Guest Post by Kevin Kaiser
Owning a small retail business is one of the most stressful positions. And it makes sense as 90% of retail stores fail within 5 years (or something similar to those numbers). That is astonishingly high. So how do you make sure that you are in that top 10% that succeeds?
Having a great selection of products, an awesome in-store sales team, and impeccable customer service will allow your store to succeed locally. You’re a big dreamer, though! You want to sell to the world and why wouldn’t you with how easy it is to set up a retail website.
The only problem is that many other people are looking at this opportunity as well, making the competition tough.
You need more customers to actually visit your website to keep your business growing. Here’s one way to increase (or start) your local customer reach and two ways to increase your customer reach beyond your hometown.
1. Spread the Good Word (Locally).
Mobile marketing is a phrase that will be around for the long-term. Foursquare and other location-based apps have become extremely popular in 2011 and they are only growing. As a small business, you have the ability to tap into these potential customers by marketing a special through the platform.
Some ideas:
- “10% off by checking in”
- “15% off if you’re the mayor”
- “Free scarf for checking in 3 times”
Do some numbers and find what works for your business. You’ll be surprised at how successful these promotions are at driving in customers.
At a local boutique that I work with, Elly’s Couture, we are starting to implement this strategy. And the initial results have been very positive, bringing in about 12 visitors in a month that ended up purchasing a product, purely because of the special we offered.
Getting people to check in puts your business in front of every one of the customer’s friends, providing free word of mouth marketing.
1a. Social
While not particularly associated with mobile marketing, Facebook and Twitter are the other big ways to engage with your customers online in an environment they are familiar with.
At Elly’s, we like to announce new products and use the platforms to post our interactions with local customers. This local interaction that people can see online helps validate the website to visitors that don’t live in the local area.
2. Pay and Be Paid
A PPC campaign is one of the most tedious acts of online marketing. You have to consistently be checking your (often multiple) campaign, tweaking it all the time to get the most return on your investment.
But a carefully monitored PPC campaign can turn into a gold mine of local and national traffic to your website giving you tons of data into what your customers are looking for. And if it doesn’t bring in that traffic or make you any money, then you know not to focus your efforts on those keywords/products.
At Elly’s Couture, this is how we determine if we want to continue selling a clothing line and focus our other marketing efforts to better our return on that line or if there really isn’t much online interest in the products. This data is also useful when it comes to SEO, which I touch on next.
3. Start pushing SEO
In my opinion, SEO is the most important part of online marketing. It brings in completely organic traffic, and often has the highest potential of producing the greatest results for a website (just not in the shortest time).
Having a high ranking website for your targeted keywords is just like having a fashion boutique on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Tons of people just “walking by” will click on your site and enter your store.
To get this traffic, you have to implement a well-planned SEO strategy. This includes knowing which keywords are most valuable to your business, building links for those keywords, and performing on site optimization as well.
When starting, you have to realise SEO takes a lot longer to bring in traffic and implement than PPC, especially in high competition areas. Building rankings is not as easy as setting up a campaign and giving Google a cheque for traffic.
By setting up a PPC campaign mentioned above, you have the perfect insight into all the knowledge you need to pick target keywords by looking at the impressions and clicks for each one in your campaign.
To build links, offer to do guest posts for other blogs (which also increases visibility adding value to your website besides the link it receives). If you are trying to rank for “Betsey Johnson Pink Patch”, include a link to the page you are trying to rank in the article with the keyword as the anchor text.
This tactic works best when you are reaching out to relevant blogs to your topic. For instance, with Elly’s Couture, I would never reach out to a construction professional as we offer designer clothing for women, but a website that sold boots would be a great fit for a construction blog as it’s relevant to their readers. Always make sure to write for the audience of the blog as well. Writing for the purpose of building a link can often lead down a path of bad content, and as other bloggers notice this they will be less inclined to give you the opportunity to guest post.
On-page optimisation is also important, and one of the easiest parts of SEO you can do to increase rankings. Focus on the title tag, h1 tag and having great content that converts the user.
Conclusions
Now that you have an idea of what needs to be done, do some more research and start implementing what you learn. You can read all day, but only when you start performing these tasks on a daily basis will you truly become knowledgeable enough to succeed.