People are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that they can do many things online. From booking flights to finding a restaurant, it’s easier and easier to perform tasks with just a few clicks of a mouse. Because of this, more and more businesses are turning to online directories to help them find customers and partners. In this blog post, we’ll discuss five ways that online directories can benefit your marketing agency.

Product Listings

If you’re selling a product that is not manufactured by you or a company you represent, you’ll need to provide a way for potential customers to find your product. Product listings are perfect for this as they allow businesses to both create a free ad for their product and allow customers to find what they’re looking for easily.

For example, if you sell bedsheets that are produced by Simplicity Bedding, you’ll want to appear on search engines like Google and eBay for keywords like “Simplicity Bedding” or “Bedsheet”. If someone types in these keywords when searching for products related to mattress storage, your product will appear near or at the top of the search results.

Web Design

Even if you’re not the kind of business that specializes in Web design, it’s still important to have a solid background in this field. Why? Think about this for a second. Without solid Web design skills, you’ll have a difficult time creating an effective e-commerce store. Or, if you’re doing it yourself, you’ll have a tough time making sure that your site is user-friendly and has the proper content and navigation.

Sales

Just like with product listings, if you’re selling a product that is not manufactured by you or a company you represent, you’ll need a way for potential customers to find your product. One of the best things about online directories for marketing agencies is that they can help with sales. When a new customer searches for your product on a search engine, your online directory’s listing will appear along with the search results.

Take a look at the screenshot below. The yellow box represents how the user’s eyes will naturally fall when they use Google to search for “digital marketing agencies” — a phrase that could be relevant to the user’s needs but is not specifically geared toward an agency.

The result is that the customer will see your product or service listed among a sea of other products, and if they’re interested, your sales representative will have an opportunity to close a deal.

Reputation

Even if you’re just starting out and don’t have much of a reputation to protect, it’s still important to maintain a good one. After all, your online directory’s reputation is what you, the business owner, bring to the table. When other businesses or individuals discover your directory, they’ll have an opportunity to contribute content and build up your reputation.

For example, if you make a concerted effort to promote a healthy lifestyle and encourage people to be their own health experts, you could build up a reputable reputation for being “the health agency” (i.e. a well-known and trusted source for health information).

In a nutshell, when you establish a reputable source for health information, people will turn to you first when they need advice on health issues. In the long term, this could lead to more clients and, hopefully, increased productivity.

Research And Analysis

If you’re doing any sort of market research or analysis, from identifying competitors to creating buyer persona’s, you’ll need a way to discover who and what your customers are searching for online — and you’ll need to do this consistently. To get started, you can use free tools like Google Analytics or Ahrefs to discover the types of keywords and phrases your customers are using to find your product.

Once you have this information, you can begin to build your buyer personas and develop a buyer’s list — a group of individuals who have expressed interest in your product. After you have a good chunk of your buyer’s list, it’s time for B2C marketing analytics, which stands for “Business to Consumer”. This means your strategy will be focused on attracting, engaging and converting this audience into buyers of your product or service.

Pricing

Finally, we’ve talked a lot about how to get customers — now it’s time to cover the important issue of how to get them to buy your product. One thing you’ll need to do is establish a good price point for your product that is in line with industry standards and doesn’t leave a lot to be desired. When it comes down to pricing, nothing is more frustrating for a business than setting a price that is too high only to discover that no one will actually pay that amount for their product or service.

In order to avoid this scenario, you’ll want to set a price that is within reason and, based on the market demand, will either encourage or compel buyers to take action.

If your pricing is not set in line with industry standards, you run the risk of alienating existing customers and losing out on potential revenue — both of which are huge blow to your bottom line.

In summary, setting up a successful online directory for a marketing agency takes a lot of planning and research — and, hopefully, some success stories along the way.