Ecommerce Digital Marketing Strategy

The percentage of total retail sales that go to eCommerce has been growing at a healthy rate for years. While a booming market is excellent news, it also means more competitors. As such, attracting appropriate clients can be difficult and expensive for each eCommerce business. Unless you’re focused on increasing brand awareness and sales, your eCommerce website will exist in a vacuum. This is the reason why an effective eCommerce marketing strategy is crucial.

Effective eCommerce digital marketing would open many marketing channels for your business. Here are some of the most important and efficient strategies for increasing online sales across your eCommerce funnel.

• Develop and Implement an Ecommerce Marketing Plan

• Optimize your eCommerce website

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Drive sales with Google Ads

• Social Media Marketing

• Turn likes into sales with "Shopping" options on social media platforms 

• Remarketing campaigns

1. Develop and Implement an Ecommerce Marketing Plan

“A goal without a plan is just a wish” - A lovely quote that is particularly pertinent to our situation. Developing a “plan” is a must-have for any successful marketing campaign. A well-developed and tactful plan will help you analyze and understand where your business stands right now, where it should be headed within the timeframe you have set, and what steps should be taken to attain this. An effective marketing plan comprises of:

Goals & objectives: Make it very specific and realistic. 

Target customers, personas & markets: One of the main factors behind a successful plan is knowing your audience. If you are not sure about who you are targeting, what qualities identify them, and where they're situated, your campaigns won’t be successful.

Pricing & positioning strategy: Make sure that your pricing and positioning provide genuine value to the audience. Forcing overpriced products on your customers would result in loss, especially when price comparison is so easy nowadays.

Tactics & Tools to Consider: New marketing channels are constantly being launched. Take a look at which platform is most likely to be used by your target audience. Do adequate research to determine which platforms are most likely to be used by the audience you intend to reach. 

2. Optimize your eCommerce website

Create quality content: Be creative and unique in your approach. Creating high-quality, unique content will help you succeed because it will resonate with your consumers in a way that will encourage them to interact with you, buy from you, and follow you. 

Optimize layout: It’s also important to test the site’s layout and language to make sure it works seamlessly for customers to make it a great place to shop for products.

Ensure that your site is mobile-friendly: Since people now use mobile devices to browse the Internet, it's important that your site has a responsive design. That implies a mobile-friendly design is a must for eCommerce marketing if you want customers to find your site and buy products or services.

Write relevant blog posts: There are many reasons why having a blog on your eCommerce site is beneficial. It helps in improving SEO, developing a reputation as a trustworthy authority in your market's niche, generating valuable leads, etc.

3. Search engine optimization (SEO)

An ideal eCommerce SEO plan begins with an SEO audit to provide an honest evaluation of your present position in search results. An eCommerce SEO audit is a process that aims to determine how your site ranks in terms of search terms that are most relevant to your business. To best prepare for the success of your business, it is also relevant to perform a competitor analysis to determine where exactly do they rank on behalf of the same keywords.

Technical SEO is usually overlooked when it comes to developing an eCommerce website. There are a variety of technical issues that can affect the operation of your website:

Broken links: Broken link is a web page that cannot be found or retrieved by a user. Having broken links on your website could adversely affect the ranking.

Slow load times: If your website is experiencing slow load times, it could cause some people to abandon your site before it fully loads.

Duplicate content: If your content appears in more than one place on the Internet, it’s probably duplicate content. 

Security issues: If your site isn’t secured with HTTPS, users will receive an “insecure” warning while visiting the website and may choose to visit a different site.

Now that your eCommerce SEO audit evaluated how well you were performing in all of the keywords you were actually targeting, it is also necessary to find the ones you aren’t. Ecommerce Keyword Research helps in growing your audience by targeting new keywords and search phrases. It helps you in doing extensive eCommerce keyword research in order to decide the fresh terms that you need to target.

Check On-Page SEO which includes optimization of meta keywords, images, and page content.

Work on Off-Page SEO which involves various link-building strategies. 

4. Drive sales with Google Ads

Since Google Ads is a pretty big platform, it is one of the most important marketing channels for many eCommerce websites. Google Ads helps you to advertise on various platforms with the help of a variety of campaign types available. Here are the top Google Ads types that every eCommerce store brand should explore as part of their marketing strategy:

Shopping Ads: Shopping Ads are the most efficient way to sell if you are having B2C products. These ads will be shown on top of Google search results attracting potential customers to visit your website and make a purchase.

Search Ads: These are ads that are being shown on top of Google search results. They are really advantageous since they appear when individuals are already looking for products similar to yours. By purchasing an ad, you ensure that your products are seen before those of your competitors. 

YouTube Ads: Youtube Ads are another important Ad type that is truly successful because of the fact that they are harder to “ignore”. These ads easily get along with the Youtube interface and the youtube user is forced to watch the complete ad (or at least a part of it) while watching videos.

Display Ads: Google Display ads are video text or image ads that would be visible on third-party Google Partner websites as an image or block.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a long-term investment for eCommerce businesses. The main goal of social media marketing is to convert visitors into followers and then followers into potential customers. Let’s take a look at various social media platforms available:

Facebook: With 2.4 billion monthly active users, Facebook covers over one-fourth of the total world population. Facebook provides tailor-made campaigns suited for different strategies – video, stories, carousel ads, live content, etc.

Instagram: Instagram turns the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" into eCommerce gold. The highest user engagement rate is held by Instagram now. If you are well aware of how to increase followers, use hashtags cleverly and protect your brand, you will be able to lead shoppers right to your CTA.

LinkedIn: Having 227 million monthly active users, LinkedIn is especially suited for the B2B market. 

Twitter: Twitter is one of the larger and older social media platforms that help users to connect with both niche and mainstream influencers.

Pinterest: Like Instagram, Pinterest is also a visual platform, having 81% of the female user base offering a unique opportunity for targeted ads.

Snapchat: Snapchat is the best platform for the younger audience as it has 16.4 million users between 12 and 17-years old. 

6. Make use of "Shopping" options over social media platforms

Almost every social media platforms provide a "shopping" feature now where users can browse and even purchase products without leaving these social media platforms. 

Pinterest offers “buyable pins” that allow the audience to check and purchase the product within the platform itself, thereby making it a more convenient and frictionless shopping experience.

Instagram has been providing “shoppable posts” and stories with “shoppable tags” that help Instagram users to tag their products thereby helping the users to purchase them directly from their organic news feed.

7. Remarketing campaigns:

It makes sense to target individuals who have previously expressed interest in your website, blog, Facebook page, and other online businesses. That is why remarketing is one of the most effective and best methods to consider. It can aid in the development of brand recognition and the conversion of more leads into sales.

In case you have doubts about how to build your strategies or implement them, get help from experts. Building an e-commerce site is only half the battle when it comes to selling online. As an e-commerce digital agency, we'll assist you in launching, improving, and upgrading your website as well as digital marketing campaigns.