Skip to main content
Your Trusted Digital Marketing Agency

Author: Chris Wood

5 Top Tips on Using Instagram to Improve Online Sales

5 Top Tips on Using Instagram to Improve Online Sales

Written by Chris Wood on . Posted in Digital Marketing, Instagram.

If you have an online shop, the question of how to improve your sales is never far from your thoughts. Whilst you might have tried Google and Facebook to help increase your online sales, another platform worth looking at is Instagram. Since Instagram shopping was introduced, this platform is having strong appeal to retailers with a visual brand and a strong following. Read on for our tips on how to use Instagram to help improve your online sales.

1. Strong Visuals

Instagram is first and foremost a visual platform, so it’s essential you are sharing eye catching and appealing content. Only strong visual images will help to build your following and your brand on Instagram. Plan your posts carefully to highlight new collections, key product features, benefits and seasonal appeal.

2. Build Trust

If you want people to enter credit card information on your website they need to see a brand which feels authentic and trustworthy. Make sure your Instagram account is linked to your website and build in a strategy for customer engagement and loyalty.

5 Top Tips on Using Instagram to Improve Online Sales
5 Top Tips on Using Instagram to Improve Online Sales

3. Set Up Your Account Properly

It’s essential that your Instagram account is set up as a business, rather than a personal profile, otherwise you won’t be able to link your online shop or add shoppable posts. You will also need to connect your business profile to a Facebook catalogue of products. This can be created and managed through Facebook Business Manager.

4. Create Shoppable Posts

The great news for businesses, is that tagging a product within an instagram post is as simple as tagging a person in a post. A shopping post’s tags mean easy access to a tagged product’s information for shoppers. As soon as your account is set up for Instagram shopping, you simply add a photo and click ‘tag products’ – easy! As long as the products you sell are physical goods and comply with Instagram’s commerce policies you’re good to go. Find out which products are prohibited here.

5 Top Tips on Using Instagram to Improve Online Sales

5. Paid Ads

As well as setting up shoppable posts you can also set up paid adverts on Instagram. These are set up through Facebook Ad Manager, by creating a campaign and selecting Instagram as one of the promotion placements. Unlike shoppable posts, which are seen by your organic audience, Instagram ads can reach beyond your existing audience to help increase web visitors and sales. You can do detailed targeting: narrowing down your audience by location, age, interests and job titles. If you already run Ad campaigns it is worth reviewing the setup to avoid wasting money.

6. Use Custom Audiences

Facebook’s Custom Audiences allow you to target people who have interacted with your brand already. This means you could target people who have interacted with your profile or ad on Instagram. This can be a great way of reaching people who have already shown a recent interest in your brand or products.

We hope you found these top tips on using Facebook to improve your online sales helpful. We specialise in helping online retailers increase their revenue, so get in touch to find out how we can help.

Website SEO & Digital Marketing Ideas

What You Can Do to Prepare Your Website Post Lockdown

Written by Chris Wood on . Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media.

If your business activities are quieter or on pause due to coronavirus, now might be a good time to take stock of your website and digital marketing activities ready for when you’re fully operational. Here are some tips to help you review, update and optimise your current marketing channels.

Improve Organic Reach with Keyword Analysis and SEO

Make your web pages more visible to search engines and help them appear higher up in the organic search results by improving your SEO. Alongside well planned website text, getting meta title & descriptions right is important in getting those all important click-throughs to your website.

Firstly, carry out some keyword analysis. Use Google’s keyword planner to find out which keywords are most relevant to your business and which are searched for the most. You can then use this information to review and update your website content (making sure copy is still readable and flows well) and the meta data fields and alt text on your site. It might be that the keyword analysis has informed you that there could be new pages to introduce too.

For example, if you’re a fitness coach, analysis on keyword planner would show that as well as ‘fitness coach’ the keywords ‘fitness trainer’ and ‘workout coach’ would also be worth including on your website and in meta data. If you need to flex your offering to take account of changing customer behaviour due to coronavirus, you might also decide that the keyword ‘virtual fitness coach’ and similar are worth including if you have the capacity to offer virtual sessions.

Tip: If your website has a lot of pages and you’re not sure where to start, you could check in Analytics for your most visited pages. Head to Behaviour – Site Content – Landing Pages and then All Pages.

Promote key products with Google Ads

If you’re not currently running Google Ads it might be worth considering setting up a campaign to promote your key products or services and increase web visitors and customers. Make sure you pay attention to locations, ad text, keywords and negative keywords. If you’re an ecommerce business not yet on Google Shopping that would be worth considering as well – great for online retailers. If you need help get in touch.

