To give you a sense of what a proper eCommerce marketing strategy should look like, here are some common marketing channels and how you would use them to build an audience for your online store.
Social Media Marketing
Most brands, publishers, and growing businesses know that you need to be on popular social networks to succeed in today’s digital era. It’s the best way to connect with your audience directly. Your social profiles will give audiences a huge insight into your brand. It communicates who you are, what you do/sell, your brand ethics, your tov, plus so much more, so it really can’t be neglected in your marketing strategy.
As an eCommerce marketer, you should remember that not every social network is a good fit for your requirements. Not every campaign/creative is going to work on every platform. You’ll need to be prepared to adapt your ads depending on the message and where it’s being said. One ad might work on TikTok, whilst one will work on Facebook - and they might not look the same. If done well, it can drive a good amount of attention and traffic to your product pages.
Additionally, you can take your social media posts a step further by making shoppable content. This is content that enables visitors to make an immediate purchase. It includes anything from display ads in a social feed to additional tags that take users directly to a shopping cart. Ultimately, these methods help you remove any friction during the purchasing process.
Content Marketing
When people mention content marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is blogging and video marketing. This type of content is meant to improve your website's ranking in search engines and answer your industry queries. However, if you're selling a product online, is it necessary to have online articles and videos? Definitely.
Here's what to do:
- Optimise your product page
Include short, product-driven keywords in your product descriptions. If you’re selling wedding dresses, a Google search for "purple bridesmaid dress" is most likely to produce product pages like yours if you’ve incorporated that term on that page.
Attract customers to your store with clever seo-optimised blog posts. Use them to talk about your products, your brand and anything else that you'd like your audience to know/see. It'll help to grow the connection between you and your customers.
By submitting guest posts, you’ll get more domain authority for your eCommerce website, which means search engines will understand that you have a reliable site and rank you higher.
To do this, you need to find sites that rank for keywords related to your product. Sometimes, you might not even need to create an entire post from scratch. Some sites already have posts related to yours, so you can offer to expand on it and provide additional content with a link to your site.
Search Engine Marketing
While SEO depends on your knowledge of search engine’s ranking algorithms to optimise content, SEM involves pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display campaigns or product-specific ad campaigns (like Google Shopping), which let you pay for the top spots on the search engine results pages.
For example, on Google, PPC campaigns guarantee that potential customers will see a link to your page when they type in search terms that match your campaign’s terms if you have your bidding strategy set up correctly. The campaign puts users directly in front of your product if they click on a paid result, boosting the likelihood that the searcher will purchase before exiting your website.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can be a powerful marketing tool when it’s done correctly. It relies on brands paying a small percentage of sales linked to a specific ‘brand ambassador/affiliate’. This has proven to be popular with people who have large followings on social media/blogs/YouTube - like influencers or celebrities. It allows them to promote a product or service, and for everyone that goes on to buy through their link, they make some money.
For brands, this can be incredibly useful as it’s a way of latching on to a famous person’s following and having a trusted influencer talk highly about your product. This helps to grow not only sales of product but increases your brand awareness and trust signals.
Companies like Amazon, eBay and Shopify have easy to implement affiliate marketing tools for individuals and stores that use their platforms.