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Andrew Stickel

Those Abandoned Shopping Carts

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A recent study found something that may be disturbing to many online marketers. The study found that when consumers shop online, 75 percent of the shopping carts they initiate are abandoned before the sale is finalized. If you’ve brought a consumer to the place where he or she is about to make a purchase, you don’t want anything to get in the way. Let’s look at the reasons why users abandon their shopping carts and see if we can remove any obstacles that stand between customers and finalized sales.

1. Buyer’s remorse: It’s that feeling you get after making a big purchase when you first ask yourself, “Do I really need this?” Online, however, buyers have plenty of opportunities to get that feeling before finalizing the sale. It’s human nature; it’s the same reason you see out-of-place abandoned items near the checkout lines in retail stores, and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

2. Just window-shopping: Kids like to pretend they’re superheroes, and we really like putting those designer dresses and jackets in our shopping carts. But your kid isn’t really a superhero, and a lot of people just like to pretend they’re wearing those designer clothes. According to Women’s Health magazine, window-shopping can be a harmless fantasy that “releases mood-lifting endorphins, boosts your immune system, keeps your brain nimble, and even fulfills basic social needs.” Online window-shopping floods the senses and stimulates the imagination, and no credit card is needed for that.

3. Tax and shipping: Sure, that “Breaking Bad” t-shirt looked great online when it was listed for $14.99. Then some tax was added, the shipping charge was calculated, and your effort to identify with a TV character was just a whim that you quickly forget. Increasingly, online retailers are working to soften the sticker shock by calculating tax and shipping charges before you begin checking out. Since those charges can’t be eliminated, this is probably the best approach

4. The Great Coupon Code Hunt: You’re about to check out, and you notice it: Enter Coupon Code Here. Thus, the Great Hunt begins. You open tabs. You conduct searches. “Error 404 File Not Found” is burned into your brain. You can become so obsessed with finding the coupon code that you actually forget about your purchase, or you become so frustrated that you decide to quit the whole thing. Here’s a situation online retailers can actually do something about. Studies show that you are far more likely to make a sale when your coupon codes are easy to find. Coupon codes are a special incentive to buy, and customers genuinely appreciate them.

PoachIt is using a new approach; if customers don’t like a price, they can sign up for alerts when the item is reduced or goes on sale. Innovative thinking like this is the way social media marketers can avoid some of the built-in obstacles to online retail buying and selling.

Avoiding Click Farms

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Celebrities, businesses and even the federal government have purchased phony Facebook likes, Twitter followers, or YouTube viewers from “click farms,” offshore boiler-room operations where workers like, like, and like with thumbs up buttons, video views, and retweets that inflate social media numbers. Who buys bogus likes? Ironically, it’s the marketers whose value is based on their credibility – attorneys, for example.

Don’t do it. Social media marketing requires a genuine and authentic engagement, something that’s admittedly difficult for always-busy attorneys with other priorities. An established social media marketing company is a much better alternative to the click farm. A good social media marketing firm can help you gain genuine likes, views, and retweets, the old-fashioned way: by earning them. Instead of a one-shot deal with an ethics-deficient click farm, hiring a social media marketing firm means you’ll have direct, professional, hands-on marketing help that can genuinely boost your firm’s reputation and online presence.

Security researchers Andrea Stroppa and Carla De Micheli estimated in 2013 that sales of fake Twitter followers have the potential to bring in $360 million annually, and that fake Facebook activities bring in $200 million a year. It’s big business, and you don’t want to be part of it. A spokesman for WeSellLikes.com (which sells 1000 Facebook likes for $49.99) told the Associated Press, “Businesses buy the Facebook likes because they’re afraid that when people go to their Facebook page and they only see 12 or 15 likes, they’re going to lose potential customers.”

The biggest internet companies are trying to crack down on the click farms. Speaking for Google, Andrea Faville told the AP that Google and YouTube are taking “action against bad actors that seek to game our systems.” The illusion of a mass following is just that: an illusion. The worst thing that can happen, of course, is getting caught. It may be no big deal if the local comic book store buys a few fake likes, but attorneys and other professionals simply cannot afford the damage to their credibility if they’re caught in unethical behavior.

