With more and more businesses turning to the internet to establish their presence, the right mix of traditional marketing and modern digital strategies has become increasingly important for success and profitability. This especially applies to eCommerce site owners whose success depends on traffic and conversions. It is not just about creating a pretty website but also about establishing your brand and engaging visitors and encouraging them to convert to buyers.
Four Ways to Market Your eCommerce Site
There are many different strategies you can use to market an eCommerce website and, in this article, we will discuss four effective strategies that can enhance your marketing effort and bring about impactful and profitable results. Whether you choose to outsource content marketing to experts or decide on doing it in house, we’ll put you on the right track to deciding what works for your business.
Apply SEO Strategies
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most vital strategies for improving eCommerce website performance. It will require researching keywords related to your niche and business, and applying on-site and off-site practices to improve where your site ranks on search engine result pages.
This strategy will both help expose your store to more people and improve branding. Let’s cover some basics. An effective SEO strategy will require you to:
- Make sure your site is secure. This will require you to use an SSL certificate, as it greatly impacts ranking and is essential for any eCommerce site.
- Improve site speed. Google prefers those sites that load faster.
- Build your site with user experience in mind – the longer visitors stay on your site – the lower the bounce rate. That’s important because high bounce rates negatively impact ranking.
- Use a mobile responsive layout that will help create a good user experience for mobile users, as in 2018, 52% of all internet traffic was generated by mobile devices.
And those are just the on-site SEO practices you need to consider. While it may seem daunting at first, you should definitely not overlook this strategy. It will take time, but is guaranteed to pay off in the long run, when you have a great steady source of recurring organic traffic bringing in new customers to your site.
Create a Blog
Blogging is a great way to market an eCommerce site. Not only can you use it to further improve SEO, but also engage customers, share valuable knowledge about your niche, establish your brand as an authority and much more. Additionally, a cleverly written blog can help businesses to market their products and provide information on how they can improve the user’s daily life.
The blog page can be within the eCommerce site itself, on a subdomain, or have a dedicated URL. For instance, if your site sells travel packages to Italy, a great post idea could relate to that topic – cover its weather, culture, and events. An article with the title “ Top 10 Must-See Places in Italy” or “10 Days in Romantic Rome” would be a perfect fit. Chances are, if the visitors like what they read, it will be easier to convert them into customers who can shop at your eCommerce site.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a must-have strategy for any business that is serious about creating a long-term presence online. With nearly 3.5 billion social media users in the world, this is not a strategy to be overlooked.
Start by selecting the social media platforms that are likely to reach your target audience. From there, start posting the appropriate content like photos, or article snippets, or promotional messages, and consider directing your audience to your site. The key is posting content in the right place, at the right time, and in a way that will grab the eye of the potential client, and make them stop scrolling their feed when they see your post.
Additionally, social media is a great place to interact with and engage your audience. Respond to comments, talk to visitors, run polls, and create memorable experiences.
For example, use Instagram to promote daily deals with product shots, create a YouTube channel or start a conversation on Twitter or Reddit.
Lastly, make sure you’re representing your brand. Create a Facebook or LinkedIn page, and an account on other platforms relevant to you. That way there will be a hub for your brand on each of these sites. Additionally, you’ll be making sure no one else uses your brand’s name and spreads misinformation.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most direct methods for engaging a target audience. Regular emails that are designed to provide valuable content can quickly capture visitor attention, influence their buying behavior and even turn one-time buyers into loyal fans.
Email marketing is effective for informing the audience of exclusive promotions, product tips, company news, and upcoming launches. While you may think that email marketing is on its way out, you couldn’t be more wrong. According to Oberlo, email marketing delivers a very strong return on investment and enables you to reach the mobile audience easier.
In addition, email marketing can allow businesses to explore different strategies to suit a different audience. For example, by segmenting the customers by buying behavior, age, gender, and frequency of purchase, eCommerce business owners can create different marketing messages to appeal to different groups within their audience.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to grow your eCommerce site, you’ll need to explore various different marketing strategies and methods. Good planning is key: figure out where your target audience is, what message is going to resonate best, and how to send it to them. In this article, we covered four digital marketing strategies that will definitely improve brand awareness, increase traffic and encourage conversions:
- Practice SEO to grow organic traffic and notoriety on the search engine result pages.
- Create a blog to engage visitors, build brand authority trust.
- Use social media marketing to expand your reach, and interact with potential customers.
- Take advantage of email marketing to keep your audience informed and interested in your brand.
We hope this article sets you on your way to skyrocketing your eCommerce store to new heights!
