Ecommerce Marketing
Running a business can be difficult, especially with the number of channels available to carry out your services. Over the past years, companies have resorted to online marketing to expand their reach to customers. As one of the most competitive industries on the internet, e-commerce marketing is about standing out from the competition to drive more sales than other existing businesses. Although this is a gradual process to commit to, the results of a good marketing strategy will certainly be worth the time and effort exerted.
What Is E-commerce Marketing?
These days, consumers look for convenient shopping alternatives to purchase the goods that they need. With their mega busy schedules and limited access to supermarkets and malls, online shopping proves to be the most efficient approach for today’s market.
Considering how consumers have slowly gravitated towards online shopping in the past years, online businesses work rigorously to raise brand awareness through powerful e-commerce marketing.
E-commerce marketing, or electronic commerce marketing, is generally known as the process of driving sales by buying and selling goods over an electronic network such as the internet. These business transactions include business-to-business, consumer-to-business, business-to-consumer or consumer-to-consumer transmissions. Most consumers seek the help of the internet to find a wider variety of goods, and at a range of competitive prices they could easily compare.
So, how does e-commerce work?
Technology has made life a million times easier by offering us efficient alternatives to complete everyday tasks, with online shopping being one of them. From the comfort of our own homes, we can fill up our virtual shopping cart with the things we need. Many of these shops offer various payment options, such as COD (Cash-on-Delivery), credit payments, and debit payments, to cater to different consumers.
But with the large number of online businesses existing in the market, the challenge comes with creating the perfect e-commerce marketing strategy to attract paying customers and drive repeat purchases. Apart from creating eye-catching and user-friendly websites, e-commerce websites need to pull all the strings to increase their online presence. Without a strategic e-commerce marketing plan in hand, the business is bound to fall flat among the thousands of companies that offer the same products at a similar price tag.
E-commerce Marketing Channels
Listed below are some examples of marketing strategies for successful e-commerce:
- Pay-per-click advertising – In a PPC campaign, bidding on keywords or phrases utilized in an ad are run to direct traffic to a given website. These ads typically appear above or below non-paid organic search results.
- Search engine marketing – Promoting websites with this form of internet marketing is done primarily through paid advertising by increasing a website’s visibility in search engine results pages.
- Search engine optimization – Unlike the different paid advertising methods mentioned above, SEO generates traffic across search engines through strategic content creation, inbound links, social media engagement, and other factors, depending on the given search engine algorithm.
- Affiliate marketing – In this marketing channel, advertisers gain traffic by capitalizing on reviews and testimonials from brand ambassadors and the like. One example for this is celebrity marketing, where particular individuals are paid to promote a brand across different social platforms. The said individual or entity may then receive a certain commission for the referred sales.
- Email marketing – Newsletters are the most common form of email marketing, where a targeted group of prospects receive notifications and invitations regarding product releases, special deals, and other business announcements.
- Display advertising – Banners and sidebars are some examples of display ads where visual advertisements appear on a website to promote a given product or service.
E-commerce Marketing 101: Tips You Should Know About
E-commerce marketing is a tricky subject to take on, branching out to different strategies that are easier said than done. Fortunately, we have created a list of marketing tips to guide you in your ecommerce adventure:
1. Identify Your Goals and Objectives
Like everything else in life, having a good set of marketing goals and marketing objectives to focus on will help you build business-centered strategies for your company. Defining your goals is essential in determining the path you want to follow, despite the hurdles you may encounter along the way. But success doesn’t happen over night, and it’s nearly impossible to obtain your goals without accomplishing a series of subgoals or objectives in the process.
While there will always be a fear surrounding “how” to get there, goal-setting should be seen as an inspiration instead of a hindrance to a bigger picture. This will also serve as a guide towards crafting an effective marketing plan.
2. Target the Right Market
Targeting a specific group of consumers based on demographics is a great way to craft better marketing strategies for your desired audience.
If anything, marketing is all about influencing prospects to purchase your goods. However, if you fail to recognize the type of content that your potential consumers are looking for, then it would be difficult for them to see why they would ever need your products or services in the first place. The key to this strategy is to “speak the language” that a specific bracket can relate to in order to raise their buying power. Not only should this attract targeted buyers, but it should also convince consumers why they should choose you over competing businesses.