If you’re running Google Ads already, review & update your Ad text and negative keywords and check your settings, keywords, bids and search queries. This will help you get the best ROI for your ad spend.

Tip: It could be worth introducing new Google Ads campaigns which focus on your most searched for products and services, which could have changed due to coronavirus.

If you would like a Google Ads audit to see whether you could get a better return, or if your business could get a boost from some paid Google advertising, we’re here to help. We offer Google Ads Audits to give you expert help on how to improve your campaigns. Many campaigns we see aren’t optimised to their full potential and we’ve helped many clients save money and improve their reach and sales.

Review Social Media Ads

Social media ads are useful to businesses in a number of ways. Unlike Google Ads, which appear in the search engine if someone searches for keywords relating to the ad, social media ads show to people who may potentially be interested in your product or service.

For example, an accountant may have Google Ads running which appear when someone in their target area searches for ‘accountant’. They may then complement these ads and increase exposure for their business by setting up Facebook Ads which appear to people in their local area who are small business owners who might be interested in an accountant.

If you already have social media ads set up, now could be a good time to review and update them. Make sure images, ad text, landing pages and location targeting is reviewed to make sure it’s relevant to the current situation and customer needs.

Review your email marketing strategy

Do you regularly send out email marketing updates to your followers? Although people now communicate frequently on social media, email marketing still remains a very effective way of keeping in touch with customers, increasing website visits and making sales. The chances are, your customer needs have changed dramatically due to coronavirus and you might need to flex your offering accordingly. Think about your likely customer needs and desires over the coming months and develop an email marketing strategy accordingly.

We hope you’ve found these tips useful. For help with any aspect of digital marketing or SEO, get in touch.

5 Top Tips on Using Facebook to Improve Online Sales

Written by Chris Wood on . Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media. No Comments on 5 Top Tips on Using Facebook to Improve Online Sales

If you have an online shop, the question of how to improve your sales is never far from your thoughts. Facebook is an invaluable tool for helping online retailers reach their target audience and increase ROI, so read on for our tips on how to use it to help improve your online sales.

1. Write to Sell

Make sure you are using your Facebook Page to raise awareness of your brand and products. Don’t just take the hard sell approach and shout about products. Plan your posts carefully to highlight key features, benefits and endorsements. Check out our social media content ideas for businesses here.

Make sure you are also making the most of Facebook messenger to engage with customers and use it as another avenue for ordering and fulfillment. Set up a chat bot which can automate a lot of FAQs.

2. Build Trust

If you want people to enter credit card information on your website they need to see a brand which feels authentic and trustworthy. People will often head over to your Facebook page to see what people are saying about your brand before buying. Make sure your Facebook Page is linked to your website and build in a strategy for customer engagement and loyalty. Ensure you are doing everything you can to encourage good reviews and feedback in order to build trust with your target market.

3. Optimise Campaigns

Facebook advertising is a great way to reach beyond your existing audience and increase web visitors and sales. You can do detailed targeting on Facebook: narrowing down your audience by location, age, interests and job titles. If you already run Ad campaigns it is worth reviewing the setup to avoid wasting money.

4. Use Custom Audiences

Facebook’s Custom Audiences allow you to target people who interact with your brand already. For example, you can reach out to people who visited certain web pages on your site, used your app, interacted with your Facebook page or even visited your business. Read more about custom audiences here.

Mobile Shop Consumer

5. Promote Flash Sales

If you have a glut of products at the end of a season or line, a flash sale is a great way to shift them quickly and Facebook is the ideal way to quickly share your sale. Create a Facebook offer and share using audience targeting.

We hope you found these top tips on using Facebook to improve your online sales helpful. We specialise in helping online retailers increase their revenue, so get in touch to find out how we can help.

Super-Target your Facebook Ads with Custom Audiences

Written by Chris Wood on . Posted in Digital Marketing, Facebook Ads, Social Media. No Comments on Super-Target your Facebook Ads with Custom Audiences

Have you used Facebook’s custom audiences to get the most out of your Facebook advertising spend? Read on to find out what they are, when to use them and how effective they are.

What are Custom Audiences?

A Custom Audience is an audience that lets you show ads to people who may already interact with your business. Maybe they’ve reacted to your Facebook Page posts, purchased products on your website, downloaded your app, visited your shop or interacted with you on Instagram.

When to Use Custom Audiences?

Using custom audiences helps you to be more targeted in your advertising and get the best return on investment for your advertising spend.

