This statistic shows the vital role social media plays in online marketing. By having a better understanding of this process, you can develop a more effective marketing strategy.

How Does Social Media Affect Consumer Behaviors?

In general, social media can impact buying decisions in the following ways:

• Shortening the Customer Journey – The customer journey is the process a consumer undertakes when buying a product. The proliferation of mobile devices means that customers can efficiently research services and products on their phones, often using social media to read through reviews. As a result, a customer journey that used to take weeks can now be completed in under one day.  

• Enhancing Word-of-Mouth Advertising – The viral nature of social media means that a satisfied customer can sing the praises of a business far and wide. Additionally, most consumers take inspiration from their social network when it comes to buying decisions.

• Enticing Users via Influencer Marketing – Influencer marketing can have a substantial impact on sales, particularly with younger audiences. Influencers are people with large volumes of followers, who are often eager to try out recommendations made by their favorite online personalities.

How Can You Improve Your Social Media Marketing Strategy?

The first step is to choose the relevant platforms, meaning those most often used by your target audience. While Facebook is not quite as popular as it used to be, it’s still a major factor in consumer decision making when it comes to goods and services. Instagram is beneficial for reaching a younger audience, while Twitter is good for engaging consumers interested in what your business offers.

In addition to choosing the most relevant platforms, you must also create social media messages that really resonate with followers. Your feed should include a broad selection of informational posts, humor, how-to articles, images, and video to fully engage followers. You must also develop a posting schedule that keeps you on the mind of users without overwhelming them.

Along with our amazing web design and SEO services, SonicSEO.com also helps clients develop impactful social media marketing strategies. Our team will help you find your target audience, while also developing well-written and informative posts for your followers. Let’s discuss your marketing needs today!

Systems integration offers numerous benefits to business owners. It can make tedious processes easier on your staff, while also providing insight into the cash flowing into and out of your business. If your financial systems and eCommerce site aren’t currently integrated, here are a few reasons why they should be.

Minimize Errors Due to Manual Entry

Even the most fastidious staff member is bound to make mistakes from time to time. Mistakes are most likely when entering massive amounts of data into a system, whether you are entering online orders into your POS system or moving inventory from one place to another. Integrated systems allow you to automate many manual processes for better accuracy and timeliness. Instead of inputting information, it will be transferred from one system to another. This also saves time for you and your staff, so you can focus on more important endeavors.

Target Promotions More Effectively

Understanding your customers’ buying preferences is key when developing promotions. There’s a lot of information within your POS system as well as on your eCommerce site, and your marketing will be the most powerful when this information is integrated. For instance, you can aim certain promotions at multi-channel customers, i.e. those who shop online and in-store. These customers are ideal targets for email marketing campaigns, which can be personalized to their specific preferences. Preferences can include the types of products they buy, how much they typically spend, and how often they patronize your store or website.

Make Order Filling and Returns More Efficient

The faster you can fulfill customer orders, the more satisfied they’ll be. With integration, it’s possible to fulfill an online order in-store, which the customer can pick up immediately. Integration also makes it possible for customers to return or exchange an item purchased online or in-store. Curbside retail is becoming the norm, and most customers prefer placing their order via a website as opposed to calling the store directly to place their order. This also takes some of the pressure off your staff. Instead of fielding phone calls and taking down information, all of the order details will be provided instantly.

Let’s Discuss Systems Integration

Here at SonicSEO.com, we pride ourselves on being able to solve problems for our clients. One major problem we’ve recognized recently is inefficient systems, including accounting and POS systems, that don’t communicate with one another.

We can help you locate the right systems for your needs, as well as take the proper steps to ensure these systems all communicate seamlessly. Let us know your thoughts about your current setup so we can develop an effective solution to save you time and money.

Brand loyalty is a large component of business success. While you should always be cognizant of attracting new customers, you should be equally concerned with retaining those customers you already have. While the pandemic has complicated the issue, there are ways you can continue to serve your customers to the best of your ability.

Why Brand Loyalty Is on the Decline

There are many possible reasons why consumers are shying away from the businesses and brands they’ve supported in the past. Business closure is a primary reason, as shutdowns have left some consumers with no other option than to switch brands. Shut-downs occur for all sorts of reasons, a major one being that it’s cost-prohibitive for some businesses to continue operating. Others may find it impossible to continue operations while also abiding by social distancing rules.

For the businesses that have established e-commerce sites, problems interacting with website and apps can turn a customer away in an instant. Glitches, delays, and other issues turn off consumers, who expect a seamless user experience. Apps or websites that are confusing or hard to navigate are also likely to turn customers away.

How You Can Boost Brand Loyalty During the Pandemic

When problems do arise, whether it comes to technical issues or product shortages, an immediate response is necessary. Customer service is more important now than ever, and businesses must respond appropriately when faced with complaints or other issues. Additionally, businesses must make the process for getting help and assistance easily known. Offering numerous contact options, including text, phone, and email, is another essential aspect of quality customer service.

Businesses are also encouraged to remember the emotional element when it comes to customer interaction. So many people these days are fearful about the future, particularly when it comes to their health and well-being. For businesses that still operate from a physical location, proper cleaning and sanitation procedures are a must. These safety practices must also be widely known to consumers, and posting updates on websites and apps is an efficient way to inform the public.

We’re Here to Support During this Challenging Time

As a partner in your online marketing strategy, SonicSEO.com is happy to help you improve and ensure brand loyalty among your customers. If you’re website is in need of an update, or you’re interested in developing a mobile application to better serve your customers, let’s discuss your options today.

The following are the key steps in the customer buying process.
The companies that can best anticipate these steps and use them to their
advantage have the best chance of engaging consumers on a deeper, more
meaningful level.

