The time has finally come: you have a beautiful webshop, a full stock and beautiful products. You are ready for your first orders, but you have no customers yet. This is a known problem for many novice webshop owners.
A well-functioning webshop is unfortunately no guarantee for success. In practice, visitors will not be able to find your webshop just like that. It is important that people know about the existence of your webshop, because no matter how good your webshop is, you will not achieve anything without visitors. Before you know how to sell on ebay here are some things you need to be sure of:
Start an SEA (Search Engine Advertising) Campaign
Millions of people search for products on the internet every day; Google alone processes 500 million searches per day. There is a good chance that there are also people who are looking for your product. It is therefore important to be clearly visible in Google search results.
With SEA you pay to advertise in the search engine. You buy advertising space above or next to the organic search results, as it were. The Google search engine uses the Google AdWords advertising system. With this system you bid in an auction on keywords that are relevant to your company or product. When a user searches for a word associated with the ad, your ad will be displayed. Google is based on the pay-per-click principle, which means that you only pay when someone has actually clicked on your ad.
Google Shopping is a Google advertising system that is very beneficial for online retailers. This section displays products, including image and price, at the top of Google search results when someone searches for that product. This Product Listing Ad leads directly to the product in your webshop. Google Shopping provides paid advertisements, which can be created with a Google AdWords account.
Just like SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEA is a form of search engine marketing. As a webshop it is important to also focus on SEO, but that is more for the long term. With SEA you can achieve immediate results.
Start a Social Media Campaign
Social media is now an indispensable part of the marketing strategy. Start-ups can no longer ignore it either. Social media is extremely popular and therefore extremely suitable for recruiting new leads and gaining brand awareness through web-care and advertising.
The social media channels offer you the opportunity to get in touch with the target group promote your brand and increase your online presence and reach. But it is not that far yet, you must first have the necessary followers. It is wise to advertise on the social media platforms first, before starting the ‘web-care’ part.
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube and Spotify all have an option to advertise on the platform. The best social media to advertise on depends on your target audience and the available budget. On platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook it is possible to target very specifically on, for example, gender, location, interests and age. Are you looking for people who listen to certain music? Then Spotify is very suitable again. The costs of advertising vary widely and you are often in control. Most channels allow you to indicate a budget per day or per campaign.
