Over the next few Thursday posts I shall look in detail at how to you can encourage people to visit your site. The full list of approaches to increasing traffic is in the earlier post “How to Help the Right People Find Your Site”.
Direct entry is where your visitor types your url into their browser. To do this they are likely to copy your url from a document you supply. This approach may seem to be a bit primitive compared with the others but it is important particularly for local organisations.
Three things you need to consider when you think about direct entry.
- How local is your market? Do your customers live or work close to your business? Local might mean a part of a city or across a city or region. If your market is national or global, direct entry will be less relevant to your marketing needs, although it may always have some relevance, eg at conferences or if you post out products.
- How visible is your business? If you have a shop front business, with people passing the entrance, this opens up extra possibilities for direct entry. If your business is a service, perhaps from your own home, then your opportunities will be more restricted.
- The value your site adds to your business. If you are not visible, your site might be your main shop window. If you have a real shop window, you will need to think about how your site enhances opportunities for customers who already use your shop.
You need to develop a marketing strategy dependent upon whether you want to find new visitors or to increase sales to existing customers.
Let’s say you have a bakery with a single outlet with plenty of footfall. You may want to:
- encourage visitors to come to your shop from other parts of the city. Can you persuade them to take a detour to your shop? For example, you might (1) collaborate with neighbouring shops to develop a portal website to promote the local area, (2) run market stalls elsewhere in the city and encourage customers to go to your website.
- increase sales to existing customers, by increasing customer loyalty. They might spread your news by word of mouth and buy bread from you regularly. So, on your website you might include recipes for your bread and sell the ingredients in your shop. Whilst some people might try to make your bread at home, whatever the results, buying bread from you is always going to be easier. The recipes will show people what your product is really like and help them understand what goes into your baking.
You will want to build long-term relationships with your customers, so that you can tell them of future promotions and developments.
So, how might you make your url better known?
- Business cards are essential for any business. There will be little room to publicise your promotions but hopefully people who receive your card will check out your site and join your email list.
- Flyers can give people a reason to visit your site.
- Posters are possibly less successful because people need to copy your url from the poster. However, they are permanent and may still be around when the flyers have gone.
- Things like paper bags. A baker might sell produce on a market stall and include their postal address and url on the bags. Perhaps add a reason to visit the url.
- And don’t forget to add a signature at the end of your emails with your url and line of business. This will come up every time you create an email and it can of course be deleted if it doesn’t seem appropriate.
Getting some traction between your website and your business is important if you are a local trader. However, if your market is further afield, you will need other methods to increase visitors to your site. They’re up next, starting next time with back-links.
Have you any examples of brilliant online promotions for local businesses? How did they publicise their website locally?
