Five Simple Steps To Selling Your Service Online

Are you a local entrepreneur or business owner looking to expand your brand online? Perhaps you’re an hairdresser, a dentist, a solicitor, or a local tradesman looking to build your client base and grow your business?

Today, I want to share with you five simples steps to building your brand online, how you can take advantage of an online presence to gain leads and new customers and ultimately build your brand within the local community.

Step One: Establish Your Presence

Whether it is a simple website design or a bespoke e-commerce website, you should define what your goals are and establish your presence in conjunction with that.

Perhaps you just want a simple website that will allow you to create static pages, and perhaps you want to release a blog post to showcase your expertise. Great, use WordPress.

You want a more dynamic website that has the ability to sell your goods online? It may cost you more, but you should explore an E-Commerce platform such as Magneto.

You should define exactly what you’re looking to do with your online presence, then start to establish your own image. An SEO-friendly website, the relevant social media channels, a strong Google search presence, these are all the first steps of building your online brand.

Step Two: Promote Yourself

Promoting yourself is done through many markets. You can create content in the hopes of discovering new customers through Google organic listings (content marketing) when they are looking for answers to their problems.

Perhaps you want to get your brand to thousands of people, so you consider digital display advertisement, which is essentially the same as placing your advert in the newspaper.

The trick is to make sure all of your efforts work in conjunction. For example, you may create a website that looks to convert your audience to your customers. To do this, you market yourself with content marketing, curating content that will engage with your target audience and help solve their problems. You then use Display Advertisement, Social Media Marketing to drive people to the content on your website, where you offer a free E-Book that collects people email address, and perhaps phone number.

The email address and phone number then feed your email marketing database, allowing you to email potential prospects with new information, promotions or offers and engaging material, or perhaps you could use the phone number to give the potential lead the chance to discuss their needs with you and establish a working relationship.

Step Three: Engaging Your Fans

Engage your fanbase. Your customers. Your followers.

You should be posting on social every day, using content marketing to showcase your depth of knowledge and keeping people up to date with your industry. You should ensure that your Google presence is sound, all your information online is up to date. Just be actively available.

The best way to engage with people is through response. The quicker and more effectively you respond to their comments, likes, posts, messages, the more they’ll appreciate your web presence. People nowadays are looking for immediacy – they want it here, and now. You need to be there, or you’ll miss out.

Step Four: Sell Your Service

Promote yourself. Sell your service. For ways to find prospects, you could perhaps use LinkedIn, particularly if you are business to business. It’s a great way to find new clients and speak with potential customers every single day.

For those who are more consumer based, you should be engaging mostly on Facebook, some industries benefit from Twitter, you should definitely be on Instagram, and you should make certain people know what your services are, that you’re available for work and be easy to communicate with.

Most companies are on social, they have a presence, but they’re not selling their services. They’re posting for the sake of it. If you’re not stating your intention to sell effectively, you will lose customers.

 Step Five: Analyse & Optimize

Set up your Google Analytics, track your customers. Make sure you know where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying on your website, what they’re looking at before they leave.

There are plenty of metrics you can use to determine how people are engaged with your site:

• Bounce rate (do they leave the site – if so, on what page?)
• Conversion rate (how many people enter the site before someone buys something/contacts you?)
• Where your traffic comes from (is it Google, Social Media, PPC or organic?)

You can use split testing to further optimize your advertisements or content (meaning you put out several advertisements, or use separate landing pages for your website to see which gives you the best result), but having Google Analytics set up would be the first step to ensure that you can actually track your customers activities within your website.

Are you trying to promote yourself online, but can’t find the time to keep up? Get in touch today, let’s see how I can help.