The digital world is prone to constant changes; since the Covid-19 breakout, many new digital trends are coming into sight. But, e-commerce has stolen the limelight. Over the past two years, numerous e-commerce websites have emerged and made their space in the digital realm effortlessly. The unrecognizable growth of e-commerce stores has skyrocketed the sales by a good 35%. While the emerging trend has disrupted numerous other online selling landscapes, it has brought immense convenience for the audience.
Today, more retailers, wholesalers, and even merchants are joining e-commerce platforms for better reach and boosted sales. These online shopping platforms have helped millions of people reach their audience seamlessly, bringing e-commerce where it is today. This year alone, e-commerce sales are expected to reach $4.2 trillion. But, in addition, experts also suggest that the constant changes that we see today will stay in trend for decades; due to the durability and momentum, which is undeniably exceptional.
Knowing e-commerce stores are the latest trend in the retail industry, you must also adopt this proactively if you are a merchant, product or service seller, or businessman. Here is all about e-commerce stores, their marketing, and optimization.
eCommerce Marketing & Optimization: What You Need To Know About It
We already understand that you need online traction to thrive in the digital realm. Thus, e-commerce websites need marketing for gaining prominence on the SERPs and among the audience. eCommerce marketing refers to activities that drive attention and traffic toward the online business platform – in this case, e-commerce store.
Ecommerce marketing entails using social media channels, SEO, SEM, paid, or email marketing to attract traffic to the desired platform. You can run several different campaigns using each of these methods. These activities combine to increase sales and conversions for the store.
However, you need to formulate a strategy for each approach to make it all work together. Here are a few e-commerce marketing strategies you must know. Whether you have an e-commerce store or work in alliance with one as a merchant, these strategies will enable you to increase your reach and prominence on the web.
SSM – Social Media Marketing
Most famous entities, brands, businesses, and organizations use social media to run marketing and advertising campaigns. The power of social media has helped many excel in their respective industries. Social media channels allow sellers to interact with their buyers directly.
However, when doing it for e-commerce stores, you have to run campaigns in paid advertisements. Also, this approach doesn’t work the same on every social media channel. Thus, it would be best to have a different strategy for all channels you choose. But, you have to choose wisely as all social media channels are not suitable for running e-commerce marketing campaigns.
Moreover, e-commerce sites consist of more visual content than textual; therefore, you need to add an adequate amount of product pictures, demos, and more in your social media marketing campaigns. This will help you fetch more customers to your platform effortlessly.
Facebook and Instagram are some of the most used social media platforms for marketing. These platforms allow merchants and e-commerce store owners to run campaigns with images and videos to display products and let people understand the offerings. This approach also helps people reach out to the e-commerce store easily.
You instantly start getting the most related traffic as you run your campaign over Instagram. The best thing about using Instagram and Facebook is creating shoppable ads and shoppable content. Shoppable content enables users to buy instantly through an image or video.
The content displayed to the users comes with a link that directs them to the website to make the purchase instantly. These ads may include display ads, videos, or images during Instagram stories, YouTube videos, and other social media activities.
There is more than social media marketing can offer for e-commerce platforms. However, you have to explore it yourself to discover more.
Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is one of the most popular yet most effective tools for optimizing any website or digital corner. Since every website needs content, you need to create drafts that align with your strategy and are optimized with the best keywords. Keywords are essential for better rankings on the SERPs. But with the proper optimization, you can achieve more than higher ranks.
You can:
- Write a blog related to your products and services
- Start guest posting to spread awareness about your e-commerce store or the offerings
- Regularly post about your offerings
- Use the right tools to identify your audience, and create content targeting them directly.
Moreover, you need to create optimized content for product descriptions. This shall be based on the searches made or trends on Google. You can use free tools to identify these things and then use the right approach for maximum results.
