Imagine you are searching for a gift for that special someone in your life. While searching Google for a specific item, numerous brands and items will show up for that particular item. You might have to search through hundreds of websites to find the particular item you are looking for as Google ranks. E-commerce continues to grow year after year as the world is turning to more online shopping.
Many businesses and corporations are surging with online e-commerce retail amongst their competition, and many are trying to update their e-commerce marketing strategy to attract and keep clients. So you need to know how to set apart your business from the competition. Questions that might arise around the boardroom about creative marketing strategies would be: “What is the brand’s objective?”, “Who are your targeted customers?”, “What are the brand’s long-term goals?”, and “How do we measure success?” Knowing the answers to each question will help you reach your company goals, establish a successful e-commerce presence, and establish a loyal customer base.
You need to be able to make an emotional connection in motivating your audience to trust your brand. Defining your brand’s objectives in researching potential customer(s) and establishing long term marketing goals on how to sell your product(s). Throughout this blog, we will go over the different items you can implement into your e–commerce marketing strategy.
Importance of E-Commerce Marketing Strategy
E-commerce marketing is the act of awareness and action towards their online goods and services for customer consumption. An e-commerce marketing strategy can use social media, search engines, pay per click, digital content, and email marketing to attract potential online purchases. E-commerce advertising falls under developing an established marketing strategy to reach more customers and boost conversions and brand awareness effectively.
Determining the approach of the company’s brand strategy will help showcase the best method for the brand’s objectives for loyal customers. You are showcasing that your brand exists, and its impact on the retail or e-commerce industry defines the start of a successful marketing strategy. We will now dive into how certain areas in marketing benefit for a successful online presence.
Digital E-Commerce Marketing Strategies & SEO
First, businesses should use low-cost marketing strategies to showcase their e-commerce business and other marketing channels. These tactics are the building blocks on establishing a successful e-commerce marketing strategy for your online store.
Search engine optimization or SEO is highly essential when it comes to e-commerce marketing techniques. You need to ensure that your website and product pages are optimized with the appropriate keywords that your customers are searching for.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the core pillars in e-commerce marketing techniques and works closely with content marketing.
We typically refer to ‘content marketing‘ by blogging or video marketing for the produced business. However, content marketing means any relevant content that can help increase brand awareness and improve your website’s ranking in search engines; items include blogs/guest blogging and customer reviews. Here are some ways that content marketing can help with your e-commerce storefront.
Blogs for Services, Products or Industry
Writing blog posts is one of the easiest but time-consuming ways to produce content for your e-commerce site. Blogs should be centered around the different services, products, or industry-related topics to attract potential customers and keep them on your website. Having blogs relevant to what your customers are looking for will help increase viewership on the site and improve search engine rankings. These blogs should be engaging for the reader to consider purchasing the respected service and turn them into leads.
Guest Posts for Additional Websites
Writing guest blog posts increase your products’ online marketing on another business’ website to the relevant audience. Guest posts can come for a price, but some are potentially free depending on the site you want to push your blog on. Extending your blog to another website can help increase the internal and outbound links on your website. Before publishing a blog with a website, you need to research the site’s page authority and the quality of blogs to determine if you want to engage with the site’s audience.
Customer Reviews
Before purchasing or working with a company, the customer will review the respected review. Customers’ engagement with reviewing your products helps potential customers determine if your products are truthful for what they are offering. The review sections for products are usually the determining factor for potential customers to purchase or abandon their shopping carts as the reviews come from similar individuals. Reviews for a company’s products or services can be authentic or sometimes brutally honest.
Receiving excellent reviews is another marketing technique that your company can use for content marketing or referral purposes. Encourage your current or former clients to write reviews about the products or customer experiences that they had to showcase what you can offer your clientele – sometimes, the reports do the selling for you. Establishing a high-quality rating on Google My Business with customer reviews can also increase leads and develop loyal customers.
Importance of Pay Per Click
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can also include pay per click (PPC) specified campaigns (example: Google Shopping). PPC campaigns guarantee that potential customers will see a link for your website when they search keywords in your targeted campaign. E-commerce marketers usually register with Google AdWords to promote their product pages through PPC campaigns.
Campaigns put the customer right in front of the business’ product when they click on a paid ad (found on Google Search with “AD.” Depending on the type of campaign you are targeting, you may need to reevaluate goals for retargeting the respective target audience. Other platforms you can use for your campaigns would be: Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Promoted Pins to showcase the products or services provided.
Social Media Marketing for E-commerce
Established brands, corporations, and growing businesses have all launched pages or accounts on today’s most popular social media platforms to connect with and publish content for their targeted audience. Each campaign you run might be different than your competitor due to whom you are trying to reach with your campaigns: age, gender, location, and targeting the social media network of your audience should be reviewed for developing a high conversion rate.
E-commerce websites should show off your products and be visually appealing to pull in customers to your site. Your social media’s success should show by the visual composition of the website’s design and the application of graphic design imagery to drive attention to product pages. Another step for social media content for e-commerce would be establishing shoppable ads that intrigue the customer with content that leads visitors to buy products right away. Intriguing tactics can include social media ads on feeds (example: Shoppable Instagram), social media influencer marketing that brings their followers to the brand, or marked hashtags that bring the viewer to respected shopping carts.
E-commerce Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is a model that connects merchants with independent marketers who are willing to invest time and money into the business. This marketing method can see on the television show, Shark Tank; this connects business services/products with an individual or organization marketer who can sell it.
