6 tips to reach your customers online
Nowadays it is essential for businesses to have an online presence as consumers increasingly use the Internet to evaluate and compare products before making purchasing decisions. At .eu, we want your company to be in that decision-making mix, so here are six tips to help improve your online presence.
1. Keep it simple
It’s easy to make a website too complex. Aim to keep the number of clicks required for a visitor to reach their desired content to a minimum. More than three clicks and visitors tend to lose interest, so keep things intuitive and easy-to-use. Design your website around content that makes sense from your customers’ perspective and use words, names and phrases that customers will recognise.
2. Make it search friendly
Use your company name and branding to label your online presence. Ensure that search terms and keywords you want to be associated with are in your domain name and on your homepage, so that customers and search engines can find you. Remember that with more established top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com or .net, it is likely that the domain names you wish to register might already be taken. As a comparatively young TLD, .eu still has many domain names available, which will stand out as fresh and modern.
3. Mind your language
Think about which language you use online. If you run a local company and want to keep it that way, use your native language. Don’t forget that .eu is also available in .ею (Cyrillic script) and .ευ (Greek script) and that EURid supports Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs), allowing you to approach your customers in their mother tongue.
Alternatively, if you want to reach a wider market, consider using more than one language. When providing the same website in different languages via different domain names, bear in mind that this choice affects search friendliness. It is preferable to attract all your online traffic to one central location rather than to spread it over many websites. With its pan-European appeal, .eu is the perfect solution if you are active in different markets but wish to centralise your online communication. Clients from all over Europe will be able to find everything they need to know about your business in a single online location.
4. Do one thing and do it well
It is better to have a well-planned Internet presence, suited to the needs of your customers and business, rather than trying to be everywhere simultaneously. Social media trends are fast-moving and can be difficult to grasp all at once. Instead, ask yourself where your customers gather online (be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs or discussion forums) and what you want to achieve. Then, take a fresh look at social media and decide which platforms are best suited to your needs.
5. Interact with visitors
Establish a relationship with visitors to your website by inviting them to interact with you online. You might, for example, allow reviews and comments on your services or start a blog about other aspects of your company. Consider making your website a forum for dialogue with your customers – you will gain valuable information from a two-way conversation.
6. Make it your communication hub
Connect all your marketing activities by making your website the hub of your communication strategy. When planning a marketing campaign offline, think about how it will affect your customers’ behaviour online. Will they use a search engine to find your business? How can you best respond to these searches? Will people type in your URL to visit your website? What will they find there to keep them interested? By using tracking tools, you will gain useful data about traffic going to and through your website.