Marketing Strategies For eCommerce Businesses

Introducing your products to a new audience or maintaining a well-established and loyal customer base both require a bulletproof marketing plan. This plan must include staying up to date with the new and current marketing trends that could benefit your business and techniques to consider implementing to produce results across different methods of marketing. Marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses like yours centre around a structured website, as this ultimately represents your shop.
This said, it is important to create and launch a website that creates the image of your brand and that offers a user-friendly experience. These are all elements that must be considered before creating and implementing a marketing strategy for your eCommerce store. Without a well-optimised website, your marketing efforts will be sending people to your website which visitors may find hard to navigate and use.
Below we discuss a selection of marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses that if implemented correctly can create results for businesses just like yours, keep reading to learn more.

Create Original Content

By creating high-quality content you are more likely to stand out and resonate with your customers in a way that makes them want to interact with your brand, hopefully resulting in a sale and a loyal customer. If your eCommerce store sells as a third party website we recommend that you create your own style of product descriptions as this will allow your product to rank. As if you were to use the same product description that the manufacturer used you would find your brand competing with the manufacturer’s website directly.
Content does not simply refer to the written copy on the website, consider the branding that you are using to represent your business. Software like Adobe Photoshop and Canva have meant that re-engineering visual content has become possible within minutes. We recommend that you spend time and money on creating or purchasing original graphics as these will project your brand image in a better way.
A note that we recommend you consider here when creating any content is to be both creative and original.

Get Personal

eCommerce is an incredibly competitive business model, which we know you are all too aware of. However, as consumers have become the MVP of the eCommerce industry, it is more important than ever to stand out in a unique way. Creating an experience for the consumer that they will not forget is more important than ever as the power is in consumers hands. We have the ability to search for anything, product or service, at any time or place, thanks to our friends Google. This illustrates further the importance of staying on top of consumer trends, competitive pricing structures and user experience in order to maintain a loyal customer base.
As a result of this, it is more important than ever to customise their user experience (UX) to cater to the variety of needs of your audience. It is important to create a brand that has a personal appeal, a tone of voice that resonates with your customers and entices them to believe that your store is similar to their own personality.
Make your marketing centre around your customers. Take time to get to know your customers, what they like, what they don’t like and what their buyer’s journey looks like. Of course, not every customer will have the same characteristics however you may find the common area between particular trends or consumer preferences. The best way to then get this to work in your marketing is to create “Buyer Personas”, this allows you to create individual experiences for each Persona type. From here we then recommend adding personal touches like addressing your prospect by name, through whichever medium you are conversing, social media, email, post etc.
Another way to create the more personal approach is when you are promoting your own business consider being transparent about your company processes and procedures. Share genuine photos of your team and employees, almost creating a behind the scenes feel for your audience. This helps create a personality for your business and will hopefully create a face for your eCommerce store and can contribute to a loyal customer base.

Social Media

This should no longer be considered as a new medium in which you can connect with your potential customers. However, social media has changed the way in which so much is done, from instigating conversations to expressing our concerns with products or service. As an eCommerce business, this can make or break your reputation as it is important to respond to any concerns that your customers may have in regards to delivery or product details. These elements continue from the previous point, in creating relationships with your audience and continuing with a brand personality.
Social media offers unprecedented opportunity to generate engagement and interaction, boost traffic to your website and connect with a larger base of customers. Utilising the different approaches that are available with each different social media platform is essential when deciding which platforms connect with your audience and your product niche. It is important to remember that not every social media platform may be relevant for your business. Social media marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses must continue to create a personality and maintain this personality is essential in order to have a consistent brand. Which in turn will build trust with your audience, changing personality for each post will create doubts for your audience as to your legitimacy. Therefore it is essential that any member of the team who has an input for the social media must understand the company’s communication style and stick to that.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most important elements for a successful eCommerce website as it is the process of making sure your online store is optimised for search engines. It is a manual task and the benefits are truly worth the work. With the standards of SEO these days, it should be at the top of your marketing hit list, if you are not already working to optimise your website for your users. Your SEO strategy should run alongside your content creation, combining these two elements of your marketing will allow you to reap the benefits of a fresh and informative website.
Your website should answer any questions or concerns that your users may have with your business and the products that you sell. SEO allows you to use keywords in order to understand customer concerns and using these within your content will mean that your website will flag up as a matching result to answer that specific user query.
SEO is not only the representation of your site on search engines, as you could answer the user query, however, your site could then offer a poor user experience and hard to navigate buyer journey. This, in turn, could lose you visitors and damage your brand. Good UX optimisation allows you to ensure that you are providing a smooth flow throughout your website, from Landing Page optimisation to easy to navigate pages.
We discuss these elements and more in our FREE downloadable eBook on Organic vs Paid Search Marketing. If you are unsure whether implementing an SEO or PPC marketing strategy would suit your business objectives, we recommend you download it. Take a read as the ideal combination of the two differs for each business and we hope that it helps illustrate the pros and cons of each strategy.

PPC

For each PPC campaign, there are three key elements that must be considered before adding budget to a campaign. These are the ad itself, the offer that the ad is promoting and the landing page that the ad takes the user to.
All three elements must not only work in harmony, be optimised for the user and also maintain the interest of the user that is clicking on the ad. The landing page is the end location for the visitor so it is essential that is a continuation of the ad and is not taking the user to a different location. It must deliver what was promised in the ad itself, in order to take the visitor through your conversion funnel, if the user is not met with what they expected they are likely to leave rather than search for it on your site. Therefore you will have paid for the click but made no gain.
These three elements of a paid campaign must work in synchrony, we discuss how to create a flawless paid campaign and we also compare it to the results that you can expect from creating an organic or paid campaign in our eBook. If you want to know which approach would work better for you, we recommend that you take a read.

Mobile Experience

We will finish with one element of your marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses that have become one of the most important within the last two years. Mobile. As an eCommerce store more and more consumers are visiting your site on a mobile device. Com Score reported that mobile devices are our primary tool for time spent online, in the UK we spend 61% of our time on a mobile device. With the UK at the lowest percentage, Indonesia surpasses everyone with 91% of time spent on mobile.

This being said, your mobile experience should be as easy to navigate as your desktop, it is essential to make sure the navigation works across multiple platforms, such as mobile, tablet and desktop. Any buttons that are clickable should be made clickable across devices, an element to consider here is making it easy to navigate with fat fingers. As clicking the wrong button or not being able to click any button is just doing to distract from your brand and create a negative user experience.
Also, consider that you are not bombarding the user with pop-ups that take up their full mobile screen or that automatically force and app download. Similar to a paid campaign make sure that your experience is streamlined and allows them to flow through the process, across multiple devices.
Make sure that you are delivering an experience that the user is expecting and it is essential to make the investment in making sure your website is fully responsive regardless of the device that it is being viewed on.

In Conclusion

When it comes to effective marketing strategies for eCommerce businesses like yours, it is important to stay up to date and aware of the latest marketing trends, techniques and consumer behaviour. You must find the correct combination of marketing elements for your business and this is even more important when it comes to digital marketing. Hence why we have created this free, easy to understand eBook that puts organic search and paid search head to head to which method you should implement for your business.

Reach out to your consumers in a variety of ways and create a personality rather than simply a corporate appearance. A final thought is, as always, to make sure that you are monitoring, analysing and evaluating your website analytics to examine trends, keep your website optimised and track your results to improve and improve and improve your marketing approaches.