Nowadays there are so many sales consultants in the market; all of them promised that they can help you start the online business. They can help you to choose the business areas, make very precise products and service segmentations, write the brand story even do the media and public relation for you. Actually all these works are very essential. However if you are lack of traffic this key, all the efforts you put at the beginning will just go in vain.
Then how can we gain the traffic? This is really a puzzling question. I am sure that lots of sales consultants themselves can not really answer this question properly. Although I have been in this industry for so long, I am not able to give a 100% right answer either. But I would like to share some experience I gain through all the failures and lessons. I wish at least I can give some general ideas about this issue:
There is no free traffic in the market
To gain traffic without cost is impossible, if there were, Yahoo would not be able to earn so much. How much sales expense online companies need to prepare for gaining traffic? According to many online business owners’ experience, if the main profit of your company is from online sales then you better prepare 10%-20% of your turnover to boost traffic. If your company just starts the online business and you have no previous turnover to estimate the budget, then you can use another calculation way: if your advertising material is good enough, the website is professional enough and can reach your target group successfully then, every dollar you invest may bring 5-6 times profit. Of course, the greater your sales ability is, the higher is your product price and trade –in rate and lower is the percentage of sale cost in your whole turnover, and better is your adverting effect.
There is no company has the same sales strategy. There are many sales tools you can use. Company should make the choice according to their own budget, target customers, inner capability and business channel. Currently the popular sales tools include:
Traditional sales tool:
• Television
• Newspaper
• Magazine
• Public actives
Online sales tools:
• Online banner
• Text link
• Key word
• Blog / forum
• Traffic exchange / cooperate with other industry
Companies should decide the sales tools according to the percentage of their turnover and the future business plan. If 100% of your orders are from internet then definitely most of advertising budget should put into developing online sales tools. If your business runs mainly through entity market but you also want 1/3 of your future sales can be made through the website, then you should spend 1/3 of your sales budget to the web market. Sometime you can also see many e-companies use entity sales tools such as television advertisement and newspaper advertisement to promote their business; however this should be done when the companies grow into certain scales. They also need to build their brand image in the internet as well.
Normally the biggest question for most online companies is which online sales tools are most effective. Here I will analyse each of them one by one:
1. Online banner
This kind of advertisement has the highest click rate; because they give customers direct visual stimulation and arouse customers’ peep desire. However this kind of advertisement is most expensive. For example, if you want to promote something in large scale on Yahoo, you need to prepare around 15 thousands USD for two weeks online banner. If the preparation does well, making long-term banners will help the company grow steadily. But if the preparation is not enough, the activity you promote is not attractive enough, and then your advertisement expense may just go in vain. There are some key points for you to make online banner: good promotion return rate, precise advertisement and there is incentive factor in your website to attract the orders.
2. text links
On Yahoo home page and four corners of each page, you can see many short sentences attract people to click in. This is text links. Normally text link helps to enhance the impression but the average click rate is lower than Banner. If there is someone talented in word in the company, and he is able to use the limited word to precisely attract people’s attention, then the click rate can also reach very high level. Among all kinds of advertising, the cost of text link is still considered as reasonable. To make an effective text link may cost 10 thousands USD per month.
3. Key word
This is one of the hottest sales tools in recent years. But I have some different opinions: if you own an e-market, or you own various products, key word will be a very good sales tool. But if you don’t have that much products or you wish to build up new brand or promote diverse brands, then the effect of keyword may disappoint you. If you provide unified services such as selling boxes, moving, fixing computers and so on, keyword will be the cheapest sales tools for you.
If these 3 sale tools don’t fit your budget or business types, you can use some hard but very cheap way to do sales.
1. Blog: Set up a blog and reveal your professional areas in your Blog. At the same time you can post your ideas on others Blogs or communicate with others through Blogs to build up your reputation graduately.
2. Forum: Be a frequent visitor to forum. Discuss the issues in your fields, and let yourself be the topic people discuss about.
3. Cooperate with other industry: Exchange the banner with other websites which have similar traffics or exchange the printed ventures to give to each other’s customers. It also includes provide other small sites or Blogs your banner for them to help boost your traffic. If the deal is done, then you can pay them certain amount of hire charge. It is not difficult to set the system, but the biggest difficulties may be finding the partners to cooperate.
These 3 sale tools are much cheaper than the former tools, but they consume lots of time and efforts. If you have lots of time, it can also be a good way to challenge yourself.
Edited By Vicky Yin
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