What you need to know to successfully sell online

Nowadays you cannot underestimate promoting your own business in all its forms. Every business leader knows that a buyer is more likely to put a familiar product in the cart — something they have heard about before. Therefore every entrepreneur tries to present their branded product to customers in the most original way. With the emergence of computer networks, the possibilities for advertising campaigns have grown substantially. It turns out that online advertising is often much cheaper than radio, outdoor ads, or newspapers and magazines. Also, when organizing product promotion on the internet, we most often gather targeted consumers who are willing to spend money on the offered products. To stay ahead of competitors on this path, a nontrivial approach to brand promotion is required.

What are its main features? There are three distinctive elements that must be kept in mind when promoting your product using the web. These are: website promotion, website creation, and the development of the company’s corporate identity. We will describe each of these stages in detail below. For now, a few words about the overall solution. All three stages of promoting a company in the virtual space directly interact. Corporate identity defines the site’s design, and the site’s content determines the set of ways to promote it. Consequently, you should carry out these stages in order, always maintaining a coherent concept of the project. In most cases for small businesses and often for large enterprises it is practically impossible to accomplish this without funding an in-house advertising department with a team of highly qualified PR specialists. In such cases it is most appropriate to seek help from an agency that as a whole implements each of the three "pillars" of promoting your company in the virtual space.

Corporate identity

The development of a company’s corporate identity serves to build an appropriate appearance of your business in front of partners and potential clients. Various components of the corporate identity later become the model for the design of all product promotion online. For example, the logo appears not only on stationery and presentations, but also next to the header of your online resource, in outdoor advertising, and in the press. Corporate identity must indicate your company’s competitive advantages and, at the same time, clearly show what you are selling to the consumer.

Creating a corporate identity should be done comprehensively, like the entire advertising campaign. It is optimal to define all details "upfront" and place an order for the store’s corporate identity, for example, with a single provider: branded envelopes, business card design, and so on. In addition, creating a presentation is important. After completing the development of the corporate identity, you can proceed to planning and creating the website.

Website creation

The next stage necessary for the proper implementation of brand promotion online is website development — that is, the company’s branch on the Internet. In this case there are many nuances that must be taken into account. These include software, the address and other technical matters, the appearance of pages, and, moreover, the most important part — the content, original texts and images. Ultimately, this catches the customer’s eye and prompts them to visit the selling pages of the catalog and buy your product.

Before ordering the development of an internet resource, you need to clearly understand what materials you would like to publish there. Most commercial websites typically include a set of simple sections, such as: information about the company, catalog, price list, contacts, and useful information. When uploading the content of these pages, it is necessary to remember about site optimization (discussed later). Website development is a multi-stage process that requires expertise; it can be properly carried out only by qualified designers, programmers, and layout specialists, which is why you should not entrust such work to amateurs or an inexperienced company.

Website promotion

After creating the web resource, you can begin to use it as a multifunctional tool to increase sales. But for the website to work at full capacity, buyers must appear. Where do you get them? The vast majority arrive via search engine links, then via various advertising, and finally via links to your site from other pages. Search engines play the decisive role in this list. At the same time, search engine optimization costs many times less than other types of brand promotion. To ensure potential buyers see a link to your online store for targeted queries closer to the top (and even better, within the top ten results) of the search engine results, a set of search optimization measures is carried out. This is a very important step that must not be underestimated.

Today there are many companies advertising website promotion, and you must be especially careful when choosing them for your enterprise. As mentioned earlier, the safest option is to purchase the entire online advertising campaign from a single firm that has been on the market for several years and professionally engaged in this activity.