It is easier to figure out what to sell, have a website for your online store, and generate traffic in comparison with getting the things done and having constant growth.
Usually, you take one or more years in a row to make your idea of starting an e-commerce business come true. You can’t expect traffic and sales just after launching your e-commerce website. Traffic generation and sales start can take 3-6 months, and you can have to wait for a year for significant growth in your e-commerce business. You need to develop an ideal online marketing strategy for your store.
E-commerce marketing is a method to align your marketing strategies, goals, and tactics to attain notable traffic growth that converts into sales. Developing an e-commerce marketing strategy gives you a path to move ahead in your online business. Here are a few practical tips for you:
Find the Target Audience
You need to specify your audience more in comparison with the people who purchase your product. While defining your target audience, you must look for a well-defined subset or a unique angle for your shopper group. In the specification of your shoppers, you should include:
- Demographics – age, sex, location, and salary
- Personal – challenges, goals, fears, and values
- Interests – affinity categories and hobbies
For knowing your target audience, you need to conduct primary and secondary research. You can hire a digital marketing agency or do it yourself.
For example, take Wildlife Showroom that sells duck decoys. Here, you need to create a group of people who love to buy wood duck decoys for home decoration, gifting, or even hunting purposes. Make a Google sheet and define your target audience based on age, interests, age, sex, and other allied terms. After that, search forums for your product, keep digging and fetch more information.
Keywords and SEO
Keywords matter a lot if you want to drive organic traffic to your e-commerce website. You need to conduct keyword research for your product and use the same in optimizing your product pages for search engines and content creation. For instance, take Tobacco Pipes that sell different types of tobacco pipes, check out how they are targeting a combination of keywords and optimizing webpages for users and search engines. Check out below how they are doing on Google:
You need to conduct keyword research on Google keywords planner and Moz and find the best business keywords to target for your website. Here is a glimpse of suggested keywords for you:
Whether you are writing content for your web pages, marketing, or blog posts, you must use the most relevant keywords in a natural tone.
Referral Marketing
Also acknowledged as word of mouth marketing, referral marketing is the best e-commerce marketing strategy. It is, as we are social animals and we love sharing our experiences with others. With it, we help people avoid having bad experiences and offer support to have excellent buying experiences.
To apply this trick into your e-commerce business, you need to set up a referral program. You can hire a developer to have a customized referral program for your store if you have the resources like Dropbox or Uber. Instead of it, you can install a referral program application such as ReferralCandy. Whether you have a custom-designed or premade application, you have complete control over your referral program.
Email Marketing
Even in the age of popularity of chat applications and social media, email is the #1 communication channel. A study shows that approximately 91% of the customers check their emails daily. An average value of email marketing is 3 times higher than social media and has a 3800% ROI. As per Convince and Convert’s research, people spend 138% more when they have marketing materials through emails.
To use email marketing in marketing your e-commerce business well, you need to make your email list and send the right emails to the right customers. After having the right list, you can send Welcome Emails, Nurture Emails, Abandoned Cart Emails, and Email Receipts.
SMO Marketing
Social media platforms are the one thing you can’t ignore while building an ideal online marketing strategy for your e-commerce business. You should value both Instagram and Facebook in your social media optimization plan.
According to Sprout Social, 65% of Instagram users use their feed to get inspiration for their online shopping and discover new brands. These are the users that can shop products from an online store like yours. For better results on Instagram, you need to create quality content (images and texts), get more followers, and engage with your existing as well as probable customers.
Facebook is still the most powerful social platform for marketing a business. You can optimize your e-commerce site and run ads on Facebook with quality images and provoking texts.
Conclusion
Building an online marketing strategy for an e-commerce business is a steady process, which requires a sound knowledge of digital marketing. Whether you do it yourself or hire a digital marketing company, you need to execute it well to attain what you expect to achieve in a period of 6 months to one year. Have patience for the first 3 months. A proper marketing strategy will help you achieve your desired outcomes.
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