Sales Online

The Internet has profoundly changed the way people communicate and interact with each other. It has also fundamentally changed how many people shop for all kinds of goods and services.

This change has had a siginificant effect on the business community and has required companies to adapt the way in which they promote their offerings online. Those that cannot or will not embrace the online market place will simply be left behind or will be replaced.

Today, many people start their shopping experience by looking on the Internet for more information about the product or service they want. More specifically, people start this process with the search engines, of which Google is the most popular. By the time someone searched for a generic product they have already established a desire for that type of product. By the time they are searching for a product or brand name they have normally decided they want that specific product. In order to remain competitive, businesses need to ensure that their websites are found online at the appropriate stage in the buying cycle.

Businesses have the opportunity to use the Internet to reach customers and geographies which were not open to them in the past. They can do this at a fraction of the cost of utilising traditional marketing tools when entering a new market. By effectively using the Search Engines, companies can actually benefit from access to consumers who are actively looking for their products and services!

In order to succeed in Online Sales and company must:
· Attract quality traffic to their sites by providing quality content and establishing strong inbound themed links.
· Convert visitors into customers by making the shopping experience easy and by presenting an attractive offering to the visitor.
· Analyse the usage of their website to optimise online marketing efforts. This might mean identifying parts of the site from which visitors are being lost or it might be through recognising oportunities for further cross sell, etc.

the traditional sales funnel involved using “Old Marketing” methods to attract customers. These techniques relied (for the most part) on broadcast mechanisms to get the company message to as many people as possible in the hope that some would bite!

Online Marketing

As already described, the way people shop has changed drastically however. Shoppers and the Search Engines combine to produce a knowledgable and sophisticated market place which must be carefully and accurately targetted in order to produce sales.

By creating a website with a compelling offering and optimising that website so that it appears in the Search Engines when someone searches for your products, you are ready to capture the buyer just as they are about to make a purchase.

“New Marketing” or online marketing methods include:
· Search engine optimisation (SEO)
· Pay per click (PPC) advertising
· Blogging and social networking
· Viral marketing
· Sophisticated Conversion mechanisms
· Detailed analytics and analysis.