Better Business: How big is your window?

Lorelei Gibb advises on how social networking can drive both web traffic and store footfall.

How big is your shop window? How do customers find you? Are you on the High Street, or in an area where thousands see your business and are lured inside to buy your wares? How about dramatically broadening the reach of your display, of getting your shop front seen by (potentially) millions of clients? You can’t physically increase in size, but there are myriad tools at your disposal for getting your business noticed without people having to walk past to find you.

All businesses need a website if they want to be found – no excuses. When was the last time someone picked up the Yellow Pages to search for “ink cartridges, London”? The majority of people search online no matter what it is they are after.

Of course the competition for being found online is as intense as enticing customers in store; your website needs to be constantly working for you and you need to ‘market’ your website in much the same way as you need to ‘market’ your store. It’s as important to get people to visit your online shop window as it is to physically visit your premises.

And this is where your social media can play a vital role – each time that you add a new picture of your latest product to your website, tweet about it, upload the photo to your Facebook page, post a link to your Google+ account, add a new pin to the relevant Pinterest board, share a quick Vine post or add a new YouTube demonstration video.

The more that you add information online, the more that you will be found online – if you want people to buy from you then they need to know about you. So make yourself as visible as possible in as many places as you can.

Lorelei Gibb is Marketing Director at www.dolphinupgrades.com