E-commerce marketing plan for super shop 2022
- superstoresolution
- Apr 16, 2022
- 6 min read
Table of contents
What is eCommerce marketing?
3. SEO
eCommerce marketing is the practice of using promotional tactics and strategies to drive traffic to your online stores and convert traffic into paying customers. A sound marketing plan is essential to any eCommerce store in order to build brand awareness, attract potential consumers and ultimately, drive more sales to your store. eCommerce marketing applies to both customer acquisition (getting new customers) and customer retention (retrieving old ones).
eCommerce marketing spans virtually all digital marketing channels that we have long been acquainted with. We will go through all most-used eCommerce marketing channels you can utilize when executing your marketing plan:
Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of internet marketing that utilizes the use of social media networks, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to promote your company’s product.
Traditionally, this marketing tool is mainly used for distributing content to generate traffic to websites, but social media has evolved to provide businesses with more comprehensive marketing tactics, such as video, storytelling, live stream, and many more. One of the most praised SMM tactics that are broadly adopted recently is to distribute shoppable posts on social media platforms. Shoppable content posts allow marketers to use, mostly, compelling images with actionable purchase points so that customers can easily make a purchase when browsing social network sites. This is an innovative social media marketing technique to bridge the gap between browsing and buying.
One of the most obvious advantages of social media marketing is that it can reach out to a broad range of audience base with all groups of ages, genders, occupations, and hobbies, so SMM can be considered as the one-size-fits-all marketing channel for all businesses. SMM is favored by marketers as it gives them a myriad of available tactics thanks to its flexibility to engage and directly connect with target consumers.
It’s not a secret that social media marketing has long grown to be one of the most popular means of marketing, for both brick and mortar and online businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises, and world-recognized brands are hopping all over trending social networks to connect with their audience.
Content marketing refers to the process of creating and distributing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to educate and attract a clear target audience, and ultimately to convert them to make a purchase at your store. There are many channels that content marketing can be applied to, such as social media, blogs, landing pages, podcasts, print publications, and more.
In the eCommerce space, content marketing is considered the best means to distribute your product to the audience, as a highly relevant and comprehensive content marketing strategy will ensure other marketing channels become successful in parallel.
Aside from converting leads to customers, content marketing can be a golden weapon to deliver educational content, through all distribution mediums, and also, drive organic traffic to your site, which is enormously beneficial to your site’s SERPs. In the age of inbound marketing, where customers voluntarily come to you after learning about you and your brand, content marketing is definitely the game-changer that can appeal to potential customers to visit your site in a natural, non-disruptive way.
Apparently, we can’t talk about eCommerce marketing without mentioning SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your store website to make it rank higher in search results pages, such as Google, Bing, etc. When people search for a specific product or keywords related to your product and services, SEO will help you rank your page in a higher position, making it more appealing to users and thus, increase the chance of getting more traffic to your site.
Why does SEO remarkably matter to eCommerce marketing? Nowadays consumers have a preference of searching for solutions and product recommendations on Google with the hope of solving their pain points. They are looking for product options, comparisons, tips and tricks, guidelines, and many more to help them make a better decision. That’s where eCommerce SEO comes in. It leads potential customers to your well-informed content and quality products, provides them with solutions, and ultimately, persuades them to make a purchase at your online store.
Therefore, optimizing your eCommerce site for a better SEO is always one of the top priorities of any marketing strategy. Normally, SEO involves three main practices—on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO.
eCommerce SEO provides you with a natural way of reaching your target audience without paying for ads, and bear in mind that taking people to your online site is the first but most essential step in order to convert them and drive sales.
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing channel, also known as paid search traffic, refers to all website traffic that comes from paid ads on search engines. Though the PPC marketing channel can cost you a much larger amount of money compared to other methods, you can be guaranteed that your product and store website will reach specific target customers. There are many different PPC ads networks, such as Bing Ads and Amazon Advertising, but at this moment, the two channels that are most used for paid ads campaigns are Google and Facebook.
Google Ads gain a reputation as the easiest channel to use and for many marketers, the primary source of all PPC advertisements. Google PPC guarantees that your paid ads will appear at the top of search engine results, meaning that potential buyers will see your page first when they enter search terms that match your ads campaign. However, remember that as you need to pay for Google each time a user clicks on your link, your conversion rate should be high enough for a good ROI. Otherwise, your might overspend your marketing budget without winning any real customers.
Along with Google, Facebook is also becoming a dominant paid marketing channel, with around 2.8 billion monthly active users. Facebook Ads is believed to provide the best return on investment (ROI) due to the fact that Facebook advertising proposes an enormous customization potential. It’s not a secret that the platform contains a lot of personal information about its huge number of users, so it’s entirely possible for you to target your FB ads based on certain features, including gender, age, marital status, career field, interests and many more. Another great point of Facebook Ads is that it lets you define how much you want to spend with a variety of formats, such as the overall amount, your daily budget, and your cost per result.
Email marketing refers to commercial emails you send to your “email subscribers” – contacts in the email list that have given permission to receive emails from you. This is a traditional and low-cost yet effective marketing method to promote, inform, drive sales and raise awareness of potential as well as frequent customers about your brands and products.
Modern email marketing has left the traditional mass mailings method behind and instead focuses on engaging content and personalization. Email marketing comes in many types, either promotional (post-purchase follow-up, abandoned shopping cart mail, etc.) or informational (newsletter, announcements, etc.) to fulfill a specific purpose.
Though email marketing has been there for a long period of time before the boom of eCommerce, it still holds a specific value in the world of eCommerce marketing. Email automation along with subscriber personalization techniques can help you effortlessly set up a certain email campaign for specific customer groups that are segmented by interest or by their customer journey. There are many Email Service Providers (ESP) that can help you to do that and achieve a great email marketing goal for a reasonable fee per month.
Video advertising is a means of eCommerce marketing that uses videos to promote and market your product or service, normally on your digital and social channels. This marketing strategy is growing popular as it can help you to increase visitor engagement and reach your audience with a new medium, which might broaden your customer base. By 2021, online videos are forecasted to make up more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic, proofing that this marketing strategy must be included in your eCommerce marketing plan as soon as possible.
There are almost countless video marketing types for you to employ in conjunction with your marketing funnel, from brand videos, FAQs to instructional videos and more. Simply having video content on your site can help boost up the ranking on search engines, and of course, you can upload your videos on other social and marketing channels to drive more organic visitors.
Affiliate marketing is the process when a network of affiliates or referrers drive traffic to your online store and get paid for each sale they made. As the popularity of social networks has continued to grow, this marketing method has at the same time become a great sale channel for many online stores, because merchants can decide their own commission rates, and they only have to pay when a sale happens at stores.
Moreover, a new eCommerce might face challenges to build up brand awareness and generate sales, and an affiliate marketing program is a smart channel to quickly and affordably drive more traffic while not paying a dollar upfront. Most affiliates share common characteristics to ensure that their audience will be receptive to purchasing your products, but still, there are several different affiliate marketing channels that you may leverage, including influencers, bloggers, paid sites, email lists, and well-known media channels.
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