Social Networks That No Business Should Work Without

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Social networks have changed the face of business forever. They allow businesses and professionals to interact with members of their client or customer base in a new, innovative way and allow businesses and professionals the chance to market products and services for absolutely nothing at all. Here is a list of some of the most popular social networks that are available to businesses and professionals along with their primary benefits:

Facebook

It may not have been the first social network, but it was definitely the first to get it right. Facebook lets businesses and professionals create their own pages which can then be “liked” by individual users of the social network. The more likes that a page is able to receive, the higher it will rank in the social network’s internal search engine, and the more likely that new clients or customers will be attracted to using the business or service for themselves. A good social media campaign should include a plan to get as many Facebook likes as possible.

Twitter

There is no distinction on Twitter between accounts for businesses and professionals and accounts for individual users. Anyone can create a Twitter account for themselves or a business. Once an account is created, any other Twitter user can opt to become a follower of that account to receive messages from the followed account. Unlike other social networks that are full of bells and whistles, Twitter is beautifully simple to use. The service lets users create public messages up to 140 characters in length which can be read by anyone, but which appear specifically in the news feeds of any official followers. It may not seem like a lot, but 140 characters is plenty of space for businesses and professionals to keep prospective and satisfied clients and customers engaged in business happenings and offers.

Google+

Google’s solution to Facebook, Google+ offers many of the same benefits as Facebook, plus a few extra perks. Perhaps the biggest and best perk of using Google+ is that information shared on Google’s social network is instantaneously indexed by Google’s search engine. This means that users of Google+ are more likely to have the information which they share on the social network viewable by users of the Google search engine than those who only share the information on Facebook or Twitter. While possible for Facebook and Twitter profiles to appear in Google search results, information shared on a Google+ profile is likely to reach a favorable search engine rank on Google faster than an equal profile created on Facebook or Twitter.

LinkedIn

Designed to be the social network for business professionals, LinkedIn can be a great way for businesses and professionals to find new customers and clients. The network is perhaps the most professional social network among the web’s most popular networks, so personal posts, comments, and photos should be excluded from the LinkedIn profile. The benefit to using LinkedIn is that the service connects people who are looking for work with people who are looking to have work done. It is a go-to resource for many businesses and professionals who are looking for fellow businesses or professionals that they can outsource to.

Brand And Reputation Management

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The most valuable elements of your business are your brand and your reputation. Reputation is simply the public’s perception of your brand. Once tarnished, a business reputation is hard to repair. Some people still refuse to buy Tylenol, for example, because of a Tylenol product-tampering scare that happened more than a quarter-century ago.

You may work hard to repair a damaged reputation, but the public (and media) may find it hard to forget even the slightest negative incident. Especially today, consumers online and actively sharing their experiences with various brands, reputation is more important than ever. You may distinguish yourself or your business with prompt delivery, a quality product, or outstanding customer service, but if you carry a negative reputation, these distinctions may be of little help. Reputations can take months and years to repair; some remain damaged forever.

The internet makes it easy to monitor and track discussions about your brand and reputation. The internet also provides literally hundreds of forums and opportunities to spread grievances both minor and major; facts, unfortunately, can play little if any role in the internet rants and slanders that may be initiated against you and your business. For these reasons and others, reputation management services have grown significantly in recent years.

Public relations agencies now offer reputation management as a value-added service and as a way to measure and track an ad campaign’s success. Other companies do nothing but create strategies for fixing or re-establishing a brand’s reputation. Is reputation management necessary? The overwhelming consensus is, Yes! While not every business can afford to closely monitor its reputation, here are a few strategies everyone can use to influence and keep abreast of developments:

Position yourself. Develop and promote the positive reputation that you want for your brand. If there’s negative online talk about your business, at least you’ll be out there defending it.

Use Google Alerts. Google Alerts is free and notifies you whenever something is posted online about your brand.

