Ecommerce blog

Online Marketing Checklist

The Christmas holidays are a time when many people decide to start a new business or think about how they are going to ramp up their business activity for the year. Whether your business is a bricks and mortar, online business or a mixture of both, this year should be the year to focus on your online marketing to jump ahead of your competitors and take a larger slice of your market for the coming year.

We have compiled a checklist of things you absolutely must do in the first month or two of 2012 to ensure you don’t get left behind by your competitors..

• Set up a facebook business page and start regularly communicating with your potential and existing customers.
• Set up a Twitter and Google + presence to ensure you don’t miss out on audiences using those social media platforms.
• Ensure important information on your website has the Facebook ‘like’, Twitter ‘tweet’ and Google ‘+ 1’ buttons so that visitors can easily spread the word about your products and services through social media (which is an excellent way to get free viral marketing)
• If your website is older than 2 years then it is time for a revamp! Many new technologies have come out over the past couple of years to make your site load faster, be more interactive and be able to gain much better rankings in search engines.
• Either learn how do to SEO (search engine optimisation) and devote time each week to do it or hire a professional to assist. SEO provides a significant return on investment if done correctly.
• If you don’t already do it, start doing regular email marketing. Despite the rise of social media, email marketing is still by far the most cost effective method of online marketing and provides the highest return on investment. Check out www.mantismail.com.au for a free trial of our easy to use email marketing platform.
• Look into developing a mobile friendly version of your website. A growing number of people are now accessing websites via mobile devices and we are able to configure your website to detect that the visitor is on a mobile device and automatically redirect them to a ‘mobile friendly’ version of your website.
• Look into if your Facebook page could benefit from a custom tab that pulls data from your website. For example, having a Facebook shop that is linked with your online shop usually results in higher sales from your Facebook community.