While it may be tempting to market to everyone with your website design, content and social media in order to increase your sales, generalising can actually limit your ability to build relationships and gain a long term following, even reduce the amount of website traffic you receive in the first place. By finding your business’ niche and targeting your website specifically to their needs and wants you will find it easier to define your market, attract the right customers and increase conversions.

The main benefit of businesses using social media is to establish and reinforce a sense of trust and credibility with your target audience. When they find your product or service useful, when they trust you then they will buy from you.

eCommerce and social media have traditionally been kept separate. Social media was useful to promote a website, product or service but it just often didn’t amount to sales and conversions. In 2013 only 1.55% of all traffic to the top eCommerce sites came from social media platforms. But things are changing.

As 2015 draws to a close we begin to look toward the trends predicted for digital in 2016. In spite of the advances in technology and digital devices, consumerism is, and always will be, about people and their fundamental wants and needs. Determining the best ways to service these fundamental wants and needs will be the way to help your business succeed in the digital sphere.

By tapping into the psychology behind social media you can bypass the noise and clutter and reach your audience on a whole new level. You can connect, engage and gain a wider audience.

SEO as we get further into 2015 is vastly different to that of 2014 so if you have not done so already, now is the time to go through the SEO checklist and make sure everything is as it should be. It’s not a long checklist but it is an extremely important one.

When building your business you need to always keep one thought front of mind. People connect with and buy from people, even in a B2B situation.

Each and every day around 2.5 billion pieces of content are shared. That’s a lot of competition. And that underlines why brand storytelling is so critical to businesses today.

Brand storytelling is the ability to create an ongoing conversation about your business, product or service. The concept is based around shifting the focus from the product to the brand through telling of the story. From here the approach is to offer subtle and creative content so that your readers don’t feel pressured or pushed into buying.

Driving and maintain website traffic is an ongoing process and is fairly complex so if anyone offers you a ‘get rich quick’ type plan to rapidly increase your website traffic it’s often too good to be true.

Below are the 5 worst offenders, tactics that won’t generate valuable traffic so stop wasting your time with them:

You can be running fantastic AdWords, social media and SEO campaigns, driving large amounts of traffic to your site but people may not be buying because your website itself is turning them away. Web design drive 94% of first impressions so if your design isn’t cutting it, people will just click away.