How to advertise your e-commerce store
You’ve already seen that e-ommerce is a growing industry, and you know how to build your own e-commerce store. All of your products are uploaded on your website, and you’ve set up your payment portal and domain name. You’re almost ready to capture the growing audience of internet shoppers, but a vital element to the success of your business has yet to be determined. What is the best way for you to market your e-commerce store so that it stands out amongst your competitors and also captures your target audience? This article will discuss the best ways to advertise in the e-commerce space for both new and established businesses.
What is e-commerce marketing?
E-commerce marketing is distinct from traditional marketing methods and seeks to drive more traffic to your online store, with the ultimate goal of generating and retaining paying customers. It’s important that your marketing strategy operates with this end goal in mind. eCommerce marketing can be used for specific promotions or general brand awareness. You might need a specific approach, depending on what you’re trying to promote, so it’s important to know your sales goals before you plan your strategy and you should ensure that your strategy aligns with these goals.
It’s important to keep in mind that tracking your analytics is useful for all of the marketing strategies mentioned, as you’ll be able to gain invaluable data about what customers are engaging with. Now that you know you should always look at your analytical data, here are our top ecommerce marketing strategy recommendations for your store.
Content Marketing
Content creation is a growing field at present, because businesses have figured out ways to leverage its power to improve customer loyalty and sales. Content refers to a number of different resources, and can include images, blog posts, articles, podcasts, social media posts, videos, email newsletters, infographics and a whole lot more.
One of the biggest benefits of posting unique and creative content is that it gains positive customer interaction, and promotes conversation around your brand and its offerings while still promoting new information to your audience.
Content Marketing is also very useful for improving Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) rankings. You might find that you want to feature your blog on your online store, or create long content guides to assist customers in using your product. If executed well, content marketing can be incredibly powerful in connecting with customers and establishing a unique voice for your ecommerce store.
An easy way to start out with content marketing is to brainstorm a few key ideas that relate to your business and visit competitors’ stores to get a feel for the kind of content that customers are responding to. You should ideally map out a content calendar, where you can plan your content ahead of time to ensure that you are consistently engaging with your audience.
If you don’t have time to create a new post every day, consider using User-Generated Content (UGC) in your content calendar. UGC is helpful for establishing social evidence of customer satisfaction, and includes product reviews on websites or social media channels. Simply put, people trust other people,as it’s reported that 54% of customers trusted information from their peers, compared to just 20% of customers who trusted the brand itself, without considering other customers.
Social media and multichannel marketing
Social media marketing is experiencing a boom, and for a good reason. Social media channels are popular platforms where you can advertise your store, and two major channels to consider are Facebook and Instagram.
Instagram alone has over 500 million daily users, and is the preferred platform for connecting consumers and influencers with specific brands.
Social media marketing allows you to take a personal approach with regards to generating user engagement with your brand, boosting website traffic and generating new sales.
It’s always a good idea to advertise yourself in as many places as possible, and this is especially true for eCommerce marketing as there are a number of different internet channels to consider.
Multichannel marketing includes placing yourself on social media as well as marketplaces such as Amazon, Ebay, Gumtree and Etsy, to name a few. This is a good idea because these platforms generate substantial traffic in addition to the traffic that your website is receiving. Each channel has a unique set of visitors, so it’s a good idea to determine what you’ll post to each channel. You’ll gain increased visibility and brand awareness, which can ultimately lead to increased customer conversions. Remember to maintain a consistent brand voice regardless of your chosen channels – it’s important for customers to have an identical experience when interacting with your brand, regardless of where this takes place online.
Email marketing
If you’re looking for a powerful way to send unique messages to many customers at once, look no further than email marketing. You should remember, though, to be careful about the content within your emails, as you don’t want your customers to brush you off as ‘spam’ in their overflowing inboxes.
The key to avoiding yet another deleted email is to personalize your emails as much as possible. Your email campaigns can include new promotions, however it should also include useful and informative content. For example, remember to include your pricing and shipping details if you’re having a sale on a specific delivery item.
