When you start an online business, there are lots of things to think about when it comes to growth. How will people know about you? How can you get those people to trust you and educate them about your product? And on top of this, how do you get them to come back to you again and remain loyal customers? There are lots of different avenues to try, with a sea of apps available to help you out. Luckily, we have written a mini-series, looking at some of the most popular strategies and techniques for growing your business online. We will explain confusing popular terms and show you how you can use Xeno Live Support to help you along the way.
If we were to highly simplify online business growth, we could describe it as:
Generating leads -> Converting Leads -> Customer retention
What do these words mean?
Leads is just a fancy word for potential customers. Converting means turning potential customers into actual ones. Whilst retention means keeping customers. Depending on your service, this could mean customers coming back for repeat business, or staying subscribed if you are an SAAS or a membership site for example.
We will start this series by looking at generating leads.
Generating leads involves making people aware that your business exists and then generating a connection so that you can market to them further. This may be collecting email lists, building followers on socials and more.
Here are some popular ways to attract leads online:
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but don’t let that confuse you. In less scary words, it means making your website as attractive to Google as possible so that you get ranked highly in their big shiny list of greatness, otherwise known as Google search results. This means that when people search for terms relevant to your business your website is high in the search results and is more likely to be clicked on.
Factors such as site organization and loading speed can affect SEO. But one of the main factors is the copy (words) that you use on your website.
One of the most popular ways to enhance and optimize SEO is with Content marketing. This is the creation of content, shared online that is tailored towards your target audience. Within this content, strategic keywords and layout are used to make your site more attractive to Google.
You can hire specialist SEO writers to do this or do it yourself if you have the time and are a bit of a wordsmith.
Xeno and SEO: Content marketing brings visitors to your website. Once there, they may have questions about your business. Live support is a great way for them to instantly connect to a support agent who can give them a personal 1-to-1 service, giving a great first impression of your business and building trust for the future, more on this in one of our next articles.
If email marketing is part of your strategy, live support is also a great way to collect lead contact info instead of through automatic forms and landing pages.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is still an effective method for generating leads and converting customers. Building an email list of subscribers gives you leads that you can market to and slowly move towards purchase. You could start a newsletter of relevant content for subscribers and/or offer something for free that may help to sweeten the pot, although you have to be careful that you do this in the right way under GDPR guidelines.
There are a number of strategies for email marketing, drip campaigns are a great way to build trust with leads over time, while you can also create one-off emails when you have important announcements, something topical to say etc.
You can hire email marketers to run your email for you, or marketing platforms make it quite simple for you to do it yourself, if you have the time.
Xeno and Email Marketing: Xeno has integrations with several popular email marketing platforms so you can share data across platforms and optimize your marketing strategy.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media can be another effective way to generate brand awareness and switch new people on to your business. It’s hard to get anywhere on most platforms today without an ad budget but if you have quality content then social media is a great place to generate new leads and move them towards becoming a paid customer.
Again, you can hire people to do this for you, but if you are a one person show then planning your strategy in advance has a number of potential benefits.
Xeno and Social Media Marketing: Xeno has integrations with popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and more. This means that leads and customers can contact you without having to leave their favorite apps and your staff can reply to all messages from multiple platforms all without leaving the Xeno app, happy customers, happy staff, win win!
Wrapping it Up
Hopefully we are starting to lift the blanket of mystery surrounding digital marketing for you so you can begin to understand some of the popular techniques and strategies for generating leads and growing your business.
Xeno can help you out with all of the strategies mentioned and in addition to the fab features covered it comes with many others such as analytics so you can follow your progress, post-chat surveys to find out directly how customers rate their experience with you and a shared team inbox to make things easier for your team to work together.