3. Create Original Content
While many companies continue to pull out content from around the web to give customers what they want to see, this form of content marketing does not leave the same impact as publishing original content.
Why?
Imagine if customers discover the same type of content from your site on another site. Naturally, the way they respond would likely lead to an internal argument of ‘who’s better than who’. If you consistently recycle content from the web, people are bound to grow bored over time. The business must aim to create original content in the form of videos, blog posts, eBooks, and a segments to ensure consumer engagement. This will help turn your e-commerce site into a knowledgeable source for those who are interested in learning something new about your market.
4. Diversify Your Platforms
When it comes to social media marketing for e-commerce, there are many platforms to choose from but not all of them will grant you success. The simplest solution to such is to start by diversifying your social platforms and then cutting out those that don’t work well for you.
Facebook marketing, Twitter marketing, Snapchat marketing, and Instagram marketing are some examples for this. But even if these social networks are pretty much the same, it’s important to create content that best suits the type of individuals that spend their time on these sites.
5. Try Word-of-Mouth Advertising
Thanks to the likes of digital marketing, word-of-mouth advertising is a subtle yet clever promotional approach that many companies can benefit from.
For one thing, sending samples to magazine editors and writers, bloggers, and subscribed customers is a great way to make a pitch for “free” marketing. This is usually done before or when a product is first introduced in the market to create a hype across different platforms. Once this is carried out, these ‘influencers’ may then share their personal sentiments about the product to friends and followers in your behalf. Keep in mind that though your product may gain mixed reviews in the market, the amount of publicity you gain can still build a level of curiosity and interest among consumers.
6. Automate Your Social Networks
Though it isn’t necessary to automate every single one of your social content, you’ll come to find that planning ahead will give you enough time to focus on other business-related tasks.
Let’s take this scenario as an example: Scheduling a series of Facebook posts before it’s actual publish date ensures that your posts remain timely. You no longer have to worry about what to post because everything had already been prepared beforehand. Monitoring comments may still be needed, but at least you won’t have to stress about falling behind schedule or shifting gears just to post content on social media.
7. Target Mobile-Users
Many online buyers like to do their shopping on their mobile devices due to its convenience, which is why a lot of companies invest on mobile apps or sites to cater to different audiences. But little do they know that what consumers really crave for are simple, mobile responsive sites that preserve the original essence of an e-commerce website, without taking up significant space from their mobile devices. All it takes is a mobile responsive interface for your website that will adapt to smartphones and tablets. Keep in mind that marketing is about consistency, and giving consumers the same shopping experience, regardless of the medium used to increase consumer loyalty.
8. Pack On the Photos
Visual marketing is important in business for a number of reasons.
Think about reading a book without pictures. Flipping through its wordy pages can already affect the way you perceive the book: dull and lifeless. Although judging something based on its visual aspect is extremely baseless, it’s a known fact that images can help awaken one’s senses.
Packing eye-catching photos into all of your content can definitely draw in attention. It would be best to refrain from using stock photos as well, as using your own professional photos tend to be more interesting than those that can be downloaded from the internet for free.
9. Encourage Customers to Make Reviews
If you’re the type of person who reads through product reviews to see whether a given item is worth the money, then you probably know why ratings and reviews are incredibly important in e-commerce marketing.
Customer feedback serves as a basis for social credibility. It helps convince consumers that a certain product is as good as it says it is through reviews given by other customers who have already purchased the said product. This can be a key factor to consider in online shopping, as most people find it difficult to trust small businesses that have yet to establish themselves in the market.
10. Be Interactive.
The best way to leave a good impression with your audience is to allow interaction. Apart from adding a discussion area for you and other visitors to connect, you can make use of a live chat module for your site. Not only will a live chat make it easier for customers to make inquiries, but it also ensures direct and immediate replies to the said inquiries. The attention granted to each and every individual promotes the importance of customer satisfaction.
The advancement of technology and the widespread use of the internet has made e-commerce a channel for entrepreneurs and investors to conduct business online. But with the fierce competition in the digital market, advertisers must execute the right marketing strategies and tactics to obtain successful e-commerce marketing. It’s important for these advertisers to invest on the most ideal marketing tactics in order to prosper in the industry.
Share :
