perhaps more personal or pointed, content. Let your visitors know what's going on with your store. Or, if you're interesting (or even if not), let them know what you're doing. Visit Blogger.com or wordpress.com for free blog accounts.
Create free Web spaces wherever possible
Squidoo, MySpace, Wikipedia and Facebook are excellent free opportunities to increase your reach. You've got to build buzz around your brand and some name recognition. These social networks are where the buzz is. Use these sites and tools which are freely available to you and you'll be able to tap into their enormous online communities (MySpace has over 100 Million accounts!). You can do this by building pages focused on your store vertical in these social networks. Here's what a recent retailer had to say:
I set up a niche appealing MySpace page and within 3 days had over 698 visitors to the page and over 108 from those went to the site. Create an appealing MySpace page and direct traffic to your site (Hey it's FREE). Request to be friends with high profile persons who allow you to post HTML ads to their space.
In addition to tapping into the visitor pool of existing social communities, you'll find that your pages on these sites tend to do well in search engine rankings. Make sure you use keywords in your copy that are relevant to your target customer. You'll find you'll get new customers coming to your site through the social networks and over the long run, through traditional search.
Check out some examples: Shopster on Squidoo, Squidoo example, MySpace example.
Press – Get yourself in the news
Write up a press release once every month or two for your business. Focus your release on something with a story feel. Rather than strictly informative, it can be a story about how your business got going. Or, write about one of your customers and how they use your products. Or, it can simply cover trends in your vertical.
Post your press releases for free on www.i-newswire.com or www.prleap.com. Make sure you link to your storefront in the release as these will count as inbound links for search engine page rank and will drive traffic to your site.
Research your competitors
Visit their sites and see what they're doing. Knowledge is power. The more you know about your competitors, the better. Write a list of things you like about their site and what they're lacking. You need to find out what you can offer that they don't. They're likely carrying the same products as you, so you need to offer something different. Give visitors a reason to shop from you. Remember that the lowest price isn't always the greatest selling point.
Online – Business
Submit your store's URL to search engines
If you want internet shoppers to find your RShop, go to where they are. List and advertise on search engines and shopping sites. This is where the legions of online shoppers go to find stores and products. As far as cost and benefit go, this is one of the best ways to market your new store.
Where to go:
Google - Add your URL to Google. Google controls about 40% of all internet searches. Yahoo! Search - Suggest your site for inclusion in Yahoo! Search for Free. Addme Free Search Engine Submission - Your site will be submitted to the following search engines: focusLook, Subjex, Alexa, Scrub the Web, FAST Search, AllTheWeb, Google, LookSeek, Jayde, InfoTiger, NerdWorld, Aeiwi, Walhello, LifeTips, ExactSeek, and EntireWeb.
List your products on shopping comparison and online auction sites
Shopping comparison sites compare products and prices across a large number of online stores. Auction sites are targeted towards customers looking for particular items. Some of these sites charge a listing fee or commission on sales. Checkout Froogle, BizRate, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, eBay, and Yahoo! Shopping Auctions.
Pay per click advertising
You can pay for ads with Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. When you conduct a search using either of these search engines, take notice of the advertisements that come up to the right of the results. They are geared towards the search query you entered. You can pay to have your RShop link come up as an advertisement whenever someone enters search words you pay for.
Interested in giving pay-per-click a try? Sign up here and receive a $25 Credit Free with Yahoo Search Marketing and another $25 in Free Clicks with Enhance Interactive!
Exchange banners and links with complementary sites
Contact others whose sites are related to yours, and exchange banners and other ads. Remember that there is a difference between competition and complementary sites. Competitive sites aim to take your visitors and your business. Complementary sites sell products that complement the ones you sell – they do not sell the same products you do. These help you reach a new audience. For example, if you run a DVD store, think about contacting sites that sell DVD players. Customers buying DVD players are going to need DVDs at some point.
Submit your store to industry-specific directories
Links from directories help your ranking. Higher ranked sites get more traffic. List your site in dmoz, which is a free Open Directory Project.
Run sales, create coupons, and let people know they're special and getting a deal
Everybody wants a deal, so why not give them one? Here are some ideas for running sales and using coupons effectively:
- Run sales on popular items in your inventory that are fairly inexpensive. Cut your profit margin on them. Then when the customer is purchasing the popular item, up sell them on related items and accessories and make your profit there. You'll also profit from having a happy first-time customer and hopefully getting a repeat customer out of them by running great deals on highly sought-after items.
- Offer a coupon to repeat customers and advertise that first time customers receive a discount on their next purchase.
- Create unique coupon codes for each campaign to help track your results.
Search Engine Optimize your content and store
Test your storefront to make sure that its search engine friendly here. You can do a variety of things to help search engines pick up on your site. There's no magic formula; it basically takes some work and some time.
Here are the most important ways to spend your time improving your natural search results:
- Pick keywords that your target customer is searching for and that you can actually compete on (Wordtracker.com is excellent software to do this with).
- Build content around those keywords (product description, company description, help articles, blogging etc). Click here for a handy tool to check your keyword density.
- Get inbound links to your store which can be accomplished with a link exchange program or affiliate program. This is critical if you want to achieve good natural results in Google searches.
- Build page titles for each page around the keywords you want to be found under. Remember to give each page a unique page title.
- Add meta tags of your keywords and site description, customize them for each page on your site where possible.
- Put the keyword in the page URL.
Submitnet specializes in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Click on the following link to try Submitnet free for 3 months: Submitnet
Online – Email
Get visitors to subscribe to a mailing list
Visitors who sign up to receive emails from you are already interested in what you have to offer. It's up to you to entice them to come back and become customers. Visit constantcontact.com or verticalresponse.com for more information on managing a mailing list.
Send promotions, coupons, updates, and offers to your customers
Existing customers are a valuable market for you. Solicit your customers to return by rewarding them with coupons and offers. Keep them interested with updates.
Comply with CAN-SPAM
The ramifications of not complying with a Federal Act notwithstanding, there is an air of professionalism and respect that comes with seeking permission and being mindful of the expectations of the email recipients.
- CAN-SPAM Act- Federal Trade Commission
- How to Comply with CAN-SPAM Act of 2003
- Shopster's CAN-SPAM Summary
Offline - Traditional
Point offline contacts to your online store
Your personal printed media are sometimes overlooked. Make sure you put your URL on anything you print and distribute. Business cards, stationary, and print ads all have room for your online address.
Make use of print ads – brochures, magazine/journal ads, etc. – to let your customer base know about your existence online. If you have an actual store (a building out of which you conduct business) with customers, you've already got a jump on many retailers. You've got customers. Let them know about your online store.
Sign up for a Vista Print account and receive 250 business cards FREE!
Shopster Community Forums - Marketing/Promotion Center
Last but not least, there is an entire section in our Community Forum called Marketing/Promotion Center where members can discuss and share their marketing strategies. There are also a variety of excellent marketing articles posted in the forums to assist you.
Remember, this is not an exhaustive list. The more creative you get, the more successful you'll be. But in marketing the old axiom "don't put all your eggs in one basket" definitely applies. Make sure your approach includes more than one technique and adjust your efforts based on your results.
If we've missed an important tip or you've discovered a revolutionary way to market your store, email us. Likewise, we'd love to hear and share your success stories.
Have fun and good luck!
