With most experts agreeing that the pandemic has hugely accelerated the growth in e-commerce, we thought it worthwhile to look at six great marketing strategies to employ for your e-commerce website to help you stand out from the crowd and grow your sales.
All of these e-commerce marketing strategies are designed to drive awareness of your e-commerce store and to acquire new visitors and customers. We focus mainly on digital marketing which are the most typically used strategies, but this does not preclude the use of traditional marketing techniques such as print advertising, local poster advertising and public relations.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you haven't considered optimising your e-commerce website for search, then you are potentially missing out on around 43% of e-commerce traffic. Search engine optimisation is the process of making the pages of your website best placed to rank in search engines including Google and Bing. What's more, ensuring that your e-commerce website is optimised for search really levels the playing field, making your store just as likely to rank as the bigger players - allowing you to compete. We would suggest that it's an essential item for e-commerce websites (in fact all websites), so how do you do SEO?
Keyword research
The most important part of SEO is researching your market and finding out what words your customers are using when searching for products like those that you sell. This does not mean what words you think your customers are using, but the words that they are actually using! There are research tools available like Google Keyword Planner which wil help you to identify these.
Web page optimisation
Once you understand the key words and phrases to optimise for, you should optimise the pages of your website accordingly. There are two types of page optimisation including the more technical behind-the-scenes information such as page titles, page descriptions and alt-tags as well as front end optimisation such as writing keyword rich product descriptions and other content optimisations.
Link building
Creating inbound links to your website is invaluable and there are a few techniques worth using. Firstly try and identify any links that your competitors are achieving and see if you can gain a similar link too. If your competitor is in a particular online directory, make sure you are too! Go back to your suppliers and manufacturers and see if they will include a link to your site as a stockist of their products. Many manufacturers have 'where to buy' pages - so try and get listed. Depending on the products that you sell, you may well be aware of key influencers for your customers. Identify and reach out to these influencers to see if they will link to your website.
Content marketing
Content marketing is a great long-term marketing strategy for your e-commerce website as not only does your content help to educate and inform your target audience, but it also helps with the overall SEO of your website if you create content with the right kinds of keywords. Not all content is created equal however, so its important to choose subjects that are more likely to generate traffic to your website. Keyword and phrase research is helpful here as you can find out what topics are most commonly searched for and create content that answers those questions. Bear in mind that your competiton may be doing this also, so ensure that you are creative and produce content that approaches the subject from a different angle to all the other content out there. A good copywriter can help greatly here.
Content can take several forms including blog articles, infographics and video - so be creative! Also, don't forget to include content from existing customers - namely product and service reviews. These are often included as part of an e-commerce platform and simply need to be enabled, or you can use external third party services such as Revoo and Trustpilot which can help from an 'honest broker' perspective in providing those all-important inbound links.
Email marketing
We think that email marketing is a really good marketing tool for small businesses. You can send personalised messages, it's easy to target, you can track your return-on-investment (ROI) and it's one of the cheapest digital marketing techniques. If that's not enough to convince you then how about the report that 8% of businesses achieve over half of their sales through email, that the estimated average return from email marketing has increased by 16% since 2012 and that over 66% of consumers bought something online as a result of receiving a marketing email?
However, like most digital marketing activities you need to be in it for the long-term. If you don't already have a method of generating an email marketing list you need to act fast. Because to build a list, you'll need to generate traffic to your website (see above) and then when you achieve that traffic, you'll need to convince visitors to sign up to your email marketing list. Thankfully there are ways of sweetening the deal, as you can offer one-off sign-up discounts at your store, or offer a free download, useful information - get creative with an incentive to start building a list.
Once you have a list, you can use it to keep your visitors up-to-date with what's happening at your e-commerce store. There is a fine balance to make between regular emails and emails that begin to get annoying and that really depends on your product and your audience. Email marketing is a form of content marketing too, as you can re-purpose content, send updates or provide a digest via email - all designed to entice people back to your website.
Social advertising
Depending on your brand and what you sell, we tend to recommend that as part of your content marketing you put in place a social media marketing strategy and regularly update your social media channels. However, you can also use social media as a paid advertising medium. It can be very effective too as it offers much better targeting than print, TV or radio advertising ever could. Most social media channels will allow you to target via demographics, interests, subjects that visitors have already shown an interest in and many more. Couple this with the ability to control the spend and duration of your advertising and you have a medium that can be turned on and off as your marketing strategy - or sales that week - demand.
If you're concerned that you don't have the budget for social advertising you need to remember to focus on measuring the return on advertising spend (ROAS). When it’s positive, it means that your adverts are delivering sales, so you'll always know when you are making money. Conversely if it's negative, you need to adjust the campaign or pause it and re-think.
Google advertising
Similar to social media advertising, Google advertising, or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising allows you to pay to be listed in the search results for particular keywords or phrases that you select. Now you may say that we've already talked about search engine optimisation so why pay Google as well? Well SEO can take some time to start working, so paid-for advertising can be a good stop gap and can also be used tactically if you have a seasonal or short term promotional requirement.
At the risk of repeating ourselves, Google advertising once again relies on you researching, choosing and targeting the best keywords and phrases for your business. The research that you're already doing for organic search engine optimisation (aren't you?) will come in useful here but you can also short-cut things by looking at what your competitors are targeting.You can do this manually which takes time or there are ways of discovering this information quicker, which we can help you with.
Amazon & eBay
Whilst we can level the playing field somewhat for smaller businesses and the techniques we've outlined already will help to improve your e-commerce business, there are a couple of strategies based around the fact that if you can't beat them, join them.
You'll probably of heard of a couple of small e-commerce stores called Amazon and eBay respectively. Amazon is the world's biggest retailer which accounted for over 40% of all e-commerce sales in the US in 2017. What you may not realise is that you can list your products on Amazon as well, which gives you another channel to reach customers. Depending on the product you sell, you may well find that others are already doing so, but it makes sense to try and gain a small slice of the pie in any case. The same goes for eBay where you can list your products in an eBay store.
In both cases, many e-commerce platforms allow you to easily create listings for both Amazon and eBay and manage everything from your store so there's no need to worry about having to run three stores at once. And whilst these channels are not suitable for every business, it's an avenue worth exploring. We can help you decide if it's for you and how to go about making the most of Amazon and eBay.
If you're unsure of your e-commerce marketing strategy or need help with getting your e-commerce marketing activities up and running, contact us for a no-obligation chat about how we might help.
