It’s the most wonderful time of year… according to some. Everyone has started decking the halls, and your favorite (and least favorite) songs are drifting in the air. That’s right — the holiday season is already here, which means that people are going to begin the most crucial portion of their preparations: buying gifts for everyone they know. Their kids. Their parents. Their boss. Their next-door neighbor. Their cat.
That means that most likely, someone will be considering products like what your eCommerce store sells to give to a loved one (or maybe just an acquaintance). The question is: will they be able to find your website?
Whether it’s the holidays or not, if you’re not actively generating leads for your eCommerce business, then you are missing out on valuable opportunities to bring in more potential customers. Here, we’ll review how to develop a comprehensive lead generation strategy to ensure that you keep fresh leads coming in all throughout the year.
The foundation for any successful lead generation campaign starts with a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. That’s because, once you put things in place, like some additional keywords in your content, your website’s performance will generally improve gradually over time. While we don’t recommend a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach, the advantage to SEO is that not only does it not cost you anything, but it doesn’t require the constant maintenance of a paid marketing campaign like PPC or social media.
While there’s no denying the importance of a strong SEO strategy, it works best in tandem with an equally robust pay-per-click (PPC) strategy. This allows you to bid on your most profitable keywords and give you more opportunities to show up in the search results. For eCommerce, Google Shopping is usually an essential component of PPC. Shopping results display at the very top of the results page along with an image of your product, which increases the likelihood that someone will visit your website.
When you’re determining how to spend your ad dollars to generate more leads, don’t forget about social media marketing. Depending on your product and audience, advertising on the right social media platform can be an effective way to generate more leads. The visual nature of social media allows you to creatively capture users’ attention by targeting the people who are most likely to be interested in your product. You can use a number of different parameters to make sure your ads reach the right audience, including basic demographic information like age and location, to more specific criteria like interests.
Once you’ve completed the tricky part — getting someone to your website — you need to convince them to stay, browse, and maybe sign up for that awesome newsletter you’ve been working on. Your website’s design is a big part of that convincing, so make sure that it’s easy to navigate. If it seems like you updated it at some point in the last decade and not like a teenager’s Angelfire site from the turn of the millennium, that also adds credibility to your business. When it comes to design, keeping things simple and clean is your best bet.
Lead generation truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Even if your eCommerce store doesn’t typically get an influx of orders during the holiday season (for some reason, liquid chromatography products aren’t a bestseller as a stocking stuffer), there’s no reason not to start implementing these marketing strategies for your business right now if you haven’t already.
Even if you have an SEO or PPC strategy in place for your eCommerce business, there is always room for improvement. Curious how your website is performing? Contact us today for a free website evaluation.
About the Author:
Sabrina Lopez is the Managing Editor at 1SEO whose passion for grammar is surpassed only by her love for her avian companions. When she is not chasing her tiny human offspring around, she may be found basking in the purple glow of her PC or watching a fantasy flick with her husband.
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