Step #1: Awareness

Virtually all consumers begin compiling information before
making a purchase. Much of this information-gathering takes place online, which
underscores the importance of having a solid web presence. In fact, 87% of
shoppers start looking for products online first, regardless if they intend on
making a purchase in-store.

Because your website will most likely be the first
interaction a prospective customer has with your brand, you must make sure that
it’s effective at presenting your business. Think about the questions a
consumer might have at this stage and endeavor to answer them as clearly and
succinctly as possible. You can also use your website to position your brand
and business as an authority by creating how-to articles or linking to other
reputable websites.

Step #2: Evaluation

The evaluation stage is still linked to
information-gathering, but at this point the customer may be comparing
different companies or products on a deeper level. They may also be perusing
reviews from past customers, which can have a significant impact, both
negatively and positively. Consider that 86% of consumers will be reluctant to
move forward with a company after reading negative reviews. Additionally, displaying
positive reviews on your website may affect your sales figures, with some
showing an 18% increase in sales as a result.

Encourage past customers to leave reviews and have a
strategy in place for dealing with negative messages. Effective handling of a
poor review, such as by responding quickly to the issue, offering a sincere
apology, and making a genuine effort to provide a remedy, can actually have a
positive impact on current and future customers.

Step #3: Decision-Making

By this stage, the consumer will be close to making a
decision based on the information gathered in the previous two steps. Because
the customer will be on the verge of making a choice between you and another
company, it’s more important than ever to demonstrate the value of your brand.

As stated above, customer reviews are crucial for showing
the value of what you have to offer. You can also entice a potential buyer in
other ways when he or she has entered the decision-making stage. Offering a
free trial of a product or service increases consumer confidence, while offering
a discount or special on an initial purchase shows appreciation. There are lots
of ways to present the value your business offers consumers; you just need to
pin down those that make the most sense for you.

Step #4: Retention

While it’s slightly more difficult to entice a new customer
into making a sale as it is to keep an existing customer satisfied, there is
still work to be done within the retention stage of the journey. First of all,
you want to leave the channels of communication open between you and the buyer.
You can do this by reaching out with requests for testimonials, providing
surveys, and sending notice of new products that may interest the customer.

You should also strive to provide resources to your
customers at this point. Maybe they have questions about getting the full
functionality out of a product, which can be satisfied by helpful tutorials and
how-tos. Once again, anticipating and fulfilling the customer need is a must
for business success.

Step #5: Advocacy

If you’ve taken the above steps, chances are you have a
satisfied customer on your hands. While this is a benefit all on its own, you
can also leverage a customer’s satisfaction to your advantage. This is why
having a presence on social media platforms is beneficial.

Ask your customers if they wouldn’t mind leaving a review
about your business online, specifically on Facebook or another social media
platform. You can also ask followers to share other information related to your
brand. Posting an amusing meme or informative article entices your followers to
share, which expands awareness of your business. The goal is to get them
talking about your brand in a positive way to as many people as possible.

Along with our technical skill when providing SEO and web design services to clients,
SonicSEO.comis also able
to enhance your understanding of essential concepts like the customer journey.

We’re happy to pass on this information to you, so that your
online marketing strategy can be as informed and effective as possible.  Feel free to contact us if you
have questions about your customers’ journey cycle and how you can capitalize
on it.

However, some SEO strategies do not translate well to large shopping carts. It’s simply not practical to write a quality page of text for thousands of products, let alone thousands of products available in a range of colors, sizes, etc. But you can improve the search engine performance of your shopping cart pages with a few targeted strategies.

Clean Up Your Online Inventory (and Site Maps)

To appear in the search engines results pages (SERPs), product pages must first be indexed by search engine crawlers. If you have thousands, possibly millions of product pages, there’s no telling when/if that will be complete. But you can make it easier for search engine crawlers by making sure your site plan is always up to date. That means:

• When you remove a discontinued product from the shopping cart, remove it from the site plan, too.
• When you add a new product to the shopping cart, add it to the site plan, too.

In short, you want to minimize the number of “404: Page not Found” errors the search engine may turn up.

Make All Products Easy to Find from the Main Menu

Making products easy to locate from the main menu does not mean listing every product in the main menu. Instead, you need categorize, perhaps more than once. In other words, keep the main menu looking clean with a manageable number of primary categories. Expand to secondary and (if necessary) tertiary categories when a user clicks or hovers.

A word of caution: it may be tempting to structure URLs to match your categorization, like this: www.SomeShirtCompany.com/products/apparel/Tshirts/mens/green-polo. But doing so puts multiple folders (indicated by forward slashes) between individual product pages and the root directory; it also makes it more likely that the URL will be cut off in the meta data below the link in the SERPs. It’s better to keep URLs shorter (closer to the root directory), like this: www.SomeShirtCompany.com/apparel/mens-green-polo.

Create Quality Content Where It Makes Sense

Although it’s not practical to create quality content for every single version of every single product, you do need quality content on category pages. Text beyond product descriptions provides context for the search engine crawler so that it knows how to index and rank the pages within the category.

Use Product Schema

Schema.org offers structured data protocols for any type of product or service, and Google values that structure. Shopping cart pages that implement Product schema may rank higher and much of the product data, including star ratings, may appear in the search result snippet. The placement and structure of the search result using Product schema increase online visibility and “clickability.”

The State of Your Shopping Cart

Even scaled down, SEO for an ecommerce shopping cart can take a lot of work. If your shopping cart is managed by SonicSEO.com, then that work is already being done for you. If you need help boosting the visibility of your online offerings, contact us to schedule a free SEO consultation.