EFFECTIVE MARKETING STRATEGY FOR E-COMMERCE BUSINESS
No matter how impressive your product is and no matter how popular it is, there is no guarantee that people will be able to find it on their own, especially now, when the market is replete with various goods and services.
If your marketing materials are missing where your ideal client should see them, and they don’t match their needs, all your work will be wasted.
In this article, we’ll look at a few effective e-commerce marketing strategies you can use to grow your business’s customer base and increase the engagement of your existing users.
MARKETING PLAN FOR ONLINE SALES
Your marketing plan is the collection of marketing tactics and strategies that your company uses. Practice shows that really effective marketing plans do not appear by chance. They use both the basic structure of marketing and its general philosophy.
For example, the inbound traffic methodology can be part of an overarching marketing plan. In this case, you should direct all your marketing efforts towards reaching an audience, converting members of that audience into leads, closing deals, and fully meeting their needs in order to motivate them to spread the word about your brand through word of mouth. There are many different strategies that can be taken as a basis for building a marketing plan. Below we propose to familiarize yourself with several of the most effective options.
1. BLOG
Blogging is a great way to drive organic traffic. By creating and publishing quality content that is relevant to your industry, you will make your potential customers think of your company as something reliable and legal. By attracting Internet users to your site through content (in addition to the one that is directly related to your product or service), you motivate them to perform targeted actions in the end. Regardless of what products or services you offer, blogging is an economically efficient way to prove that your company is an authority in the industry in which it operates.
2. PLACING GUEST POSTS ON OTHER SITES
Guest posts help you become better known online. They not only help build credibility in your industry, but they also improve the reputation of the domain used by your e-commerce site. As a result, search engines consider your site to be more reliable and deserving of higher rankings in search results.
To post guest posts, you need to select key phrases related to your product or service and use them to find third-party sites. In some cases, you don’t even have to create your own unique content. You can use existing articles by adding relevant materials or infographics to their text with links to your Internet resource.
3. USING REFERRAL MARKETING PROGRAMS
Referral marketing brings together two fundamental things of any marketing strategy for an online business: word of mouth and initiative. With the help of a referral program, you will be able to send your messages through clients to those who trust their opinion.
According to recent research, word of mouth has an impact on 90% of all sales, with 19% of purchases made directly from referrals sent through this marketing channel. For this reason, a large part of your marketing strategy should focus on word of mouth.
Offer your customers some kind of incentive: a small gift or a discount on your product in exchange for recommending your products or services to other people. This way, you will not only be able to retain current customers, but also expand your user base.
4. USING SOCIAL PLATFORMS
Effective use of social platforms is an essential component of any successful e-commerce marketing strategy. That being said, social media marketing to promote an online business can be significantly different from marketing for a regular business, brand, contractor, or publisher. In addition, not every social platform is ideal for these purposes.
E-commerce is a kind of visual medium. Not every customer is ready to purchase a product based only on textual information. The success of your social media marketing efforts is directly dependent on the quality of the photos you post to capture the attention of potential customers and drive traffic to your product or service pages. So Instagram is the perfect platform to complement your overall marketing strategy.
Also Read: 8 DESIGN TIPS FOR E-COMMERCE WEBSITES 2021
If possible, you should also include in your marketing strategy so-called shoppable content – interactive content that allows visitors to make a purchase or order a service immediately. Such content can be both advertising elements in the social network feed, and special tags that direct users directly to the page with a shopping cart.
5. ATTRACTING USER-GENERATED CONTENT
user-generated content acquisition is the practice of finding ways to promote your business with your customers and encouraging this initiative. It is also seen as a great way to promote it using word of mouth. User-generated content drives traffic to your website for online sales, thereby building an audience of interested customers.
There are several ways to attract user-generated content. One of the most effective ones is holding contests – drawing prizes between your customers who advertise your product to one degree or another. In addition, you can use social media advertising hashtags and review platforms where customers can share opinions about your product or service. Using your customers to promote your product builds trust in your business and provides a relatively inexpensive source of the traffic to your website.
As an example, consider the #WhiteCupContest campaign launched by Starbucks in 2014. Customers could paint whatever they wanted on the company’s branded cups. The winning designs have been used in the design of the new limited-edition cups. In just three weeks, Starbucks’ campaigns received 4,000 different designs, generated a lot of publicity, and used them as free advertising for their products.
If your business has anything to do with e-commerce, you will be able to achieve better results by studying and applying various marketing strategies in practice. Many of them are not only able to benefit your business, but also do not require high implementation costs. Regardless of how you build your marketing plan, make sure it is dynamic, covers all the important aspects of your business, and is flexible enough. It will take time and money to implement any of the strategies outlined above, but this investment will pay off with interest in the near future.
