10 Essential Tips for Your eCommerce Marketing Strategy
The world of eCommerce has evolved massively throughout the past few years. While once, it was a nice option one may decide to choose, today, it’s a necessity, both for consumers and for merchants. For many people now, online is the primary way of purchasing things, which opens up great new opportunities to those who want to try their hand at operating their own eCommerce website.
Considering the level of competition the average online store has to fight through today, though, it is clear that just setting up a website and waiting for customers to come is far from enough. The growth of eCommerce created the necessity for more refined marketing strategies, and everyone who is to keep up needs to get on board. Here are 10 essential tips to take your eCommerce marketing to the next level.
Boost your product pages
Presenting your business and products in the best light possible is absolutely crucial in order to make a favourable impression on any potential customer. Not only should your product pages be visually pleasing, but they should also provide enough information. Format product descriptions for easy readability, and use the right keywords in product names to boost your chances of being found. As for the visual representation, make sure you include plenty of high-quality images. Customers appreciate images of the product from various angles and even when in use. Add appropriate alt text to all your images, and you might just see some traffic coming from Google’s image search.
Work on your branding
Your marketing efforts will only yield long-term results if you devote ample attention to your branding as well. In the sea of other stores, it’s easy to get lost. If you don’t have a recognizable name, logo, and brand presence, customers may not even find their way back to your site. So, if you have not tackled this yet, it should be on your to-do list. Besides a cohesive visual identity, branding will also mean a consistent voice through channels. Think about who your target customers are and build a brand they will be able to identify with.
Tap into content marketing
Content is king in the world of digital marketing today—you might have heard this phrase countless times. People seek out content for various reasons. They may be looking for information, inspiration, or entertainment. If you manage to produce content that tackles these, you will get to promote your store in an organic manner. But what kind of content should you focus on? Today, video content may be the most effective at grabbing attention and communicating information. Shooting tutorials and product demonstrations are sure to establish authority. However, supplementing this with textual content in the form of a blog is highly recommended for SEO purposes.
Get on social media
As social media sites become search engines of their own right, it becomes clear that a business misses out on massive opportunities if it doesn’t leverage these platforms. Social media marketing can undeniably be tricky. While it may be free, maintaining social media accounts does take a lot of resources in the form of time and effort. You will need to learn the ropes of each site to work them effectively. For instance, on Instagram, you can take advantage of the fairly recent shopping feature and tag products directly. If the majority of your target audience is on Facebook, you can do something similar there. Just remember that staying active is the most important on social media. If you’re struggling to keep up, you can outsource social media management with no problem.
Invest in ads
If your business can afford to invest in ads, it may not be a bad idea to look into your options. While your primary goal should still be an organic reach, paid ads can give you a much-needed boost in the meantime. Today, advertising is much more advanced than it once was, so you don’t have to worry about your money going down the drain. Ads can now very accurately target customers that have the highest chance of being interested in your offer. Your most important task will be creating an irresistible offer and a landing page that delivers on your promise.
Optimize your website
Even though people love to spend their free time browsing social media, when they are set to find something they need, they won’t be clicking through pages after pages of Google results. This is why you should invest in improving your search engine rankings. Good SEO involves much more than just picking the appropriate keywords. Your site may need to go through some changes to improve its speed, layout, and structure. You will need to optimize your store for mobile and devote special attention to local SEO if your business relies on local orders. Queensland-based businesses should, for instance, seek out professionals in SEO from Brisbane to achieve the best results.
Don’t skip email marketing
The next marketing strategy no online store should pass up on is email marketing. Your mailing list is something that you should be working on from day 1, if not even sooner. The key to a successful email marketing campaign is providing value. Your newsletter should not only include personalized recommendations, it should also update interested parties about relevant news regarding your shop, business events, and, of course, any discounts and promotions you might be having. Making some of these exclusive is a good way to boost the signup rate.
Try influencer marketing
The next marketing strategy you may want to tap into is influencer marketing. Here, the most important step is finding the right people for the job. They should be relevant people to your target audience with a degree of authority instead of “celebrities” with a big following that live on promotions. In fact, influencer marketing does not have to be a million-dollar investment. Small businesses can reap notable results with the help of micro-influencers. Despite a smaller following, micro-influencers have a great power to connect you with just the right niche audience. Their promotion will also be more like a personal recommendation than a full-fledged ad, which can sometimes be a plus.
Use reviews
Reviews are crucial for any eCommerce business. Not only are they a sound way to convince leads of your reliability, but they can also be used as a powerful tool in your marketing: reviews can boost your SEO with the help of schema markups. These allow you to display ratings right on the search results pages so people will be more likely to click on your shop. So, encouraging your satisfied customers to spare you a couple of minutes to leave you a positive review is highly recommended. Having a strategy in place for dealing with negative ones is also a good idea.
Rinse and repeat
A successful conversion is not the end of the story—in fact, it should be just the beginning. Repeat customers are extremely valuable for a business as retaining them doesn’t cost nearly as much as converting a new lead from zero. There are many ways you can entice customers to come back. Have them sign up for your mailing list, offer them a discount coupon upon the completion of their purchase, give them free samples of other products… You can also retarget leads that failed to fully convert with the help of cookies and PPC ads and bring them back to your site.
Marketing your small eCommerce business in the sea of competition can seem daunting. However, marketing does not have to break the bank. The aforementioned tried and tested methods are essential parts of any marketing strategy today but are also available to businesses of all sizes, so give them some thought.