Product Page Optimization
If you are a regular online shopper, you must be familiar with the amount of content below each product you open separately while shopping online. There are a plethora of things you see below the images. For example, you may notice:
- Product brief
- Usage
- Instructions
- Manufacturing or expiry dates
- What is the product made up of
- Where is the product manufactured
- The authorities that authorized the creation safe for use or wear
- Size guides
- Pros and Cons
- Reviews
- Ratings
These are just a few things some sites even display things you can do with the particular product. So, with so much content, you have a tremendous opportunity to use the right words and keywords.
When done right, content marketing allows you to receive massive traffic. As the search engine finds more content on your website related to the queries, it automatically enhances your reach and the website’s ranking on the SERPs.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
SEM, also known as Search Engine Marketing, includes SEO and paid advertising, which increases a website’s visibility and ranking on the SERPs. The two methods are organic (SEO) and inorganic (paid).
The significant difference between the two is that SEO is organic. It takes time to show results, but the result last. However, paid marketing only works as long as you choose to spend on the advertisements displayed on the search engine.
The paid marketing method is commonly referred to as PPC (Pay Per Click) or PPV (Pay Per View). This is because the business or website has to pay per view or click in this method. This means you don’t have to pay according to the time you want to keep the ad running, but according to the clicks people make or the number of times people view the advertisement on the SERPs.
Google Shopping allows you to run ads on the top spots of the SERPs. At the other Google, ads will enable you to run ads and campaigns in various ways.
Most e-commerce stores use Google Ads to run campaigns for the products. Paid advertising lets your ads reach the most relevant audience and increases the chance of purchases.
Publish Videos On YouTube
YouTube is widely used worldwide and has more than a billion users. It is a fact that YouTube is the second largest search engine, right after Google. This means it offers a massive audience that you can captivate seamlessly. For example, if you are a merchandiser or an owner, you can quickly post videos about your products or ask others to post about them.
Many brands introduce techniques to ask users to try their new products and post demonstration videos on YouTube, using dedicated hashtags. In return, brands offer discounts to videographers. That’s a fair deal for anyone. You need to post relevant videos, let people do it for you.
The benefit? When people look for reviews about your newly introduced products or services, they will look up the internet to find about them.
As a result, these videos will pop up and let people discover genuine reviews by real people, which works like word of mouth and proves to be highly beneficial for any business.
Other great ways to achieve more with YouTube include:
- Ask a professional to speak about your product on your YouTube channel
- Ask an influencer to use and review it
- Ask a celebrity to do it
- Make tutorials
- Make video guides for spreading helpful information
- Create problem-centric videos about the products specifying why people need it
These videos significantly increase customers’ trust, and they feel satisfied when they make purchases from your platform. Thus, videos on YouTube outperform many other marketing strategies.
Moreover, it is crucial to add keywords on YouTube. You can add keywords in the video descriptions or use hashtags to highlight the most relevant keywords. This will help people to find your videos instantly.
Email Marketing Strategy
Emails are one of the oldest ways of communication, but still, they haven’t gotten obsolete. This is because of their outperforming power. People worldwide still rely on emails for professional, confidential, and personal emails. Moreover, almost all businesses use it today to make announcements, send order confirmations, take feedback, and so much more.
Additionally, you can let people know about your sales, new products, achievements, and so much more! The best thing about email marketing is that it can be entirely automated, and you can send thousands of emails to so many people. And all of this at such a reasonable cost, you send out emails without having a budget or any money in your pocket.
The Take-Away
E-commerce is the latest retail industry trend, and they are here to stay for decades. Thus, if you look forward to joining as a merchandiser or creating your platforms, you must familiarize yourself with these marketing strategies. Marketing strategies discussed in this blog will help you market and optimize your e-commerce store or the products you sell without any hassle.
Author Bio
Aimen Kahn is a skilled writer with vast experience in providing article writing services. Having served several industries, she’s now exploring the digital marketing side and helping businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs establish their online presence with compelling content. Having worked with numerous big names, she aims to help the struggling ones on priority for a change.
