Attract Informed Customers by Automating Sales Economically

You own a small business that requires active selling on the floor and spending good advertising dollars creating much needed brand awareness. You realize that selling requires a lot of time explaining details and convincing the customer and wish that you had a quicker, more efficient way of selling your product, be it a used car or mobile phones. So what can you do?

Automate part of your selling process. By automate I don’t mean that you utter the words ‘sell automato’ and by magic your services or products starts selling. What I mean is a shift from conventional selling to a more logistic intensive, yet easily manageable system of selling whereby the customer can interact with your services and products online. Company websites are one way of achieving this but often struggle unsuccessfully to appear high up in search results for keywords relevant to their business. Search engine optimization can be an extremely time consuming and testing job if you have to do it yourself. But there is another free and easy way to get your products and services noticed.

You need to advertise your products on websites that already have great search result ratings. You can opt for directories and forums, but the truly active and interactive place to advertise is online classifieds. In the recent years online classifieds have grown with a large amount of successful sites catering to buyers and sellers all around the world. All you need to do is find a few online classifieds that are truly active and have good rankings and you can start getting an instant response to your advertising. However, you need to make it effective and noticeable.

Online classifieds allow you to upload pictures and videos, manage your ads efficiently and are a direct link to your particular kind of customer. All you need to do is make a corporate video using a video camera and your best executives, get a few customer testimonials and you’re all set to go. It doesn’t have to be professionally edited but it must come across as serious, informative and trustworthy. If you are a used car dealership you can take pictures of all your cars and film videos for each of them always mentioning how reliable your services are and how all the cars you’ve sold are owned by delighted customers.

Post a corporate ad and keep it running all the time - in other words don’t let it expire. Post ads for all your used cars or products along with pictures and video and post at intervals of a few hours all through your working hours. This will help ensure that a larger audience accessing the site at different times during the day views your ads. Post ads for tow to three used cars at a time so that people know you have variety and can probably find what they’re looking for through your services. And don’t forget to mention your star products and services in each ad along with a few impressive details about your company.

One of the benefits of following this strategy is having your ‘virtual sales team’, in the form of videos, accessible to interested buyers at anytime twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. The other benefit is you’re educating the client before they walk into your office or showroom and providing them a list of your key products and services. Most people will be more inclined to a product or two before visiting you, resulting in enormous time saving. And the greatest benefit is the instant results you get at almost no cost.

It may seem like hard work but the key thing to remember is for your business to grow hard work alone isn’t enough. With tough competition and limited budgets, small businesses need to minimize the cost per sale and use effective and cheap alternatives to promote their business. So whether its used cars for sale in Karachi or a carpet cleaning service in the London, online classifieds provide a highly practical and inexpensive form of automating part of your sale and bringing in a more desirable customer type.