A good e-commerce marketing strategy strives to captivate the attention of your target audience through high-quality content marketing that provides value before customers even decide whether or not to buy your products.
However, e-commerce marketing isn’t just content marketing but an entire marketing strategy that encompasses different channels, approaches, and plenty of research. In this guide, we’ll discuss the best marketing strategy for 2024, what it includes, and how to create one.
What Is E-commerce Marketing?
E-commerce marketing refers to digital marketing strategies that are specifically developed to boost the performance of your e-commerce business. One of the main goals of these strategies is to increase the level of your search engine optimization (SEO) and increase the organic traffic to your e-commerce website by ranking your web page higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, these strategies extend beyond just SEO practices and increase the organic website traffic to your e-commerce page as only marketing channels. It’s safe to assume that the primary goal of e-commerce marketing strategies is to direct the target audiences to your e-commerce store and increase the conversion rate through e-commerce sales.
A good marketing strategy outlines your target market and target demographics and identifies several marketing channels and approaches necessary to reach and engage with both potential customers and existing customers, drive customer interest and customer loyalty, and make conversions.
Types of E-commerce Marketing
Not all e-commerce marketing is the same, as there are different types of e-commerce marketing, and in this section, we’ll discuss what those types are:
Paid Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising refers to ads paid by businesses to rank higher than organic results on SERPs. These sites will rank completely independently from other non-paying websites, and they’ll always appear at the top of the page, separated by a gray “Ad” symbol in front of the page’s name.
Organic Search
Organic search, also referred to as search engine optimization or SEO, is a set of practices that increase the visibility of your online store to search engines, which in turn rank you higher in SERPs. This translates to more visitors and more conversions, which creates a feedback loop and further increases your SERPs.
However, organic search encompasses several different key elements, such as keyword research, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, content creation, and site navigation optimization.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an important part of your marketing campaign, as it involves posting user-generated content on your e-commerce site’s blog for your customer base to interact with. The content can contain product descriptions, new product marketing, or product reviews.
Content marketing often overlaps with other marketing channels, such as email marketing, social media marketing, landing pages, product pages, etc., or any other channel that can help you deliver content to your customers to increase online sales and grow brand awareness.
Affiliate Marketing
This type of marketing involves an affiliate promoting a product on your behalf through their own marketing channels in exchange for sales commissions. You can engage in this type of marketing by finding affiliates via affiliate network brokers.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing involves both paid and organic marketing efforts via social media platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. This allows businesses to not only engage with their target customers and provide special offers to loyal customers but also reach new customers, build brand awareness, publish content via social media posts, use hashtags, and use many other ecommerce marketing tactics.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers and social media celebrities often have access to niche audiences that your e-commerce brand needs. You can always collaborate with an influencer to promote your product to their audience in exchange for sales commissions. What makes influencers so appealing is that they’re already fantastic content creators willing to use their own marketing tools to increase your sales.
Customer Loyalty Programs
Customer loyalty programs are great for driving sales and customer retention. Loyal customers are extremely valuable, as they’re often making repeat purchases, and thus, should be awarded for their online shopping habits.
These programs often allow online retailers to retarget an existing customer base and attract new customers, sometimes by implementing a referral system that offers incentives for existing customers to introduce new customers to your e-commerce brand.
Creating Your E-Commerce Marketing Strategy
Though modern technologies are revolutionizing how advertisement is implemented and deployed, the fundamental rules of creating a solid marketing strategy for your business haven’t changed. Here are some of the basic steps for creating your own e-commerce marketing strategy:
Conduct market research: Conducting thorough market research is necessary for gaining insight into market shifts and customer behavior, but it can also help you identify possible market gaps. In short, conducting market research helps you make well-informed business decisions, thus allowing you to adjust your strategies as the market shifts.
Define your marketing goals: Setting specific marketing goals can provide you with measurable results regarding the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Not only that, but these metrics also help you identify areas in your strategy that need improvement, allowing you to optimize your whole marketing efforts.
Identify your target audience: Creating an effective marketing strategy begins with identifying your target audience and demographics, including details such as age, gender, geographical location, areas of interest, income levels, and buying habits. This helps you perform market segmentation, which further affects the effectiveness of your entire marketing strategy.
Analyze the competition: Analyze the marketing channels and efforts of your competitors to gain better insight into what works and what doesn’t, which can help you identify gaps in their marketing strategy. This would allow you to rely on data and position your company in a way that fills that gap.
Develop a brand message: Developing a concise and convincing brand message and a mission statement that’s consistent with your brand values is really important, as it directly appeals to your customer base.
Choose your marketing channels: Choosing the right marketing channels depends on your market and audience research and might directly impact the reach and efficiency of your marketing campaign.
Summary
Ultimately, there’s really no one-size-fits-all when it comes to developing a solid e-commerce marketing strategy since a good strategy results from thorough research and trial and error. If you’re looking for a company to help you with an e-commerce marketing strategy, don’t hesitate to contact Orchard Marketing.