The ultimate goal for any business, whether it is run online or through brick-and-mortar outlets, is selling products. The better a business is in selling products, the more revenue it would get and the more successful it would become. Selling your products online also requires you to have a marketing plan, forecast your sales, prepare your budget, and run your advertising campaigns, just like you have to do for selling products through retail stores. The benefit of the digitized world is that selling your products online is actually a lot more cost-effective than promoting them through retail outlets.
Social media marketing is cheaper than direct marketing or door-to-door sales. Fortunately, social media marketing is the most common form of promoting and selling your products over the internet. Even if a business is doing most of its marketing and promotion through its official website, its sales would still be boosted more through social media. This is why all successful online businesses these days integrate the website with social media pages. Since shareability and following are easier to build on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube, smart businessmen take maximum advantage of these opportunities. They focus on building great web content that can be posted and shared on these platforms easily.
If you want to be a pro in selling products online, keep reading until the end because we’ll be discussing the tips and tricks that will help you in selling your products over the internet in the most cost-effective yet efficient ways.
10 Awesome Tips For Selling Your Products Online
For learning how to sell online, read through these 10 awesome tips. These explain the simple things that you need to do to start selling online.
1. Conduct Competitor Analysis
The first thing you need to do before you start selling online is to conduct a competitor analysis. You need to know the market demand, the changing market trends, the competition for different product types, the pricing strategies of your competitors, and the gaps in the market if any. This information is highly valuable as it will save you from risks and losses as you move along in your business. Before you start selling your products, you need to know how to penetrate your target markets and how to influence your target customers. If you do not gather this data in the beginning, you might head in the wrong direction and end up losing the game before your business even kicks off.
2. Build a Website
Once you know what are the trending products and which products are good for selling online, the next thing you need to do for selling your products is to build a user-friendly and responsive website for your brand. The website should be simple, appealing, and have enough information about your business on it.
Instead of getting into the hassle of looking for a web developer, you can build your website yourself by using a site-building tool like Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
At Strikingly, you can find tons of website templates for creating different types of websites. You can choose from one of the following categories.
- A simple business website to showcase your products or services
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
- An online store for selling your products online through the website
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
- A blog to publish articles and build your brand equity through content marketing
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
All these types of websites can be used for promoting and selling your products. Depending on your marketing strategy, you can pick the most suitable kind of template, and get started with keying in your web content.
Adding content to your site is very simple in Strikingly, because our editor provides you with the drag-and-drop feature that enables you to adjust your content elements (e.g. text, images, embedded videos, etc) in any place on your web pages as you like, without having to write a single line of code. For selling your products from your website, your content needs to be precise and neatly organized. Make sure there is no overlapping in the text. The colors should contrast nicely with each other among the different elements of the web content. Do not forget to add call-to-action buttons, such as ‘Contact Us’, ‘Buy Now’ and ‘Add to Cart’.
3. Integrate Social Media Pages
The key to making your content and campaigns go viral is to integrate your website with your brand’s social media pages. For this, you would need to build the social media pages first, if you haven’t already. Once those are ready, one way to integrate them with your site is to add social media icons on the site’s footer. Since the footer is a part of each of your web pages, your site visitors will be able to find them easily and click on them.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Social media adverts have a greater potential to go viral than any other ads. If your campaign goes viral, selling online would become a lot easier for you. Therefore, use all the social media platforms for selling your products that are suitable for the type of business you have. To sell products online faster, use multiple platforms. For example, you can create marketing videos and upload them on Youtube. Then you can post the same videos on your brand’s Facebook page. Users will now have both options to share your video. If they like the video, they can either share its Facebook link with their friends or use its Youtube link, depending on which platform the user uses the most.
4. Offer Awesome Customer Support
Providing good customer support plays a very important role in keeping your customers happy and retaining them. Even to sell product types that do not require many queries to be answered, it is best to keep a door open for your customers to contact you just in case. There are few different ways to provide customer support for selling your products effectively.
- Email support
- Phone support
- Contact form
- Social media messenger (e.g. Facebook messenger)
- Live chat support
The best among these is live chat support. If you build your site in Strikingly, you will be able to simply chat your way to more customers. We enable you to provide 24/7 live chat support to your users, just like we at Strikingly offer to our users.
Image taken from Strikingly
5. Upload Quality Product Photos
For attracting customers and selling your products online, you need to have very good quality product photos to upload on your website and social media pages. When people cannot touch or smell the products that they are buying, they put all their focus on product photography. This is because your product shots are all that the customer can see to imagine what the product really looks like. That’s why your product photos should be awesome and clear.
If you are selling products from an online store, your product photos will be accompanied by product prices, product descriptions, and mention of any other costs or processes involved in the purchase. But if you are only showcasing your products to spread the word about your brand, then you may or may not want to mention all these other details.
Remember when you are selling your products online, your customers would rely on the photos that they see. If your actual products when delivered do not match up with the photos that your customer saw on the internet, they will end up disappointed. That’s why it is important to take care of both, the quality of your product photos and the quality of the product itself. If both are good, you will be able to develop good product positioning and sell products online more effectively.
6. Promote Your Products
The last but very crucial step you need to take for selling your products is to promote and market them. There are many different ways in which you can run marketing campaigns to sell products online. Let’s break these down into 4 different ways.
7. Inbound Marketing
This is when you don’t reach out to your customers, but let your customers search for you.
8. Viral Marketing
This is when you make your campaigns and marketing content so interesting that users are enticed to share it with their friends until it goes viral.
9. Referral Marketing
This is when you give incentives to your customers to recommend your brand to others.
10. Social Media Marketing
This is when you keep sharing updates about your brand on different social media sites until you get enough eyes on them and start selling online.
Selling your products is not too hard if you follow the right path and be cautious about any potential risks along the way. Budget your expenses properly, start small, and build up your business gradually to successfully sell products online. The steps explained above can be followed at minimum costs that are far less than renting or leasing retail space and piling up inventory before you start selling. Once you start selling your products online, you can later on move to open retail outlets as well if your financial situation allows it.
If you would like to use the simplest way to create a website for your brand, to begin with, don’t forget to sign up for a free account at Strikingly!