This marketing targets a performance base, so some businesses might rely on influencer marketing to help with their conversions by getting individuals to buy products online. Once the individual has it down to getting viewers to purchase items on the e-commerce website, they can promote more of its products. Other things that can use affiliate marketing are:
Product Pages & FAQ Sections
Product pages should be optimized with product-driven keywords that are short and to the point. The keywords should also have the name of the product in the keyword for more natural search optimization. You also need to optimize the title, headers, and images alt text with the critical keywords to focus on the correct product and service for search engines to query.
When it comes to your website or what you are offering your audience, people will ask questions about what you can offer them, pricing, etc. so you should include a FAQ section on your site to answer them. One way that a website can help benefit their products/services is by adding an FAQ section. This page can address common client questions related to pricing, brand offerings, and all other commonly asked questions. The goal is to optimize the page using structure, categories/subcategories, and target keywords (specifically long-tailed keywords) to drive focus on the targeted audience base. While establishing an FAQ section on your website, keep long-tailed keywords that your audience might ask for when it comes to the different products you have. Through the FAQ, you can establish authority with your audience and bring traffic to the website, which is vital for a successful e-commerce website.
Client Testimonials
To help establish a brand reputation, you can also put together a client testimonial video depending on your industry compiled of former and current customers speaking of the work done for them. Testimonials typically come from interviews with the customer about the products or services provided; you can put together a short survey to be placed in your email marketing campaign or follow up with specific clients and interview them.
During the interview or survey process, you can control the types of questions asked if they centered around one particular product or feature. Tailoring a Youtube video or specific email marketing campaign to your email list highlights client testimonials and reviews. Seeing as it will be benefiting your e-commerce store by asking your clients questions about the buying process, industry products, or if they would refer to your company would help increase your search engine ranking.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is another great way for your e-commerce site to grow your business brand reputation. When current or former customers refer their family, friends, or co-workers to your online business website, you can boost your online presence. It may take time since there is a natural selection amongst competitors; however, most company leads are usually through a referral program. You use incentives (discount offer, etc.) for how many customer referrals they send your way, and you can make these incentives for either party to establish loyal customer support.
Virtual Reality Technologies for E-commerce Use
The rise of virtual reality has expanded the retail industry’s playing field by offering the customer firsthand visuals of simulations on products or services that the business provides. VR is becoming the new era of commerce for retail with e-commerce marketing always changing. Companies have the ability with this technology to offer an interesting take on online shopping by allowing users to view showrooms through VR devices. This platform enables the user to have a virtual online shopping experience which allows customers to experience the store without leaving their homes.
Another reason that e-commerce businesses should look into VR technology would be allowing the customer to visualize products at home. VR allows the customer to “use” the product before buying in-store. With the augmented reality headset, the VR technology will allow the user to experience the products in real-time with life-like movements. Finally, with the accessibility of allowing VR technology on your e-commerce website, it will give the customer a new reason to go out to the store if they want to purchase the respective product or service.
Establish Email Marketing
Establishing an effective email marketing strategy will help with e-commerce marketing, even if it is one of the oldest digital marketing forms. It would be best if you had captivating graphic designs and great copywriting in the email body to reel in your targeted audience for the product(s). These can include targeted products/reviews, discounts, and new product announcements for your current audience.
The best part of email marketing is that it can be automated to send out to your subscriber list automatically. You do not have to sit and individually send out the marketing email; with one quick setup, you can establish a drip campaign for the email to send out to all subscribers and build trust amongst the subscriber list with essential emails. There are also two other methods to use email marketing: abandoned shopping carts and following up after a customer’s purchase.
Produce Youtube Videos
YouTube houses many videos designed for many different audiences, hobbies, or industries, so your targeted audience should be out there to view your videos. When uploading your video to your YouTube channel, you should include as many heavy-set keywords as possible. That way, it is easier to search for your audience and showcase the related videos for that keyword, thus giving you a more extensive range to captivate your audience.
The videos on your YouTube channel should represent the products or services that your brand or company offers. Small tutorials on different products that you provide will showcase what the customer could receive through your company. You can also showcase videos with client testimonies or product reviews from customers. These videos can improve customer satisfaction and develop an established following of subscribers with this global platform.
Overview of E-commerce Marketing Tips
- Develop and use personalization for the specific brand, products, or services
- Capitalize on user-generated content (UGC) like reviews, testimonials, or blogs
- Build a loyalty program for your customers to come back to the business
- Invest in live chat to help with any customers’ issues 24/7
- Cater to the shopping cart and have in-app notifications for job abandonment or time running out on purchases.
- Implement a responsive website design for online and desktop
Hiring an E-Commerce Marketing Agency
With these different key areas in mind to benefit your e-commerce website, utilizing an established e-commerce marketing agency can help you reach your goals based on industry benchmarks or breaking down tactics into smaller sections. They can help you improve by creating what you would like to accomplish first and further developing a successful e-commerce website.
While working with an e-commerce marketing agency, keep in mind that you want to improve website clicks, click-through rates, and conversion rates compared to competing e-commerce sites. Once you start to establish a clientele, you should still engage with them to see if any other products can help with future projects that they might have.
There are many different e-commerce marketing strategies out there; however, working with an agency that wants to see you succeed during these difficult times is reassuring. Once you have created and established an effective e-commerce marketing strategy for your online store, you will most likely begin attracting customers to your business.
As a business owner, the current situation may feel overwhelming. At Versa Creative, we have the knowledge and tools to help you achieve your e-commerce website goals. If you are looking for an e-commerce marketing agency, contact us today to learn more about our services. We can help you make sure that your business is secure.
