In recent years, the ecommerce sector has been on a meteoric rise, which is great.
Except, it also means that you have to deal with an increasingly crowded marketplace.
And that means you have to compete and perform better, which you can only do if you have an ecommerce marketing strategy that suits your business and caters to your audience.
So, there are basic ingredients that every killer ecommerce marketing strategy ought to have.
When creating an eCommerce marketing strategy, there are things that you will need to tweak to suit your unique circumstances. A holistic marketing agency can help you a great deal in this regard. Before we spill the beans on the fundamental elements of a killer strategy.
The first three steps in a standard marketing funnel are:
Those are the steps where you should have a stellar ecommerce marketing strategy.
You need to make sure your brand reaches your target audience and generates awareness among them. Once you have made them discover your brand, you need to bring them to your site. In other words, you need to drive traffic. Make sure they can easily browse your web store.
By now, you should have some sense of what an ecommerce marketing strategy is and why you need one. Now, it's time to get acquainted with the elements that you need for your strategy.
This is the starting point of any marketing strategy, especially in ecommerce. Since you do not have a physical storefront, you need to invest your resources strategically to reach the right people. Otherwise, if you rely on casting as wide a net as possible, you will quickly run out of resources. Hence, you need to have a sharp sense of who your audience is. You need to understand their demographic profile, their income, and interests, among other things.
Continuous studies have confirmed one cardinal truth about consumer behavior in recent years: customers are more likely to buy from brands they trust. Give them information, DIY guides, or solutions to their problems, and they will be more likely to choose your brand.
Furthermore, this is your best shot at being discovered by your target audience as well.
If you have the best content on the topics related to your products/services, people will discover your brand and perhaps ultimately make a purchase.
Simply having the most well-written and informative content may not help.
Search engines such as Google need to be able to discover them easily. And that can only happen if you have a solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy in place. You can outsource this to an external partner or build a team in-house and arm them with SEO tools.
By focusing on product listing optimization, you will give your brand the opportunity to rank above your competitors and reach more customers in such a competitive environment.
As an ecommerce business, your primary mode of communication with your prospects and customers will be social media channels. You need to ensure an active, engaging, and quirky presence on all the social media channels your target audience spends their time on. Here are some tips for creating eye-grabbing social content that drives engagement and results.
Consumers are more likely to buy from brands other people have recommended them.
In other words, word-of-mouth marketing is more effective than brand marketing. That is why you need to tie up with influencers with whom you share an audience in common.
However, do not simply reach for the most prominent influencers. Partner with those who can bring the most value to your brand, ones that are likely to resonate with your offerings.
In addition to influencers, affiliates can raise awareness and drive traffic to your site as well. You cannot tie up individually with every influencer. So, you need to allow people to partner with you voluntarily as affiliates. They can spread the word about your brand in exchange for a commission. This is an easy way to grow your ecommerce business with minimal effort.
Paid marketing is basically an umbrella term used to describe all sorts of paid advertising on online platforms. Whether it is advertising on social media or search engines, paid marketing constitutes everything. It is a relatively simple way to promote your brand. It can lead to quick results but it comes at a significant cost. So, you need to be extremely cautious and strategic.
Your ecommerce marketing strategy does not end the moment you make prospective customers arrive at your site. You need to make sure that they can easily browse through your site and check out easily. Do your research on effective methods to enhance discoverability.
If you want to convert, retain, upsell, and cross-sell to online customers, giving them a personalized experience is best. Therefore, you should try to make sure that every customer or prospect receives personalized discounts, reminders, recommendations, etc.
This can form part of your email marketing strategy.
For instance, you can send personalized deals and recommendations via email. Moreover, you can send customers reminders about products abandoned in their carts. Such initiatives can definitely help you scale your business by driving conversions and improving retention rates.
An ecommerce marketing strategy is no longer an option. It is a necessity.
The most effective strategies that you can follow include investing in content marketing, focusing on social media, optimizing your content for search engines, and much more.
If you follow these strategies well, your ecommerce site will be on the right track for 2022.
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To win at ecommerce, you need to sell on multiple sales channels. The days of single-channel selling are over; you need to be wherever your customers are. Now, the struggle with that is that each channel requires its own version of your product information. The same content from your web store won't perform on social media unless it meets the platform's requirements.
Thankfully, a Product Information Management (PIM) tool can help ease the headache of manual data entry and help you image product listing optimization for each channel.