5 Easy Ways to Market Your New Retail Business Online

Your new retail business is online and ready to go. The problem is, no one knows about it yet outside of a few friends and family members. Whether your business is brand new or you’ve been attempting to market your business for weeks to no avail, it’s time to change things up. The following tips will help you develop a quick and to the point online marketing campaign that is sure to get results. Take things slowly but surely and always dream big and you will find that marketing your new retail business is a lot easier than you once suspected it would be.

Step 1: Check Your Home Base of Operations

To market your new retail business effectively, you need a home base of operations. This is where you will send your leads once you’ve reeled them in with your online marketing efforts. If yours is like most new retail businesses, your eCommerce site will act as your home base. If you are relying on the infrastructures of eBay, Amazon and Alibaba to sell your goods, your home base might be your blog (more on blogging in a moment). Whatever page/site or platform you use to manage your leads, make sure the colors, language and all media remain consistent across the board. The idea is to build familiarity with your target customers so that they come to instantly recognize your new retail business no matter where they happen to be in your sales pipeline.

Step 2: Capture Your Leads with Email Marketing

Once someone has been referred to your business, they will eventually land on your home base. But get this, a good portion of the prospects that do land on your ecommerce site (or blog) will not be ready to buy at the moment. Your job is to collect the leads that come in so that you can enter them into your sales pipeline.

In order to capture the email addresses of your core audience, you need an enticer, otherwise known as a lead magnet. This could be something as simple as a discount on one of your items. You can sign up with Mail Chimp or AWeber, and those services will allow you to place an opt-in box right on your site or blog. A simple message that reads, “Sign up for a 20% discount today!” may be all you need to collect a long list of subscribers. Or you can give away a video or written guide on how your customers can get the best uses out of your products once they buy them. Listen to your audience, find out what your core customers want and deliver that in a lead magnet.

Then, once you do have a list of subscribers, send once weekly emails that offer discounts or that showcase products that your audience might be overly interested in. This will require research, but hopefully you conducted extensive market research prior to attempting to market your new retail business. If you have indeed done the research, use that knowledge to deliver hard-hitting and useful emails that always hit their intended mark. Of course, the mark in this case is the customer pulling out their wallet and credit/debit cards, ready to buy.

Step 3: Blogging

One of the best ways to draw attention to your new retail business is to start a blog. Write about your newest product releases, the products that are selling well, the story of how your business came to be, or answer frequently asked questions by your recent customers.

Choose titles that will entice clicks on Google. That is, find those hot buttons that might be keeping your customers up at night as they agonize over, “How to Find the Perfect Ugg Boots for Your Summer Vacation,” or “10 Tips for Picking Out Beachwear This Summer”. You get the idea. Blog once a week or more if you have the time, and use plenty of colorful images, photos and videos to dress up your engaging words.

Step 4: PPC Marketing

It is recommended that you market your new retail business with the above information before you start putting money into a paid online marketing campaign. Once your infrastructure is in place, nothing will bring the traffic like PPC marketing will.

In other words, once you have a solid home base of operations and an email list, along with a blog that is consistent (and one that always brings the goods), you should then ramp up your efforts with a paid marketing campaign through Google’s Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or all three.

Start with Google Adwords, as that is the most popular (and arguably the most effective) paid online advertising platform out of the four at the moment. Start with a small daily budget, use the keyword finder provided by Adwords to find the most lucrative keywords to target, and start driving interested traffic towards your home base.

Since you will be capturing your leads with an opt-in only email list, and keeping them engaged with regularly delivered and useful content in the form of weekly emails, you’ll have a much better chance of receiving a return on your paid online marketing investment. The more effort you put into the preceding steps, the more of a return you will earn.

Step 5: Rinse and Repeat

And there you have it, a straightforward means to marketing your new retail business. Put solid effort into your venture, and you will take your retail business far. Just make sure you also put effort into retaining any customers you do gain from your marketing efforts with excellent customer service that can’t be beat. That is how a new retail business is marketed and run in today’s digital age.

Image Source: Roel Cayes on Flickr