Listen, learn from, and engage consumers. If they’re complaining, find out why, and repair any damage. If feedback is positive, give your customers more of what they want. Try new things or you’ll risk decline; there’s a reason McDonald’s is always adding new items to its menu.

Punch up your online profiles. Does your brand have its own Facebook page? Should it be on Facebook, LinkedIn, and both? Social profiles are free. Revise those profiles, and share content that helps with your positioning.

Deliver on promises. If you make a promise to a customer or employee, keep it. Nothing creates scorn for a business faster than failure to deliver on a promise.

Getting The Most From Your Online Marketing

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SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is the way to bring visitor traffic to your website from search engines. SEO can be enhanced by offering search engines like Google with relevant data about your business and by doing it in a way that makes your content easy to find. Regularly increasing the size of your website and the amount of your original content allows search engines to index more pages on your site, which in turn increases the odds of your site rising higher in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages). From your original home pages to today’s brief blog post, your website should strengthen your SEO performance from front to back.

Always be certain to add the “meta” information for each page or blog post on your site, so that search engines can more easily recognize the content on that page. Search engine bots “crawl” websites daily, but if a web page fails to offer a detailed description of what it’s about, search crawlers may not index the page correctly. Completing the meta information is part of pursuing the best SEO practices.

Internal and external link creation is another essential component in any successful SEO campaign. By linking thoroughly to other pages on your website, you help your visitors find the content they seek, and search engines can perform a more thorough crawl on each page of your site. Social media, of course, is vital today to any effort to engage users. Social media has emerged as an increasingly indispensable way to share your website’s content, to tell visitors about your business, to answer consumer questions, and more. As you engage more followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, your content will be more widely-shared, meaning more traffic to your website, meaning more business.

Most business owners, of course, have their hands full just doing business, and they don’t have time for (or interest in) search engine bots or meta information. By hiring a committed team of online marketing professionals, business owners can ease their online marketing anxieties and focus on the business side of their businesses.

Link Tactics to Avoid

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Forward Linking

Forward links are links that point from the target website, the website which a business or professional is trying to promote, to a third party website. Search engines will take note of the sites that a target site points to and, when the links are legitimate, will consider the target site as relevant to the same topic as the site at the end of the link. This is why it can be advantageous to link to well respected websites within a niche – but this should be done with caution, as the target website doesn’t want to promote a direct competitor.

Backlinking

Backlinks are links from a third party website that point back to a target website. Because of the way that search engines are designed to rank websites, backlinks can be very valuable to a website’s chances of climbing search engine page ranks. The more backlinks that exist on the web that point back to a target website, the more relevant to a given topic the search engine will perceive the target site to be. Interestingly, the reason for this is academic.

In the world of academic publishing, published papers that are cited the most are considered more scholarly than those that are cited least. Since most people wouldn’t cite a paper or link to a site unless they thought there would be something worth referencing, this philosophy makes sense. Not all backlinks, however, are created equal, which means that some backlinking strategies can actually hurt a website’s rank on search engines.

Link Tactics to Avoid

Link circling is an agreement between several sites to link to each other in a circle or some other type of pattern. So, site 1 would link to site 2, which would link to site 3, which links back to site 1. While clever, search engines can detect link circles and don’t usually favor the sites involved.

While linking to respected niche websites can do a target website good, linking to a website which has been removed can make readers and search engines alike think that the site is poorly maintained and/or out of date. Links on a target website should remain active and all broken links should be repaired or removed. When a search engine perceives a website as out of date, it will usually suppress it.

Finally, link listing should be avoided. This goes for forward link lists and backlink lists. Target websites should not include pages that are primarily links, nor should a business or professional pay for a site’s link to appear on a third party’s link list. Search engines usually don’t favor link lists because they have been over abused by spammers. Some social networks, however, do not discriminate against link lists, but owners of target websites should not expect their link listing efforts to help them climb to the top of a search engine result pages any time soon.

For the most accurate advice on the best linking strategy for a particular website, businesses and professionals should partner with a professional online and search engine marketing team. The smaller the team, the better, as the service provided will be much more customized and responsive than any large agency could hope to offer.