Calibre Creators recently caught up with Mr. Bhavesh Trivedi, a Web Professional for a chart on how can one market himself online. Here is what follows between Calibre Creators and Bhavesh. This article was published in the e-Zine - Calibre Creators Learning Letter, released on the 1st of every month.
Exclusively for Calibre Creators
In this article I will focus on a few common mistakes general businessmen
commit when they start online marketing for their business and propose some
simple solutions to make the marketing effective for them.
Many business people realise the need that
their respective business should be online, so they create a
website, start accounts on social media websites, and do some updates on
social media about their products and offers.
But nothing works after a few visits that hit
on your website.
Here are some of the reasons why.
1. No clear objective:
The objective on what the action a user should
take after visiting your website is generally missing. Mainly, the home-page of
a website provides information about the company, its history, philosophy,
vision and mission statements, and value statements as well products they have
to offer, without clear action point on what to do next. Therefore, such websites serve only as a
branding collateral and nothing else. If
they are static, not updated frequently, they do not attract traffic nor
attract Google’s attention.
The Solution
Have a clear objective on what the user should
do after he has visited your website. Let the website talk to or lead the
visitor about what to he needs to do next.
Have clear action points for the user to go further, to the page on
which you want him to.
Once the user is on the page you want, the page
should speak what to do next. Attractive product information, glossy pictures, other details, call of
actions like – “BUY NOW”, “Inquire”, “Call
me back” (modern way is to ask the visitor to leave his details and let him
know “that we will get in touch with
you”) etc., helps in lead generation organically.
2. Wrong and boring Social media updates
“I update about my website and products and
ask them to buy... but there is no response” is often what businessmen
regretfully state. The problem is that
you don't even pay attention on the updates by your friends and their friends
and the update has come on your Facebook (FB) wall as your friends has liked C it. But you have failed to capitalise on it and
convert that into sales.
And now if you update about your website
blankly, about your website pages of products, etc., is like
calling on street to everyone come to my shop, but for what... Not clear!
Solution
What’s in it for me? You should post about the
benefits that will accrue to the user coming to your website and why is it
important for him to buy your product.
Talk about key features and benefits (FAB). If you think about the “why” it will lead you
to the “how” part of the solution. Step into the shoes of the user and
think like him - what he will like and then make it interesting with relevant
images and useful content which is informative.
It has to be crisp and not very lengthy.
These days, very short videos of 5 to 10 seconds are also very popular
and help in engaging the viewer.
3. I have huge number of fans on FB and
Twitter but it’s of no use! I have spent time and money to get fans ad
followers, now what?
As mentioned above, you should have a defined
clearly strategy as to how you would like to use the social media applications
and everything should flow from that. It
should contain what you will put, when you will put, etc. Posting updates sporadically once in a while
with long intermittent gaps of time never work.
People just lose interest.
People who are your fans or who are following
you closely should be regularly fed with honey, preferably, every day.
They should have an element of faith in you and must be eagerly waiting
for your fresh new updates. Once your fans and followers are habituated with
regular updates from you with clockwork precision, they will start paying
attention and give importance to those updates.
You will all agree that you never miss to read
an update by your friend on FB or twitter. Why? Because the friend has
been consistently feeding honey to you every time he has posted an update and
has been successful in grabbing your attention and your likes.
Use the updates to lure your fans to keep them
addicted to you. You may also use the current affairs as a topic to grab
attention, but here’s a word of “caution”.
It should be connected to your product or service. You have to be very creative. Creativity is always appreciated and people
will automatically get attracted to you.
4. Traffic to my website is not increasing.
My website has a very good interface, good information about my products. All my
website pages are optimized with right keywords, titles, etc... Still the
traffic to my site has not increased.
4. Solution
Search engines need content. Web Marketers don’t say “content is the
king” for no reason.
All search engine spiders which assess your
website will eat the meat (content) of your website and will go
away...happy! To keep them attracted to your site, you must
metaphorically say “here is more fresh meat (content) for you, come and
eat it.” Once the spider knows that he will get regular content from your
website, it will keep coming back to you.
Search engines like Google rank the website higher when they see fresh
content.
5. How to use various social media?
I post same things on different social
media, which is time consuming and I don't know if I am doing it right?
5. Solution
Each social media has to be used for specific
purposes for which they are meant to be.
Facebook should be used to connect with your fans and
with regular updates convert your fans to consumers. You should always answer question asked on
your Facebook wall. It means, your
customers want to connect with you, they are interested in your product. All they need to action to buy your product
is for you to resolve their Objection or Concerns. Concerns are aspects which are not directly
related to your product. They are
willing to buy your product if you could resolve their basic problems like
transportation and delivery, actual size, power consumption, etc. They have already made the decision to buy
the product. If you do not respond to
their objections and concerns, you will lose the customer. Perhaps forever!
Many Facebook applications are available to
integrate them with your website, like FB like, FB share, FB
recommend, FB comments, FB login, etc., which are useful tools to
create a social impact. You need to
understand their core functionality, how they work, who are the actual users,
what is their social profile (like their age, profession, qualification,
geographical distribution, preferences, etc.) which will help you to tweak
your social media campaign to attract their attention. What will work effectively on social media
need not necessarily have the same impact on some other media?
Twitter is mainly used for regular updates and is a
great tool for customer relationship management (CRM). All large
organisations have a dedicated team to handle customer queries. Twitter helps you to reach out to your
customer’s easily and helps in winning the customer’s trust.
Pintrest is a great website where you can share images
of your products. The images should be very attractive and clean. Use the
tool effectively to get more visitors and share your product details.
Google+ is very powerful tool which can help you to be
seen on page one every time you post an update. This tool is very helpful
to connect with and update your clients. Also, if the Google+ icon is
available on your homepage and if the information you provide is really
valuable, the search engine will automatically ensure that have you are on page
one in your category.
Nowadays, there many easy tools and
applications are available which can help you to update all social media sites
and applications at once.
To have a good online presence, it is very
important to have a very detailed web marketing strategy, clear and defined
objectives as well as goals to be achieved before initiating online marketing
and using social media tools. Online
presence will throw at you a lot of data about your consumer’s behaviour and
therefore it is important to interpret and analyse what the data actually seeks
to tell you.
Happy Selling!
Bhavesh Trivedi is a Web enthusiast
and Web professional, believes that innovation can make things simple in
life. A marketing professional over 14 years with experience of various
business sectors, right from education to luxury.
Sarfaraz Lakhani
Chief Executive Officer
Calibre Creators
To receive issues of Calibre Creator’s Learning
Letter, please send a mail to sarfaraz.calibrecreators@gmail.com
