It’s the 4th Quarter & the Holiday Season is
coming.
Sounds like a Football game.
The pressure is on and your business needs to score. What is your Q4 plan? The defensive line is rushing. What does the Quarter Back do? In a real game of Football there is a play and It is executed to score a touchdown. Believe it or not the same thing applies to a business. What is the Q4 plan or play to score?
Unfortunately, many businesses don’t have a plan. Many businesses do what they did the year before. That’s fine if they were satisfied with the results. This article is speaking to the various businesses out there without a Q4 play. A plan is needed to reach your sales goals for the holiday season. Now is the time to implement that play, so you will be on target. It’s like the long jump in the Olympics. The jumper takes a running start then jumps the distance. Now is the time for that running start and in 3 months you will leap to the goals that was set.
Pre Plan Groundwork
Before coming up with any strategy there is research. One needs to get as much data as possible as to where the business stands at that moment. So, let’s say we are talking about a retail store. Now this store has a website. This business must come up with a number for store traffic and website traffic for the last years Q4. For this example, let’s say the store traffic was good but the sales were a bit low. As far as the website traffic is concerned it was very low. Since the store traffic was good, then the only thing that needs to be changed are the types of products that was sold. That is just a matter of knowing what your customers want. On the other hand, we need to ask about getting proper data for the website. The first thing that needs to be done is an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) audit, just click on the Try it Now button on the top of the page. The information contained in this audit will tell you exactly the issues the website is facing. There is a lot more data that could be gotten with other Digital Marketing tools but for this article we will just use the SEO audit.
This is very basic stuff but with this data you can start to form a strategy for the fourth quarter.
Fourth Quarter Strategy
We received the various SEO reports. The research shows that currently the E Commerce site is only getting 1000 users a month. It also shows that the site is not ranking well for major keywords. There are other variables to look at, but we won’t get into that right now. These two factors are the main culprits for low sales. It is telling us that not enough people are seeing the website. The site is not visible enough on the internet.
So, we need more traffic and higher visibility. The ranking
factor has to with how the On & Off Page SEO are doing. The audit will show
what needs to be corrected. Once that is done the site rank will pick up.
What about the website traffic? There are ways to get
traffic. One way is paid traffic and the other is SEO or nonpaid traffic. The
paid traffic will get results extremely fast, but it will cost you. The non-paid
or SEO will bear the cost you pay an SEO expert to do it for you. One the best
ways is to organize a Backlink campaign. A campaign like that will create a
network of web sites that will have links to your E Commerce site. This will
bring a constant flow of traffic that you so desperately need and the more
links you add the more traffic you get. Just one thing, please make sure that you
make the network from qualified sites. If you don’t then there is a risk that
Google may penalize your listing and cause a major loss in your ranking with
google.