“Ghostbusters” is one of my all-time favorite movies. It has everything: ghosts, a giant marshmallow man and a song from Ray Parker Jr. that sounds suspiciously like a Huey Lewis song. The film was certainly ahead of its time, but not just in terms of combining special effects and comedy.
If you look a little closer you can see that Peter, Ray, Egon and Winston also gave examples on how to improve your online marketing performance. Hey, that’s pretty impressive considering the movie came out in 1984!
Copyright Sony Pictures Digital
Let’s take a look at the five ways the Ghostbusters can help improve your online marketing:
1.
“If someone asks you if you were a God, you say yes!”: Let Your Users Know the Benefits of Shopping With You!
There are billions of sites on the Internet. Why should a customer buy from you? Don’t just expect them to because you have a website. You may not be a God like Gozer, but don’t let that stop you! Talk yourself up and let your users know the benefits of buying with you. This will increase the user’s trust in your site, reduce their buying anxiety and will ultimately result in an increase in online sales.
Some examples of potential offers that will help entice a user to buy with you include:
- Free shipping
- Reassurance that the online transaction will be secure with a Verisign logo or other security logo
- Show your customer service ratings with the Better Business Bureau, Bizrate or trusted outside 3rd party company
- Show the logo of well-known clients. This can engender trust and get a user thinking “Well, if that company does business with them they must be trustworthy”
- Copy that lets them know you have a no spam policy
- Highlighting your experience in the business vertical or listing how long you have been in business
2.
“Close…but definitely…WRONG.” – Don’t Expect People to Just Know What To Do on Your Site
How many times have you been on a site and thought “What the heck do I do now?!” Don’t let that happen on your site. If it isn’t clear to the user how to move forward on your site, they aren’t going to spend time figuring it out – they’ll leave and you’ll lose the sale.
Make sure your call to action buttons such as “Add to Cart”, “Subscribe” or “Buy Now” are visible and in a logical place in the user’s line of sight. Don’t expect them to be mind readers!
3.
“It just occurred to me that we really haven’t had a successful test of this equipment.” – Your Users Are Not Your QA Team
When you are launching new pages or functionality, test them thoroughly on different browsers, operating systems and connection speeds. Don’t just check desktop computers either. More and more users are accessing your site from tablets and mobile devices. Get a head of the curve and QA your site on these devices as well. Be on the lookout for broken images, misspellings, security errors, broken links and other potential issues.
The moment a user finds one of these you appear unprofessional and untrustworthy. The result will be users abandoning your site and you losing a sale. Oh, and when a user encounters a site issue 99.9% of the time they don’t email your tech team about the issue either. So get it fixed before launch!
4.
“I think we better split up…“Good idea, we can do more damage that way” – Diversify the Media Mix That Brings Traffic to Your Site
How are people getting to your site? By diversifying your paid and organic traffic sources you can avoid becoming too dependent on one source of traffic. Becoming dependent on one source of traffic will expose your company to unnecessary risk from price hikes, algorithm changes, distribution issues, you name it.
Expand your efforts to get traffic from multiple search engines (paid and organic), blogs, social media and banner or email marketing. By diversifying your media mix you’ll have more options available that will help you meet your goals.
5.
“Get her!”– Plan Your Year Accordingly!
Build a yearlong plan to try new sources of traffic and new site designs that won’t potentially interfere with the time(s) of year you generate the most revenue. The last thing you want is to try a new site design and have it perform poorly during your company’s most important sales period.
Try using the slower times of year to improve web site load time, optimise your landing pages, analyse your media campaigns to cut keywords or vendors that aren’t performing and launch test campaigns with new vendors. This will ensure the site and your campaigns are optimised to get the best performance for the busiest part of the year.
