Crafting a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy for your e-commerce may seem daunting, but then with its dividends. It’s no news that the wealth of strategies and channels that can help drive online sales is enormous (and continuing to grow). This is not farfetched, because if you’re not getting your brand in front of prospects, they would go elsewhere, hence the need to have an ace digital marketing strategy for your brand. While you may be tempted to go off to the races, intentionality is key when you start developing an eCommerce marketing strategy.

Having a digital marketing strategy enables eCommerce businesses to come up with new and efficient ways to connect with target buyers and a relevant audience. For you to be able to attract a bigger following and increase your eCommerce business’s sales, you need to start thinking like your target market and ensure that all the content you churn out will be enjoyed by them. Digital marketing will essentially help you come closer to your audience and attract more people to your brand without you having to invest too much effort. This will happen as gradually, as you learn about your audience’s preferences. It will also help you determine what ingredients you need to mix to cook up a successful digital marketing strategy for your e-commerce.

No doubt you’re up against multiple competitors in your category, so to stand out from the crowd and truly maximize your growth, you need to get ahead of the eCommerce digital marketing game. You don’t just need a “pretty good” eCommerce marketing strategy; you need the best and eCommerce marketing strategies you can find. We’ve written 5 digital marketing strategies you should consider for your eCommerce.

1. Leverage Social Media Marketing

If you’re like most brands these days, you’re probably acutely aware of the importance of social media for eCommerce. Building a social media following, engaging your followers, and interacting with them is great at boosting brand engagement and loyalty, but it has one big limitation: For the most part, your reach will be limited to people who are already aware of you.

Social media ads on channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can help expand your reach to people who aren’t already familiar with your brand. This is a great way to grow your audience and get new potential customers. One of the great aspects of eCommerce social media marketing is the granular level with which social media services like Facebook let you target your ads. Having a developed customer persona is extremely helpful here: If most of your customers are single women under the age of 40 with a love for jogging, for instance, you can run ads targeting them.

An equally helpful feature is the ability for you to find “lookalike audiences” when placing ads for things like Facebook eCommerce. This will show your ad to people like your target demographic to who you aren’t already marketing, which is a great way to grow your reach with very little ad spend.

Most of the time, your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram ads for eCommerce will all highlight specific products. Imagine if an interested social media user clicks on the ad, only to be sent to your home page, and then has to browse further to find the product they were interested in. In all likelihood, they’ll probably just click away!

Instead of risking bounces by sending users to pages that aren’t what they expected, a great strategy for eCommerce social media marketing is to direct users to custom-built landing pages that focus on specific products and are tailor-made to drive conversions. Craft landing pages that are beautiful and effective, tightly designed to show off your products, and nurture shoppers into customers, and you’ll see higher conversion rates from the get-go.

2. Elevate Your eCommerce SEO

When you need to shop online, how do you find new products to buy? If you’re like most people, you probably start by heading to your choice of the search engine (Google, Bing, etc.), entering your query, and seeing what pops up. That’s how people shop online these days, and that’s what makes it so critical to have proper search engine optimization or SEO.

To be blunt, the benefit of eCommerce SEO is this: You want search engines like Google to display your products before they display your competitors’ products. How often do you scroll down the search results page? Or go to the second page or the third? Probably not too often, right? Just being on the first page can be a huge boost to your traffic — as can your rank even on that first page.

There are many things digital marketing strategies you can utilize to optimize SEO for an eCommerce website. You can make sure images have proper alt-text, or that your page titles use common search terms. But having the best eCommerce SEO isn’t easy. If it was, everyone would do it. Truly effective eCommerce SEO requires going over your site from top to bottom with a fine-tooth, SEO-enabled comb.

An eCommerce SEO audit examines how your site ranks for the search terms most relevant to your business. It identifies your “domain authority,” which is how sites like Google assess your trustworthiness and expertise. It assesses your site architecture and if search engines might find your site clunky or hard to navigate. The best audits will also include competitor analysis and assess where they rank for these same keywords to best position your business for success

3. Use Email Marketing

Like you already know digital marketing strategies like SEO and content marketing can get people to your website, but they won’t necessarily buy. Most of them won’t. 99% of first-time visitors to a site won’t make a purchase. This means you’ll need to continue points of contact to nurture non-buyers into customers — and customers into brand loyalists. One of the best ways to do this is eCommerce email marketing. If you’re like most eCommerce brands, you probably do some email marketing already, with things like seasonal promotions and monthly newsletters being very common. Although this might sound pretty obvious, how can you send emails to someone if you don’t have their email address? Hence Smart Email Marketing begins with collecting email opt-ins.

4. You should Consider Investing in PPC Advertising

The advantage of SEO marketing is that it doesn’t cost a cent (other than your time). On the downside, however, it can take time to work, and, in the meantime, you’ve just spent a good deal of effort on something that won’t see returns for weeks if not months. Thankfully, one great way to bridge the gap is through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

An eCommerce PPC strategy is a great way to get your products in the faces of your audience. By buying ad space through networks like Google and Bing, you can ensure that people searching for relevant terms will see your products and can be directed to your site or a custom landing page.

A wrong thing to do in eCommerce PPC is to reach out to a “cold audience” that’s never heard of your brand or your products before, so you need to learn to retarget. Retargeting is targeting a warm audience that’s more familiar with you and primed to have their interest captured. And an excellent tactic that should be part of any eCommerce retargeting strategy is to use dynamic retargeting in a shopping feed. Services like Google Shopping show products that people can buy almost instantly, and devoting some of your PPC resources to getting your products into this feed will have a huge return on your investment.

To convert with PPC, these four steps are non-negotiable:

Step 1: A user searches for a term.

Step 2: The user finds your brand, whether due to organic SEO or paid advertising.

Step 3: The user visits your site.

Step 4: The user converts.

5. Landing Pages Convert Better

A common pitfall we see in many eCommerce PPC marketing campaigns is sending traffic — any traffic, no matter the source — to product pages or your eCommerce site’s main page. This isn’t always a mistake, mind you, and directing shoppers to product pages is an easy, relatively low-effort solution. However, if you want to drive conversions, studies show that product pages may not be the best bet because of its higher bounce rates and lower rates of conversion.

Think about it. On your product pages, you probably have tons of distractions: Navbars, related products, and more. These can all get in the way of a shopper looking to buy. They might click away, get distracted by a related product (and wind up buying neither), or just be turned off by unfriendly UX.

If you want to truly drive conversions, you need smartly designed, engaging eCommerce landing pages.

What do we mean when we say “eCommerce landing page,” exactly? It means a custom-designed page designed to not only showcase an individual product (or limited series of products) but to also guide the visitor on a journey. A landing page should intrigue a visitor, tell them why your products are valuable and lead them to learn more, and finally, to convert. 

But why bug yourself with all these technical details? Send us a brief let’s help scale-up your eCommerce brand.

Leave a Reply

Come see us

Errand Media Ltd
42 Ajose Street Mende Maryland, Lagos

or

Errand GoC
1309 Coffeen Avenue STE 1200
Sheridan, Wyoming 82801

hello@errandmedia.com

Need Help? Chat with us