Congratulations, you’ve got a nice small to medium-sized business up and running, and you’re ready to take things to the next financial level. Bigger customer base, higher revenue, greater profit. Sounds great, right?
So, how do you get there?
Well, we all know that marketing is the engine that drives sales, and if you’ve hit the point where you’re ready to swim in the bigger pond, then ecommerce marketing is how you’ll get there. However, the power of ecommerce isn’t just a simple switch you can flip on; there’s a lot of info out there on the best ways to implement it into your marketing strategy. If you don’t have all the most useful tips nice and organized in once place, it can all get pretty overwhelming.
Have no fear, though; with this single article, you’ll now be armed with a list of the best ecommerce strategies to grow your business this year.
1) Start with A Content-Creation Strategy
Whether it’s building skyscrapers, writing a novel, or sending a spaceship to Mars, every great accomplishment begins with a plan. And your ecommerce business is no different. You need a strategy to produce high-quality marketing content to build an audience, and this starts by writing out the different ways you can reach your potential customers, a few of which include:
• Videos
• Blog Posts
• Newsletters
After that, you’ll want to periodically assess – maybe once a week, maybe once a month – how your strategy is working in order to optimize how effectively the content you’re creating is attracting an audience.
2) Tap into Social Media
Although it can take some time to figure out which social media platforms work best for your ecommerce business, if you diversify your marketing among the various options, you can filter out which sites are making you the most money and then cut out the ones that aren’t doing so hot. Some of the top platforms include:
• Twitter
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Instagram
Thus, by using analytics tools to compare and contrast performance results, you will quickly know which sites are worth sticking with and which ones you can cut out of your budget.
3) Create Original Content
If you want to rise above the competition, then you need to offer content that’s not only top-notch but also unique from what everyone else is putting out. And while a surprisingly large number of businesses are more than happy to recycle content from other sites, you’ll create a larger and more loyal following if you give your customers something special and interesting to look forward to weekly or even daily.
A short list of content ideas could include:
• Blog Posts
• eBooks
• Videos
• Audio Clips
• Podcasts
Just remember that whatever type of content you provide, the key to building and maintain your audience is to make it unique and beneficial to your consumer.
4) Get Your Audience Involved
Allowing your site’s visitors to take part in your content creation is a great way to bond with your audience and create more of a personal connection. A perfect example of this is when Doritos holds its annual Super Bowl commercial video submission contest where not only do the fans get involved, Doritos gets a free commercial created for them.
Thus, in your site’s case, by getting your audience to submit videos, photos, or even guest posts for your blog, you’ll be outsourcing some of your work at no cost while making your customers feel a greater connection to your business.
5) Get Your Social Networks to Wake Themselves Up
Time is money. And by automating the social network platforms you’re marketing on, you’ll free up a lot of your precious time so you can concentrate on other aspects of your business. Thus, instead of posting content on a site like Facebook every day or every week, you can simply create all your posts on a single day at the beginning of the month and then schedule those posts to be automatically displayed on whichever days and times you wish.
6) Connect Through Language
One of the beauties of ecommerce is that it allows you to easily sell your product or service to customers anywhere in the world. Of course, with nearly 7,000 languages being spoken across the planet, you won’t always be able to use English to break the communication ice.
Fortunately, ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce and WordPress ecommerce themes offer the ability to translate your writing into the native languages of potential customers around the globe, allowing your business to grow beyond the US.
7) Build an App
With people today barely ever separating themselves from their smartphones, developing an app for your business is a way to be a single finger tap away from your customers at all times. Thus, when the mood strikes, your audience will instantly be able to access your business and make that spontaneous purchase we all crave and love.
8) Know How to Help Your Customers Seal the Deal
In the end, it’s all about getting conversions, and by using A/B testing to figure out the easiest and smoothest checkout process for your customers, you’ll avoid losing sales simply because a customer can’t figure out what he or she supposed to do.
A/B testing or split testing is simply comparing two things “side-by-side” to see which gets better results. Thus, when it comes to optimizing your checkout process, you’ll be able to compare different formats (words, layouts, the location of buttons to press) to each other and see which ones lead to sales and which one cause customers to give up before the conversion is made.
9) Look into Mobile Advertising
As the world is becoming more and more interconnected through smartphones and iPads, mobile advertising is booming. And from a business standpoint, it only makes sense. After all, why force your customers to wait until they’re sitting in front of the TV or listening to the radio, when you can spark their buying impulse through their smartphone or iPad anytime, anywhere?
Conclusion
Ecommerce marketing is a big universe, and while this list isn’t exhaustive in covering the multitude of ways you can use ecommerce to help grow your business, it has hopefully provided you with some great tools to get you started building your audience and boosting your sales in the electronic realm. And just remember, good things take the time to create, and by combing the building blocks of a valuable product or service, high-quality content, and savvy ecommerce marketing techniques, you’ll be well on your way to developing a successful online business.
Carolyn Williams is a passionate blogger and content writer at EssayKittens.com. She mostly writes about digital marketing, ecommerce, and blogging. Connect with Carolyn via Twitter.