It’s worth considering custom audiences when you want to target people who have already shown an interest in your business or product and you want to reach them with the product they have already shown an interest in (remarketing) or with a new or similar offering. Here’s a few examples:

1) Website Visitors: If you want to reach website visitors people who have visited a specific website page with an advert reminding them what you offer, you can use a custom audience to set up a remarketing campaign. Since these people have already shown they have an interest in your services by visiting your website, they should be more receptive to your advert. You can even target people who have spent a longer time on specific pages, making your audience even more targeted, especially useful if you have a high volume of visitors.

If you have a new product launch it would be worthwhile targeting people who have recently browsed similar product pages on your website, or interacted with your Facebook Page rather than an audience based on demographic and interests information alone.

2) Customer lists: If you have an email marketing list you could upload your customer list and target people who have bought from you in the past. This is especially useful if you don’t have an online shop from which to track purchases using the Facebook Pixel. Note though that this will only work if Facebook can match the email address in your database with a user’s Facebook email. You also need to make sure you collected the correct permissions from people when they signed up to your marketing list.

3) Lookalike Audience: You can also use your Custom Audiences to create another type of audience called a Lookalike Audience. This audience is made up of people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.

How Effective are Custom Audiences?

Custom audiences can be a very effective type of advertising campaign and typically attract a higher conversion rate than an audience which is set up using demographics and interests only. They often run alongside, or after, a series of more general awareness raising campaigns. The awareness raising campaign might generate the website numbers or Facebook activity and the custom audience ads then use these results to target people who have interacted with your business or product.

If you haven’t yet experimented with Custom Audiences it’s worth giving this powerful tool a go. Some Custom Audiences require inserting the Facebook Pixel Code on your website, but simply linking to Facebook activity just requires set up through the Audiences section of Ad Manager.

For expert help with Facebook and digital marketing campaigns get in touch.

Top Tips to Improve Online Presence & Generate Leads

Written by Chris Wood on . Posted in Digital Marketing. No Comments on Top Tips to Improve Online Presence & Generate Leads

We often get asked to carry out website reviews for clients, to help them understand how effectively their website and digital marketing strategy is performing. With that in mind, we thought we’d share some insights on how to improve your brand’s online presence. Make your business stand out and generates sales and enquiries with these tips.

1) Keep Your Website Up to Date

Give a great first impression by making sure your website is current and fresh. If someone arrives on your site and it has out of date content (e.g. past events or unseasonal stock) your potential customers will lose confidence in you.

As well as scheduling in time each week to keep your site up to date, it’s also a good idea to have new content added to your website in the form of a news section or blog. This gives previous visitors a reason to return, as well as attracting new ones.

2) Bring Your Target Audience to Your Website

A beautiful and well designed website is a great start, but if you have very few website visitors your site is not performing its role as a lead generator. You need to be actively driving relevant traffic to your website using social media, email marketing and Google advertising. If your organic reach is low or needs a boost, use paid advertising to bring your target audience to your website.

3) Write Content with Page 1 Presence in Mind!

When writing content for your website you need to write with the Google spider in mind! As your site is crawled by Google, make sure you incorporate keywords relevant to your business and publish accurate product descriptions. This will increase the likelihood of your website or product page appearing in search results.

Make sure the meta title, meta description and image alt text are all updated to maximize your chances of visibility.

A blog also benefits your site by creating extra pages for Google indexing. This, along with the use of relevant keywords, lets Google know you’re an authority in your area and helps to get you page 1 presence.

4) Ensure a Great User Experience

Is your branding well designed and your copy clear? Does your website look good when viewed on any device? To give your visitors the best experience of your website it needs to be responsive to whichever device they are using to browse. If your site is easy to navigate on a desktop but cumbersome on a mobile, it’s likely that you’re damaging many potential sales or leads.

You also need to invest time in making sure your copy is clear and appealing and your images of high quality. Ensure it’s easy for your customers to either buy or get in touch in as few clicks and data entry as possible. If it’s hard to find out where to contact you, your site is hard to navigate or it takes 20 clicks to get to the point of sale, you probably won’t get many online enquiries or sales!

5) Increase Customer Confidence with Online Reviews

Do you have any online reviews? Peer to peer reviews have exploded in importance over the last few years and if you don’t have any (or worse, you only have a handful of poor ones) this is probably effecting your sales or enquiry rate. Make getting customer reviews on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or one of the third party sites like TrustPilot part of your marketing strategy.

6) Ensure Great Customer Service

The digital age has increased customer expectations on response times and fulfilment. As well as ensuring your delivery or appointment speeds are up to modern expectations, if you have contact forms, social media accounts and email marketing campaigns you need to ensure somebody is checking for incoming enquiries and responding quickly, especially if you want to attract good reviews.

