Nishadha Silva — September 28, 2018 — September 28, 2018
There are many people out there ready to take your money with the promise of furnishing you with lots of shiny new customers. Bricks and mortar advertising, Google Adwords or another Pay Per Click program, SEO’s (Search Engine Optimizers) and marketing “guru’s” and even buying traffic in bulk. Some of these tactics can work, but there will be lots of competition because your competitors are also doing the same. Whether you’re getting tons of traffic from these methods or scratching around for just a handful of visitors it’s worth making your horizon as wide as possible.
geralt / Pixabay
Most sites have a target demographic that best fits the product, or whatever its raison d’être is, but don’t ignore the people that fall out of that demographic for trivial or unexplored reasons. The world is a big place with a diverse set of people that live in it, include as many people as possible in your efforts, and leave no stone unturned in your efforts to reach everybody.
Mind Your Language
The world is getting smaller and in many countries, English isn’t the first language or even the second language. With so many sites fighting for the top position in English search results, you can target users in other countries who speak a different language.
Try translating your site, or important parts of it, to a few of the more common languages in your target area. Data is available for language diversity of the United States and for many other countries in the world. You can even use Google Analytic or a similar tool to figure out which region is sending you traffic and do the translations accordingly.
Chose a reputed translation provider and be sure you get it verified because you want to retain your credibility with potential customers. Going to one of the online translation utilities, which aren’t perfect, could result in costly mistakes.
Out of Your Comfort Zone
Expanding into a new geographical area is another thing you can do to grow your reach. In the dim distant past, well a decade or so ago, you realistically needed a physical presence in any area you operated in. Even if you did sell online with some arcane technology, the inner workings of which are now lost in the mists of time, customers preferred the security of knowing there was an actual place they could visit if they needed to.
Today, people are more adventurous with their online dealings. Most of them are savvy enough to figure out obvious scams and they know that the credit card companies have their back in many cases. Simply start delivering and marketing in the next city/state/country/continent and replicate your success until you’ve achieved world domination. And if there is enough demand you can open your own shop in the location and give a more personalized service.
Use Inclusivity to Achieve Exclusivity
Don’t forget to consider disabled people in your marketing efforts. It often just takes a few minor changes to make people’s lives easier. You can start by making your website W3C compliant. This instantly makes it much more accessible for disabled people. Large fonts, adequate spacing, alt tags on images all contribute to increased accessibility and user experience.
If you’re selling a physical product there are certain things you can do to make it more accessible for disabled people. Partially sighted, color blind and dyslexic customers can benefit from small improvements in labeling. Other than opening up your product to a whole new market it gives you a good marketing opportunity as well. You can target organizations, magazines etc. that cater to this segment for some low-cost publicity.
Humor and Other Tangents
Humor can be self-perpetuating and adding it to your commercial activities can reap huge rewards. As in the video montage below, the funny adverts take on a life of their own and get passed around through word of mouth, social media and email because they entertain, the fact that they also spread the word on the product or service behind the ad is pure serendipity.
All this is, of course, is nothing new but it’s often a line of thought discounted by the smaller organizations that think you need a big budget. It’s often said that there are only a small number of basic jokes and the rest are derived from there. Start with one from a different niche and try to twist it to fit or mull it over and adapt it to your needs. Don’t begin at the deep end with a video, start out with something simpler like a quote on an image.
Like everything in the world, give one of these ideas a go and keep trying different adaptations and at least one should work. There are no guarantees, only not trying comes with guarantees.
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