Digital Marketing Strategies:-
Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, the eCommerce business has been on the rise significantly for the past months, and there are tons of competitors online. Everyone is finding a way to increase brand awareness and sales other than their physical stores.
However, your digital marketing strategies should be tailored to your eCommerce business’s needs. Digital marketing has become an essential part and lifeline for the eCommerce business as it offers reach and ROI. A low-cost digital marketing strategy for eCommerce can be done with the proper preparations.
What to prepare before marketing your eCommerce business?
Having the marketing tools without having the right mindset and preparation will not give you 100% effectiveness with your marketing no matter how much money or time you invest in.
Set Realistic and Reachable Goals
For a successful eCommerce digital marketing strategy to be effective and appropriately executed, it is vital to have your goals and objective clear and realistic. Planning your step-to-step roadmap for your business’s growth will help you reach your end goal keeps you accountable and organized.
Your goals should be defined. Instead of saying “I want an increase in sales this year.” or “I want more likes in all of my posts.”. Instead, try making specific goals, such as “I want to increase X% sales in the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season.” or “I want to invest more time in email marketing.”.
Once you have identified them, then you can take specific actions suited for your goals.
Knowing your Audience
If your concept of marketing means “If I market to everyone, I will generate more sales.”, you might need to evaluate how you invest your time and money.
Knowing what value your business can bring to a particular audience can help reduce inefficient campaigns that waste money targeting low-converting and unqualified individual. You can identify your ideas by the following:
- Age ranges
- Gender breakdown
- Geographic location
- Purchasing power
Get Technology & Reporting Software
It’s essential to ask yourself whether your current marketing strategy or actions are working before pushing a new or severe marketing strategy. A few analytics tools, such as Google Data Studio and LuckyOrange, can help you track your marketing efforts’ effectiveness. One thing to notice is whether the campaign actually helps or relates to your end goal.
With that, you can identify what works and don’t work, then you can change accordingly. Once you are prepared, you are ready to select the right marketing tools according to your business type and audience. Here are 10 digital marketing strategies that you, like an e-commerce business owner, should focus on in 2021.
10 Digital Marketing Strategy for your E-commerce business
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO is a long-term strategy service that helps increase your online store’s exposure in search engines such as Google. You would want your products or website to be rank on top in search engines to gain a massive boost of traffic into your website. How often do you scroll all the way down to the search results page or even to the next page?
Using tools like SEMrush, MOZ and BigCommerce apps can help you monitor your website rankings and perform a website audit.
There are ways you can optimize SEO for an E-commerce website.
- Image must have proper alt-text
- Keyword research to understand what are the keywords customers are searching for.
- Strategic keyword optimization in meta tags and content through On-Page SEO.
- Link Building to help improve the authority of your website.
- Site design and architecture based on keyword research.
- Use more appropriate and relatable photos, videos, etc.
Using keyword analytics tools such as Ahrefs is a great way to determine a buyer’s intent which correlates with the average cost per click (CPC).
This works because as more people are willing to spend to advertise a keyword, the larger it’s conversion rate.
2. PPC (Pay-per-click)
PPC is one of the foundational elements in your e-commerce marketing strategy. The purpose of this is to bring in more traffic visits to your website rather than trying to earn them organically.
With PPC, your brand would pay a small fee to an ad network such as Google whenever someone clicks into your advertisement.
It is essential to do it right as search engines reward advertisers who can create relevant, purposeful targeted pay-per-click by charging them less for ad clicks, leading to higher profits for your business.
Paid search, display, and shopping campaigns are more relevant to eCommerce marketing success.
Make sure you research the pricing of your product or brand with your competitor before diving in.
Tools you can use :
When content marketing is done right, it can spread to a broader audience faster and organically. Videos, infographics, eBooks, Newsletters, or blog posts will help you reach out to more customers and, in return, visit your website, purchase your product, or encourage them to sign up for your email list.
For e-commerce, focusing on the name, description, proper keywords, and details with the help of SEO will help boost your brand search ranking, and it allows potential clients to find you.
