E-selling industry is growing at a lightning speed, putting traditional media of sales in sheer disgust. But this medium is also turning too cluttered day by day. People are looking forward to new ways to sell online to stay in the business, to rule the business and draw maximum sales.
Web giants
Many successful sellers have realized that there is no point in switching between different websites of auctions with no ensured fixed price in return. Sticking to fixed-price web market giants like eBay, Amazon etc makes more sense. These e-commerce giants will ensure a specific price and will not make you wait for the auction deals. Such websites have huge followers, so getting your product here is a wise decision indeed.
Get listed in classifieds
Online classifieds work miraculously, as they have loyal follower base. Craigslist is a leading online classified site with great listings. It is practically big, with its presence in more than 500 cities and over 50 countries across the world. Around 40 million people do visit Craigslist every month, resulting into more than 10 billion page views. Especially if you want to pull up sales in local market, get listed in Craigslist.
Social Networks
Social networks have a huge demand among this generation. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter have huge impact on our lives. Create a fan page for your brand, to draw as many fans and followers as you can. Now link your fan page with your website for the sales. Social networking is a great tool to spread your brand awareness, brand acceptance and brand recognition. Keep posting interesting contests, polls, status messages and offer good amount of discount to your fans and followers to keep up the popularity.
Your 24×7 online shop
Let the world buy, even when you are sleeping. Yes, set up an e-commerce site for your brand, from where people can buy your products. Sit back and enjoy the increasing sales in your website. But make sure, your website has been built by an efficient e-commerce site designer, so that there are no loopholes in terms of product viewing, product ordering and transfer of payment; else you may lose all your fans soon. People should be able to view your products with maximum zooming tools, enlarge your product from every corner, find relevant sizes and order the same instantly.
What are you waiting for? Spread your wings, adopt these simple tips and shoot up your sales by selling products online.
Place of Social Media in a Marketing Plan
Websites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, etc., do not live on the fringes, not any more. They are very much part of main line, in fact, for many people these websites are what there is to the Internet. Everyone is noticing this trend, but are marketers taking notice of it? Are they considering social media worth their effort to include it in the marketing mix?
This is a question that has kept marketers, researchers, and business commentators busy. They have been fighting on this issue for many months without any resolution. But to put an end to all the cantankerous discussions, MarketngSherpa, one of the world’s leading internet research firm, has asked 3,300 marketers for their views on the topic. The result for which is given below in the image.
The study found that only 26% organizations integrate social media with other online and offline marketing technique. If we combine another 8%, who said that they do extensively integrated, but only with online media, then the percentage for this acceptance will rise to 34%, which is not a very healthy figure, seeing the rise of popularity of the medium. (See image, for rest of the data).
Is this good for the business?
This is the very first thing that comes to mind when we hear such data, and we tend to give an off-the-cuff remark in either yes or no. The answer could be right, but it does not tell why.
In this case, the answer is negative because in our time, it is bad for a business to leave social media out of the marketing mix. Still, a good number of companies are not taking it seriously. This is akin to living a large amount of money on the table. If the success of companies present on Facebook is any indicator of the efficacy of social media then it is safe to say that in our time, people on social sites get influenced more by recommendations on these websites (Likes, tweets, diggs, etc.) then are influenced by mass media advertisement.
Ideally, I would like to see everyone joining the social media party, but if not so, at least this marketing communication tool should be visited by every marketer. A dipstick trial project is must before not deciding to integrate it in the marketing mix.