If you want your online store to earn some serious money, you’ll need to market your brand and products.
The best way to do this is to develop an ecommerce marketing strategy.
While your ecommerce marketing strategy can be unique to your business, there are tips to help shape your approach.
This guide covers six tried and true methods to help you build a winning ecommerce marketing strategy.
Define Your Brand Image and Identity
Developing brand identity seems to be an obvious step in creating any type of business. However, you will be surprised to know that many organizations haven’t developed their brand identity at all.
Start by writing down the basics. You should have a detailed answer to the following questions:
- What is your company’s mission?
- Who is your target audience?
- What problems do you aim to solve using your products and services?
These details are great starting points when creating a brand image and identity. It also ensures consistency, especially when you are creating marketing content for various channels.
Brand identity, also called visual identity, is the combination of all visual elements that you have created to give your brand a voice.
It is composed of, but not limited to, the following elements: logo, color, font, typography, style, layout, and imagery.
A brand identity is the message that you want to send to your customers through various marketing activities. It helps them identify your business from others.
On the other hand, brand image refers to what your customers think about your brand. It’s their perception and impression of your business that is created using elements of your brand identity.
A brand image takes time to develop through brand awareness and messaging. It is the personality that all your marketing activities carry consistently.
Having all of these details and information in writing ensures consistency, especially when releasing campaigns for different channels.
It will be easy to drown in a multitude of marketing activities and opportunities. And, the details above will serve as a valuable guide, especially when things are overwhelming.
Additionally, it will help you prioritize different marketing initiatives, especially when you begin to manage project costs and reduce expenditures while maximizing results.
Simplify adding and designing branding elements and content to your website by using top-tier content management software.
Study Your Competitors
Identify who your direct rivals are (especially those in the same niche or selling similar products as your store) and review their current strengths and limitations. Studying this enables you to see business opportunities that give you a game-changing advantage.
Examine your rivals’ online stores and the kinds of products sold. How do their product galleries and pages look like? Do they promote their shops primarily with blogs and visuals? How often do they publish them? You can also use website performance and SEO tools that reveal your competitors’ traffic information and sources.
Competitor research is meant to be a continuous process, so keep monitoring their sales and marketing performances now and then.
You can even subscribe to their email newsletters and learn a thing or two from their email subject lines and content. You can also follow their social media profiles and buy their products for a taste of their customer experience.
Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
You can’t perfect your ecommerce marketing strategy without identifying your USP — that is, what makes your brand and products better than your competition. It is the specific advantage you hold over other similar businesses being compared to yours.
Knowing this helps you plan how to position your business and what you should communicate and showcase to your customers and market niche. It’s also the determining factor for whether you blend in or stand out in your industry.
To develop your USP, remember that it revolves around the strengths making your products distinctly valuable to your buyers. Ponder on the question, “What makes my brand different from my rivals?”
Be specific with your answers and identify traits and offerings concretely. If you don’t, your marketing messages and campaigns won’t be too convincing and conversion-boosting.
You can also create a compelling USP by keeping the following in mind:
- Be confident and defensible. Having a solid position empowers you to present a hard-to-argue case against your rivals’ products. It also makes you extra memorable compared to only a generic stance.
- Focus on what your shoppers value. Think of what your customers care about and highlight how your product addresses that.
- Communicate a unique message. Your USP is not so much about presenting a unique product. Rather, it’s about the message you choose to tell that focuses on what you have and what your competitor lacks.
Set Your Goals
An ecommerce marketing strategy should never be without an end goal in mind. The number of product units that you sell through your ecommerce store is a good measure of your success.
However, you should set more than just one goal. SMART objectives typically anchor effective marketing campaigns and activities. SMART means:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Relevant
- Timely
The goals that you set will serve as your roadmap. By staying focused on these goals, you ensure that your strategies are efficient.
Here are some examples of SMART goals for your ecommerce marketing campaign.
- Establish 5 pay-per-click (PPC) ads to increase the website traffic by 25%.
- Publish 3 content on the website and get the content to rank for top industry keywords.
- Increase Instagram following by 30% with Social Tradia and organic content marketing strategies.
Goals are not set in stone either. Adjust the objective’s timeline, budget, and other details to fit your organization, workforce, and capabilities. You can use the best Gantt chart makers online to help you schedule the implementation of activities leading to goal attainment.
Decide and Prioritize Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy
To put it simply, the more ecommerce marketing strategies you implement, the more chances of success. Reaching potential leads through different channels will attract a large number of potential customers to your online business.
However, spreading yourself and yourself too thin will decrease the results of your marketing campaigns. Additionally, it is very expensive to run numerous strategies at once.
That is why you should examine each ecommerce marketing strategy and prioritize them based on their benefits. Here are some of the most popular and effective strategies right now:
- Search engine optimization (SEO) – It involves steps such as developing content using the right keywords to restructuring your website for optimal performance. The goal is to make it easy for customers who are using search engines to find your business.
- Social media marketing – One of the most popular marketing strategies these days. It extends your audience reach, develops your brand awareness, and attracts leads through well-timed posts on social media.
(Image source: instagram.com)
- Email marketing – The granddaddy of digital marketing is still as effective as ever. It is perfect for campaigns that target existing customers. Email campaigns also encourage repeat purchases.
- Content marketing – It involves creating high-quality content that contributes significantly to your SEO campaigns. This strategy also ties well with email and social media strategies.
- PPC – If you have the budget, PCC provides a leg up on the competition by securing crucial real estate on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). It matches the users’ search terms as well, which increases the likelihood of capturing a lead.
Identify the best strategies that you can implement right away based on your budget, manpower, and goals.
Similarly, some of these strategies integrate with one another, which means a more efficient campaign effort.
Use reliable project management software to streamline managing, organizing, and prioritizing your ecommerce marketing efforts.
Test and Implement Your Strategies
Implementing and testing your strategies typically go hand in hand. Without the latter, you cannot track the progress of each strategy.
Furthermore, there’s no reason to wait until the end of the campaign to measure its performance. If possible, define specific timelines that include testing and evaluation.
By spreading these throughout the campaign period, you can adjust your activities based on their performance. It is easy to identify which strategies are working and which ones are falling flat.
This is important, especially if you have a limited budget. Once you identify which of your campaigns are pulling in leads and customers, you can focus on them in the meantime to maximize the results.
Part of testing is data collection. Fortunately, you have tools that collect relevant information from your campaigns.
For instance, marketing dashboards and SEO reporting tools such as Google Analytics analyze and optimize your web traffic and SEO. It provides insights such as dwell time, bounce rate, and conversion rate all in one place.
Conclusion
So, are you ready to launch a successful ecommerce marketing strategy?
Developing your brand and setting goals may seem daunting at first. But, as long as you know your business well, these processes should come naturally.
Furthermore, spend some conducting in-depth research on different types of marketing strategies. Identify potential opportunities and possible challenges down the road.
Additionally, stay flexible during your campaigns. The ability to adjust to hurdles and take advantage of possibilities is essential in reaching your goals.
