Improve Your Marketing to Your eCommerce Store
eCommerce
You are in eCommerce if you sell anything directly from your website!
As with any online property it will just sit in cyberspace without any traffic if you don’t tell anyone about your products or what you have to offer.
I like ot describe your newly minted website like this:
You decide to have a party so you go ahead and buy all the food and fun things to play with. But you didn’t tell anyone you were having a party, you didn’t invite anyone, you didn’t let them know when or where the party was being held. So there you are alone with all the food because no-one showed up. Without marketing a website is just like this party!
Marketing has been an important part of selling since selling was invented!
Marketing means all of the actions taken to improve brand awareness, interest and foot traffic and browsing in your store.
It can include advertising, but also includes word of mouth, social media (modern word of mouth) and any kind of activity designed to promote your brand or particular products or services. Even the guy waving a board on the street corner in a monkey suit to let passersby know that the pizza is hot is involved in marketing!
What is eCommerce Marketing?
Ecommerce marketing is the process of driving sales by raising awareness about an online store’s brand and product offerings. Digital marketing for ecommerce applies traditional marketing principles to a multichannel, data-driven environment.
Ecommerce marketing can be divided into two general actions: driving website traffic and optimizing the user experience for conversion. Both are critical components to growing an online business.
Failure in one is sure to undermine any success in the other. Seasoned marketers can thrive in a digital landscape, starting with a solid foundation of common marketing strategies.
Ecommerce Marketing Channels
Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): Effective PPC campaigns drive users with intent to purchase, making it more efficient than many traditional advertising platforms. Businesses bid on impressions for paid listings at the top of search engine results, paying on a per-click basis. Impressions are determined by user search query, with the strategy revolving around which keyword bids yield the highest ROI.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Sometimes used as a synonym for PPC, referring to paid advertising campaigns. SEM is often used to describe efforts on Google’s AdWords platform and paid platforms on other search engines, such as Bing. This multifaceted term is also used by many marketers to describe all paid and organic efforts.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Unlike the paid media opportunities described above, SEO traffic comes from unpaid “organic” results on search engines such as Google and Bing. Successful SEO requires adherence to best practices on a product page level in tandem with content creation, inbound links, social media engagement, and many other factors that search engine algorithms take into consideration. SEO is both a science and an art and rquires long term commintment.
Display Advertising: Banners, sidebars and other predominantly-visual advertisements that appear on other websites. Display ads are facilitated by ad networks such as Google Display Network. There are also many other options that can be targeted as well.
Affiliate Marketing: Referrals from other websites with industry or product-focused content such as reviews, comparisons, and testimonials. Successful affiliates have a loyal following or receive traffic from some of the above channels. They typically receive a set commission of referred sales, often determined on a case-by-case basis. Affiliate marketing channels usually require a budget for you to get started, however this can be one of the most successful marketing strategies.
Email Marketing: Newsletters, abandoned cart notifications and remarketing all use email to target past and potential customers. Email marketing is one of the most powerful resources and online business can have, yet not enough businesses are effectively utilising this strategy.
Google AdWords: Google’s advertising platform pioneered the PPC model and capitalizes on the company’s majority share of the search market. It is the most popular but it can be expensive, depending upopn the keywords you are targeting. Additonally targeting is only by keyword.
Bing: Bing offers a cost effective PPC platform, effectively reaching your keyword targetted ausience at a fraction of the cost. The drawback i that it has a much smaller market share.
Social Media Marketing: Many social platforms offer PPC advertising as well. A major difference is that you can target audience by interest, occupation, age, location and more. The cost of SMM is minimal in comparison to Google’s Adwords. Businesses need to track the performance of all of their marketing and choose the one that is most effective for their niche, brand and product.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Throwing money blindly at your advertising is not effective either! Businesses must become proficeint at managing the tracking of all aspects fo their campaigns. CRO is the process of improving every aspect of a website so that more visitors purchase. Faster load times, fewer clicks to purchase and more enticing product descriptions/images make it easier for user’s to evaluate your products and follow through to purchase.
Conversion Funnel: More than just a sales funnel, the Conversion Funnel considers all the steps taken by a prospect to become a customer, beginning with awareness and ending with a purchase. Higher-priced items generally have a longer sales cycle, while low-cost items can convert in a much shorter period of time.
Keeping Up With eCommerce Marketing Trends:
Online marketing is a rapidly developing field with constant change, updates and new innovations. what is working one day can actually becomea liability the next!
Google plays a major role is the trends and technologies avaible and how they work for the marketer. And, major marketers are always looking for an advantage. With such a large percentage of people in the world utilising the internet to find, and often purchase, the products they are looking for, online marketing is also highly competitive!
While the front end of the online marketng world is evolving at warp speed, the backend, the users, the businesses who utilise various online marketing strategies usually are too busy running their businesses to keep up. Many businesses employ staff to handle their marketing, or utilise the services of marketing agents.