According to Ipsos Marketing almost 83% of customers who purchase locally are found to research prospective retailers or suppliers online first before actually buying the product.
And according to Google, over 90% of people of who search online or “Google” for required suppliers never really go beyond the first page of the search results.
These facts pretty much indicate how powerful a tool the internet has become. What a prospective customer sees online has a huge influence on his/her purchase decision. So, if there is something that a retail business, especially a small business, must invest in inevitably today, it will have to be internet marketing.
Here are 5 reasons why you should have a full-fledged internet marketing team for your small business:
- A comprehensive reach – Nowadays people have access to so many different devices all at the same time. They are all almost always online in some form or the other. So imagine the number of times and places where the product you provide is likely to be searched for!
That is why, you should have a website, not to mention one that is top notch, that is all pervasive just like the internet. That way, you can expand your reach by a million folds because, rest assured, you’re not going to lose a customer just because they couldn’t access your website on their device. - Better visibility – If you have a great website and some extraordinary content on it, you need to optimise your website, and also each of your product pages, so that they appear on search results, on the very first page and not just on Google, but on Bing and any other search engine that your target market is likely to use.
Josh Brenhan, an SEO expert at A+ Digital says optimization can literally make all the difference.
So once you’ve got that system right in place, then your website will most definitely have the competitive edge over other companies in your industry.
- Better engagement and connectivity – One of the most essential aspects of any kind of business, is customer engagement. Customers like to feel important and recognized. So your website needs to generate a lot of engaging and most importantly relatable content for your customers. Once you push them out through the booming number of social channels, you have got yourself a talking crowd of prospective customers.
- Personalization – Like I mentioned earlier, customers always like to feel important. So with the help of analytics you can track your customers’ purchase patterns and send them personalized offers and deals via email or social media channels. That will get your customers coming back to you over and over again rather than to anyone else.
- To stay in the competition – Last but not least, in this digital age, you simply need a thriving online presence if you want to even survive in the market, let alone lead it. Come on, you don’t want to be using brick sized cellular phones when everybody else is using touch phones, do you?
