If you’re a marketing professional, you know that having a clear understanding of your customer profile is a must—what promotional gifts or branded gifts they prefer, how they’re searching and sharing information, or what other factors are influencing their decision to purchase.
Knowing these will help you tailor your sales strategy for every customer segment whose characteristics and buying habits are uniquely different from others.
Consumers in the UK, for example, are generally known to be loyal to their favourite brands who provide them valuable after-sales services such as hassle-free delivery, free shipping, and product returns. When it comes to where UK consumers prefer to shop, close to 5 out of 10 prefer brick-and-mortar stores while the rest use online, mobile, and social shopping.
By looking at these key attributes, you can come up with specialised strategies to promote your business in the UK effectively.
1. Be visible in search engines
UK customers are practically e-commerce shoppers who are constantly looking for information, products, or services online.
Since a lot of web traffic comes from a Google and Bing search, you should be increasing your efforts in making your brand searchable on these major search engines.
Google Maps is especially recommended if you own a local business so that customers can find you in the search results when they do a search for a particular kind of business in a given locality.
According to Google, there’s been an increase in searches for the “near me” phrase, so make sure your business name, address, and phone number can be found in local searches. You could also narrow down your search keyword for your business by including location markers such as the name of the street or road or other prominent landmarks.
With Google Maps, customers can also review your business, and with 65 percent of UK tagging themselves as loyal customers, it would do you well to always provide your customers with a positive experience so they would be encouraged to leave positive reviews for your brand. These reviews can positively impact your ranking on the search engine.
Paid search can be a great marketing investment since it places your business name at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) as long as you use a good set of keywords, which brings us to the next marketing channel which is search engine optimization (SEO).
British consumers usually prefer researching products and services online. This kind of organic search, according to UK marketing experts, is what’s leading about 49 percent of UK consumers to e-commerce retailers. With SEO, you want to make sure that search engines can find you as you use words or phrases that users typically type in the search box whether they’re found in your content, product description, or in the links to your site.
2. Optimise your website
You probably get the same traffic from search engines on your website, so it makes perfect sense to score high in terms of design, functionality, and ease of use especially since people in the UK are spending a great deal of time on their smartphone. Also, you wouldn’t want to be part of the statistic that says 1 in 3 British millennials do not agree that retailers’ mobile sites are not easy to use.
Website developers agree that there’s a very dynamic interplay between user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). You can’t possibly have a great UI that does not translate to an equally great UX.
If your UI is non-intuitive or if pages are taking too long to load up, you can be sure that customers will quickly abandon what they were trying to do on your site.
Browsing your website on mobile should also give users the same experience as how it is on the desktop. Google data shows that 82 percent of smartphone users rely on their mobile device to research products, but people would still switch to a desktop computer to complete the purchase. Invest in making your website mobile friendly for online shoppers, especially the young consumer groups.
To optimise your website for SEO, you could take advantage of user-generated content. Find out what customers are saying about your brand and use that information to help you improve your strategy in creating content with killer keywords for your site.
3. Establish a good social media image and presence
Millennial Brits are known to seek validation from social media. That said, it’s important that you know what to do to successfully build your company image, presence, and authority on social media channels, so you’ll appear as a trustworthy and dependable brand among young UK consumers.
First on your to-do list is to pick the right platform for your purpose. There’s Facebook for brand awareness, Twitter for real-time engagement, YouTube for educational content, and Instagram to boost your e-commerce promotions.
Once you’ve picked the best channel for your target objectives, you should decide on your posting strategy—what to post, when to post it, and how to promote or share your content. Afterward, listen and respond to what your customers are saying, as statistics say 77 percent of Twitter users feel drawn to a brand that replies to their tweets.
4. Implement traditional marketing strategies
In-store marketing strategies still appeal to British costumers. In fact, statistics say 4 out of 10 UK customers used the physical store at some point when they shopped for clothes, for example.
Further, traditional content marketing is still an effective approach in promoting a brand because people can easily access and understand it.
For example, you could distribute direct mail and other promotional gifts or materials door-to-door in your local neighbourhood. With people’s exposure to this kind of marketing strategy, you’re almost sure that they will have no difficulty understanding how your services work.
Events marketing, especially consumer shows, is also gaining ground fast among UK consumers. The popularity of consumer events seems to come from people’s growing interest to explore cultural and artisanal products in an offline environment where they can connect more closely with vendors of branded gifts in niche markets.
The most successful consumer events usually get support from radio and other traditional media companies, so be sure to partner with them when you’re ready to organise your own.
In a nutshell, UK consumers are privy to both online and offline marketing efforts, but it doesn’t mean you can just throw a one-size-fits-all marketing approach their way. Rather, a multi-faceted approach can open better and brighter opportunities as you try to get through the British market.