4 Ways to Improve Your Small Business’s Online Presence

4 Ways to Improve Your Small Business’s Online Presence

Even if your small business is a brick-and-mortar one, it just makes sense to build an online presence, too. No matter what your business specializes in, whether it’s a service or a line of products, you need a marketing strategy that optimizes online customer traffic so that you can expand and remain competitive. However, online marketing is a lively art, and the only way to determine if a strategy is working well is to try it, test it, change it if it’s not working, and try it again. We offer here four strategies for you to try and test on your website.

 

  1. Reposition Your Opt-In Offers

You need permission before you can send anyone an email. That’s a given. The places on your website where you ask for this permission are called “opt-ins.” You need to make your opt-ins easy to find and attractive so that people will click them and fill them out for you.

When they do, over time you’ll build a great list of leads that you can send emails to again and again. And if you write compelling emails, as well, making those leads practically salivate to purchase your products and services, you can’t help but increase your sales. And that’s what this is all about, right?

The best position for your opt-in is the most prominent spot on your homepage, so test your opt-in there first. Typically, website visitors’ eyes navigate first toward the top left of any page before they begin to scroll down and wander.

But you don’t need to limit yourself to only one opt-in location. You could also test having an opt-in somewhere on each page of your site to see which opt-in gets the best results.

Add some power to an opt-in by placing it in a “hover ad” on at least one page. (We talk a little more about hover ads below.) To give it a fair test, place an opt-in on each page, but put it in a hover ad it on only one page. That way, you can see whether the hover ad was more popular with website visitors or not.

 

  1. Unclutter Your Home Page

If your homepage is cluttered with too many offers and products, your website visitors won’t stay long. Too much clutter is just confusing and annoying, and no one wants to deal with that.

Instead, offer only a few products on your homepage, or maybe only a single one. In tests with other websites, many businesses have reported higher rates of customer follow-through and sales when they offered fewer products on their homepages along with better product descriptions.

 

  1. Install a Hover Ad or Two

As promised, here is a further discussion of hover ads.

These types of ads have taken the place of the pop-up ads that people found to be so distracting and annoying a few years ago. As a matter of fact, some software engineers got so annoyed that they developed software designed to block pop-ups automatically.

Hover ads are a type of pop-up ad, but they’re less intrusive, because the website visitor can usually choose to close them after a few seconds. And they’re harder to block, so they serve the purpose of advertising your products and services, but in a somewhat friendlier way.

Some companies that have tested hover ads saw increases in their online sales by as much as 162%.

 

  1. Build Credibility

Short testimonials from customers placed near product descriptions go a long way toward building credibility for your company and your products. They let website visitors know how much others loved what they purchased from you.

Also, somewhere on your homepage, describe your qualifications in a well written paragraph or two so that potential customers will know that you can provide the services they’re looking for.

But the best way by far to build credibility is to provide quality products and services backed up by great customer service.