7) Be where your Target Audience are

Analyse your target audience and where they spend time online. Is there anywhere else online you could have a presence which might be worthwhile? Or could you increase your presence on existing platforms? If you’re a B2C organisation it’s likely you are on Facebook, but it could be that it’s worth expanding your presence on Facebook by posting more regularly, posting slightly different content, starting a group or using live streaming. Stay alert to shifts in your customer trends and act accordingly.

We hope you found these tips useful in improving your business’ online presence and increasing your enquiry or sales rates. Get in touch for help with digital marketing, training or for a full website review.

How your Business can Adapt to Social Media Trends in 2020

Written by Chris Wood on . Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media. No Comments on How your Business can Adapt to Social Media Trends in 2020

It’s the start of a new year and a great time to re-evaluate your current marketing strategy. To help you in your planning, in this blog post we cover some of the main social media trends for 2020 and suggest how your business can adapt to them. Social media changes fast, so to make sure your business thrives in 2020 you need to stay ahead of the game!

1. Strike a balance between public and private engagement

Private messaging is on the rise and more and more people are shifting their time and focus to private channels such as Messenger and Whatsapp. Instagram has launched Threads, a camera-first messaging app, and LinkedIn is rolling out its new Teamates feature.

However, this doesn’t mean that the future is purely private social, so hang onto your Facebook page! The rise of private behaviors like messaging has not diminished the importance of public social media feeds, which remain a critical space for brand discovery and customer acquisition.

The key for brands is creating a seamless experience across both worlds, while balancing automation and human connection to build deeper customer relationships at scale. When it comes to private channels you can automate the easy stuff, taking advantage of messaging bots, but make sure you don’t lose the human touch.

2. Employers take centre stage in a divided world

Pessimism among consumers is growing with the rise of populism, divisive politics, and global mistrust of traditional institutions. As our world becomes increasingly divided, employees are looking to their organisations to make things right.

Progressive organisations should take advantage of this new role, building strong internal cultures, amplifying their company purpose with employee and customer advocacy, and putting to work the inextricable link between employee and customer experience.

Don’t underestimate the strength of employee advocates – they can help amplify bold sentiments and goodwill from your organisation. Try creating staff ambassadors on social media, and develop a positive social media culture within your organisation.

3. TikTok shakes up the status quo

Have you heard of TikTok? This social media app had explosive growth last year and is shaking up the social media landscape. Users share short, addictive video clips, reshaping how music is both made and marketed.

The question is, as with all new social media platforms, will it last? Whilst the platform may or may not last, it is certainly bringing valuable insight into the future of social culture, content, and collaboration. In response, Instagram has released Reels, allowing Instagram users to set 15-second video clips to music, share them as Stories, and potentially see them go viral on the new Top Reels section of the Explore tab.

It is only really worth investing time and resources into TikTok as a brand if you are aiming at the youth market. Aside from that, it’s worth noting the trend of short, authentic, raw and fun video as you develop your social media strategy for 2020.

4. Social marketing and performance marketing collide

Brand building has long been the primary use case for businesses on social media, but with the continuing decline of organic reach and increasing demand for return on investment, there’s been a rise in social performance marketing (using social ads to achieve a specific conversion such as a sale, lead, or click). Social marketers must expand the scope of their skill sets to fulfill the dual brand requirements of community building and performance marketing.

Successful organisations need to balance both driving short-term conversions and creating long-term strategies to build brand equity, customer happiness, and differentiation. Take a full funnel approach when it comes to social advertising campaigns – remember that ads aren’t just for performance marketing, they can also be just as effective for brand awareness. Don’t try to do too much with one ad either – use smart, targeted ads to move customers along the purchase path.

5. The social proof gap closes

ROI and measurement will continue to be persistent challenges this year despite attribution models now being built into social ad platforms. Successful organisations need to unite social data with other data for a holistic view (e.g. with Google Analytics data and CRM data) and don’t just look at social data in isolation.

They also need to have an integrated customer engagement approach between social media and other digital and traditional channels leads (e.g integrating a social ad strategy with email marketing, PR activities and advocacy programs).

Smart organisations should invest in both skills and tools to understand social ROI. Simply owning clever software won’t help your organisation understand the value of social media, you need to either have the skills internally to integrate and analyse the data that is meaningful to you, or to work with a skilled partner company.

We hope you found this blog post on social media trends useful. For help with social media and digital marketing campaigns for your business in 2020 get in touch.

Much of the information and stats in this blog post is based on Hootsuite’s recent live webinars on social media trends in 2020 and Hootsuite’s blog on social media trends.