4) Influencer Marketing
You’ve probably seen celebrities or influencers promoting certain brands on their social media, and that’s because, obviously, they have a large number of followings that helps brands to get attention to their brand. However, knowing which kind of influencer is suitable for your brand is essential, as it also represents the face of your brand’s values and goals.
If your business sells baking stand mixers, it will make sense to find influencers that are in the same niche, such as bakers, or restaurants owners, who have followings of the same interest.
Social media is a fast-moving industry that will not be going away anytime soon. The landscape of networking and platforms is continuing to grow and change the way people interacts with brands online.
Popular social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok continuously roll out new features and tools to help brands reach their target audiences effectively. As digital marketers, our responsibility to implement good practices when implementing strategic campaigns that engage a potential customer and create a good brand image.
For example, Instagram has a new Shoppable feature that allows customers to view their products like a catalogue more conveniently. According to Instagram’s algorithm, your products will more likely be featured in their Shopping feature according to their interest and search history.
Social media advertising is a potent tool for marketers to advertises their brand or product to their target audience. It works similarly with Google’s PPC ads, where you select your budget, target audience and create an advertisement.
However, organic social content plays a significant role in building brand awareness by engaging with customers and fostering brand advocacy, so it is essential to maintain strong SEO.
6. Email Marketing
I’m sure no one likes getting spam in their emails; hence creating a strategic and thoughtful approach to email marketing can promote a “Quality over quantity” practises. Ensure your emails are straight to the point and engaging so that customers are willing to read emails that pique their interest.
Customers are more likely to open a personalized email than those with lacked personalization.
Newsletter campaigns is a great way to start email marketing. With attractive images and content, you can deliver targeted products suggestion, announcement, and discounts offered to your audience.
After that, you can incorporate email strategies such as promoting new offers, re-engaging with previous customers and customers who abandoned their carts.
Email marketing tools to consider are:
If email marketing is done right, email can generate a consistently high return on investment.
7. Cater to Shopping Cart
Customers abandon their shopping carts for multiple reasons and mainly is due to the trust they have for the brand or the expensive shipping rates.
If a potential customer fails to complete a transaction of their purchase, consider sending them a polite email to remind them of their checkout process, offer assistance or recommend other related products that might pique their interest to get them back.
You want to give your customer every chance or reason to purchase your product. Here is some way to mitigate shopping cart abandonment:
- Money-back guarantees
- A clear and straightforward return policy
- Cheap or free delivery options
- Convenient access and responsive to customer support
8. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when a small commission fee incentivizes are paid to external websites for any sales generated from their referral traffic. Affiliate links and sales tracking can be implemented by using various affiliate programs.
Merchants can choose their own commission rates based on their budget, with percentage sales ranging from 5% to 30%. Once you consider the affiliate commission and gross margin factors, you can easily enjoy a return on ad spend.
Tools for affiliate marketing:
9. Retargeting your Existing Customers
Retargeting is a tactic that sends targeted ads to specific users who have already interacted with your brand, such as email subscribers, who have made purchases in the past, previous customers who no longer engaged, and recently visited your website.
Facebook and Google AdSense has strong retargeting capabilities.
10. Reviews and Testimonials
Finally, one of the strategy of good digital marketing for e-commerce is reviews and testimonials! Building trust between brands and customers is what keeps potential customer to complete a transaction.
You would trust the brand more and feel safer knowing that someone is actually satisfied and happy with their purchase, right?
Politely asking customers to review your website with rewards systems such as coupons, vouchers and discounts on their next purchase is a great way to attract customers to repurchase.
Testimonials are tailored reviews as you need to interview them and ask specific questions about their satisfactory purchase.
However, some topics would be suitable to ask to get answers that relate to the ease of the buying process, responsive customer support and smooth delivery setups to make the brand trustable.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is important for brands to look into eCommerce using digital marketing as their marketing strategy and move forward with the trend to not be left out. These 10 digital marketing strategies are a brief guideline on how you can improve your brand awareness. Do keep in mind to take your time to get to know your audience and choose a strategy that suits your brand.
About the author:
Hailey Sian.
A digital marketing master at the International Institute of Digital Marketing™ based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.