Some useful information to add to your emails includes upcoming events related to your business or broader industry and any news or updates in the business that you want to share. Customers appreciate transparency on all levels, and email marketing should not be seen as a ‘free-for-all’ in terms of their content.
SEO
SEO is an abbreviated word for Search Engine Optimisation, and describes exactly that. It’s absolutely essential for an eCommerce store to ensure that its search rankings are performing well, as most customers do not have the time to click through multiple Google pages to find a product.
To rank highly, you’ll need to constantly update your website with relevant and high-quality content. Your website should have a positive user experience, and should contain minimal errors. You should include keywords into your product titles and descriptions. This may include commonly searched keywords in blog posts or other resources. SEO is crucial for improving traffic to your store, and should be included in conjunction with any other marketing plan.
PPC
PPC is an abbreviation for pay-per-click marketing, and describes a form of online advertising where an advertiser will pay when potential customers click on ads that redirect them to a website. You can think of it as paying for traffic, rather than growing traffic organically through search results or content marketing.
PPC is a useful method for increasing conversions as more people will visit your website, but it can be more costly than organic growth. It’s important that customers actually convert when they are redirected to your website.
PPC is quite complicated for a beginner and can benefit from expert knowledge. Typically, a successful PPC ad will contain appropriate keywords and keyword grouping, a good landing page design, and great copy that promotes traffic. Successful PPC campaigns can assist with your eCommerce store ranking higher on search engine pages, so it’s certainly a powerful strategy that will require effort to execute well.
Partnering with influencers
Depending on your industry, it might be useful to leverage popular people and existing brands to increase traffic and brand awareness for your e-commerce store.
Influencer marketing is increasingly popular, and includes partnering with social media influencers, who have significant followings. Influencers are generally established as trustworthy by their audience. This may take the form of product reviews and free product given to influencers, but paying for a review or social media post is usually preferred.
Before partnering with any influencer, you should check the quality of their content, a statistic check to ensure their audience lines up with your target demographic, and ideally, some extra checks for follower genuinity against fake accounts. Influencer agencies can help in partnering your business with specific influencers if you are struggling to decide who to work with.
Influencers are popular because their content is relatable to their audience, and is often true to their values and beliefs.
Upselling and cross-promotion
Upselling refers to convincing a customer to purchase a slightly more premium product than before. Sometimes, the sales value of doing this can be higher than acquiring a new customer – particularly if your business offers multiple versions of the same product. It’s important that customers are aware of all your available offerings, as they might benefit from a premium product that better fits their needs without knowing it.
You can do this by emphasising product differences, including comparison tables and images. However, you should make sure that your upsell attempts are relevant to the original product that was viewed by your prospective customer, including sensitivity to price constraints. There’s no point in trying to upsell a product that will not fulfil your customer’s needs, as you’re likely to end up with a bad review.
You’ve probably noticed recommendations on other eCommerce stores based on what you’ve browsed. This is called cross-promotion, and can include accessories for products or products from the same broader category. This can be useful for capturing customer interest, and would be a good data point to look at in your analytics report.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it’s clear that there are many different avenues to consider when putting together an ecommerce marketing strategy for your business. You should consider utilising SEO and using analytics and insights in combination with any other marketing strategy to make sure that your customers are finding your website. Other options to consider include content marketing, social media and multichannel marketing, email campaign marketing, upselling and cross-promotion, pay-per-click and influencer marketing.
Regardless of your strategy, you should consider getting expert insights that could boost your online store from ShoppingFeeder. ShoppingFeeder makes it simple for you to sell your products on multiple channels and you can even run and track promotional campaigns for your ecommerce store via the ShoppingFeeder app. Shoppingfeeder also helps with campaign management – meaning they’ll set up and manage your Google Ads account to optimise your spend and make sure you’ll get the broadest reach possible.Click here to connect with one of our Google experts.
