To know where to market and promote your business online, first you need to know where do your potential customers start searching or looking when they want to buy something online.
As you can see from the simple chart above, majority of the people (36%) start their search on a General Search Engine such as Google. This means that out of 1,000 of your potential customers, 360 of them will start searching in Google for items that you sell as their first point of action.
This is followed by 15% of people who will visit a specific website on the particular subject in order to find the things they want. As an example, people who are looking to buy or rent properties will first visit iProperty, or Carlist for buying cars.
The third and fourth highest starting points are having the same amount of 7%, which they will first go and read past customers’ reviews on the item or look for those items in an online local directory. There are also a fair amount of people who will start searching by hunting for coupons or deals either via mobile apps or website, such as Shopback.
Most people perform a search first
The first point of contact is still Search Engine like Google, which tops the list. So, how should you capture this majority group of people when it comes to marketing your business online?
The easiest and most obvious way is to place your ads on Google itself. When people search for your products, your website will appear in the search result. This can significantly help to increase your website traffic and ultimately leads to sales.
Presenting your business to the people when they are actively searching and wanting your products is definitely much effective than keep throwing your ads at them when they are not interested in it. This is why Google Search Ads have higher amount of conversion rate when you do it right as compare to other online advertisement methods.
How do they search?
From the above table of a research performed in Jan 2016, it can be seen that smartphone is consistently having a higher percentage of usage no matter where they are. People now tend to use their smartphone to search for a product no matter they are at home, work/school, shopping or on the go. Desktop is seeing a decline in usage when they are outside for obvious reasons, where laptop and tablet aren’t really the popular devices that people will use to search for product.
What does this mean?
It means that your website must be responsive or mobile friendly to cater to these majority of users. Having a terrible mobile website will deliver a negative experience to users who landed on your website through their mobile phone, which is not going to help with your conversation rate and sales.
Make sure you build a responsive website and is able to scale down to fit the display of modern smartphones.
Final Words
You may be reluctant to invest in search engine pay-per-click but by knowing the statistics of how much advantages search engines have, you should really consider investing in search engine marketing such as Google AdWords, right about now.
In addition, stop relying on your old website which designed by a freelance designer more than 5 years ago, it’s probably outdated and not fit in the current technology settings. Redesign your website to make it responsive so you can capture the tremendous amount of mobile users.
Sanz Teoh
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