How do I attract customers to my website?

Every burgeoning business needs an online presence. Bringing your business online means you can massively grow your potential customer base, as well as giving you the opportunity to stand out amongst your competitors with a slick website.

Already got your website made? Then you’re halfway there! The next step is attracting customers to your site, and we have some useful tips for you on how to do just that.

Design the perfect site

One of the most important aspects of your website will be the web design. A well laid-out, easy to navigate online store demonstrates professionalism and reliability to your visitors. You don’t have to be a web design pro to help your online business flourish. BaseKit boasts a huge library of website designs that help you easily build your website exactly the way you want it.

High quality descriptions of your product will also convey professionalism to potential customers visiting your eCommerce site. Sprinkle some key words and phrases that people would search for in your product descriptions to ensure that visitors stumble upon your website.

Product photos are just as important as product descriptions; professional-looking photos of your products show a degree of credibility to your online store’s visitors. Make sure they show all aspects of your product and that you have at least two or three images for each one.

When creating a website for your business, it is important to create a domain name that reflects your brand. Ideally, you want your domain to match the name of your company. This reinforces your brand and makes it easier for customers to find you and return to your online store.

Understand the power of social media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. The list of possible social media platforms available is exhaustive. Share a link to your new website across all of your personal social media accounts to increase traffic to your store. Networking on LinkedIn, at both a personal and company level, will also be a valuable tool in promoting your business.

Don’t just rely on personal accounts, as it can look unprofessional. Create social media accounts for your business as well – social media is a great way for your business to interact with potential customers online. Maintaining a regular flow of updates helps to keep followers informed about your business, as well as bringing a sense of personality and approachability to your brand. As many as 90% of users on Instagram alone follow at least one business, so this is a channel you should definitely be exploring.

For each of your business social media accounts, make sure you have a link to your website in your bio, as well as sharing it in individual posts.  That way, every time someone visits your page, they will always see a link to your eCommerce site first.

As well as helping your customers stay abreast of your business, social media is a great tool for learning about your customers. Using analytics (usually built into the platform) to stay informed of your customer base’s interests, demographics and what time they are online, can help you to create content valuable to them at times they’re most likely to see it.

A blog is a great platform to allow customers to keep up to date with any news or updates from your business. Sharing a link to your online store throughout your blog is an absolute must if you want to drive up clicks. Remember to keep up a steady stream of updates in order to build a bigger following. With BaseKit’s fully integrated blog platform you can get started on yours right away.

Promote your business everywhere

A bulletproof way of ensuring people hear about your new online business is to tell them about it. Simple, right? Tell your friends, tell your family, tell anyone who’ll listen. As long as you keep talking about your online store, people will keep hearing about it.

Post in local groups to get your website in front of a relevant audience. Most towns and communities have dedicated Facebook groups for their residents to post in. Utilise these to keep everyone in your area informed about your business.

If you’re using Facebook as part of your social media strategy, then you can reach potential customers through Facebook’s targeted advertising, where adverts for your website will appear in front of your target audience. You can apply the same principle to Instagram, who are also under the Facebook umbrella, but you’ll have to do some research to work out who is more likely to buy your products.

For local businesses, registering your business with Google Places is really handy as it means it can be found more easily with Google searches, as well as ensuring it appears on Google Maps. Yahoo! and Bing have similar business databases which are also well worth signing up to.

The only thing left to do…

…is get your website started! We hope you’ve found this blog helpful. Make sure to let everyone know that your website is up and running and your online business will be flying!