The e-commerce industry is thriving, and several factors have led to its growth. While every business needs to develop marketing strategies, you cannot use generic strategies to grow your e-commerce business. E-commerce was earlier limited to a few big players. However, the trend has now moved towards local businesses.
These e-commerce companies have a digital presence and bring most of their customers through social media channels. Therefore, you need to create strategies that can help you capture the right audience at the right time. There are thousands of e-commerce companies out there. However, you must break the clutter and stand out from the crowd with unique and effective strategies. This guide will help you formulate marketing strategies to help your e-commerce company rise above the rest.
Marketing Strategies for an E-Commerce Company
While you can do a thousand things to grow your e-commerce company, you need to develop the right mix of strategies that suit your business and are ideal for growing an e-commerce company. Let’s look at some strategies that will help elevate your e-commerce business.
Use the Power of Videos
Source: Freepik
Videos are the strongest tools when it comes to promoting your e-commerce business. In the e-commerce business, the uniqueness and attractiveness of the business drive people to your e-commerce website. Hence, you must create unique product videos that create a buzz and drive traffic to your e-commerce website. You can shoot a product video and use a video editorto make it more visually appealing.
You can also click pictures of the product from different angles and then use a good editor to string these pictures together as a video. If you sell something unique and want to show your audience how it works, you can create a ‘how-to’ video. You must access an online video editor to make necessary corrections and modifications in the video and make it ready for digital distribution.
Social Media
E-commerce is a trend of the present. Hence, most people who might be interested in buying the products via an e-commerce website are present across different social media channels. However, different sets of people are present on different platforms. Therefore, before you choose a social media platform to promote your e-commerce company, you should define your target audience.
Once you decide on the platforms, you can formulate platform-specific strategies. For instance, if a user puts up an Instagram story with your products, you should also share the user-generated content on your page to drive engagement. Also, you can create a social media calendar based on which you can schedule your posts for the month.
SEO
Source: Freepik
Searchability of your e-commerce website is very important as there are many companies, but you need to stand out if you want to survive in a highly competitive market. To drive traffic to your e-commerce website, you need to spend on search engine optimization. Your plan should be to have your website on the first page of Google search results.
To ensure that your website is SEO friendly, you should maintain the freshness of the content. You can also use different SEO tools to incorporate keywords and improve searchability.
Giveaways
You must also include engagement activities like giveaways to keep your audience excited and create a buzz around the products you sell via the e-commerce website. You can add a few giveaways to your social media calendar and launch them across platforms. Giveaways can drive engagement as the audience will interact with your post through likes, comments, and shares.
You can give out your product or a complimentary product to the winners of the giveaway contest. However, you must not simply give out the products. You should try to make it more engaging and competitive so your followers get excited to participate.
Email Marketing
People who sign up for your newsletter or make their first purchase via your e-commerce website show their interest in the company. You can use customer information like their e-mail id to share important communication with them. You can build a mailing list and craft communication collateral to reach out to the customer. You can inform them about your website’s new launches or offers to drive sales.
For effective communication and reaching out to different kinds of audiences, you must try to segment your mailing list.
Content Marketing
Content is gold when you are running a digital business. Only with good content will you be able to drive traffic to your website. However, content marketing is much more than just acquiring customers. It helps you keep your audience entertained and improves the company’s brand image.
Content is not just limited to write-ups and blog posts. It involves several other forms like podcasts, webinars, infographics, etc. Also, when you create a content strategy for your team, you must ensure that you adhere to the current trends in the content marketing space.
Public Relations
Public relation is a broad concept. If you want to build equity in the minds of your target audience, you must invest in building public relations. It is an umbrella term involving different marketing aspects, like media coverage, branding, etc. Public relations also involve managing different kinds of crises that the company goes through while safeguarding the image of the company in public.
PR helps you keep a tab on what people say about your brand and put out the fire in case of any disputes or other issues that can hamper the brand’s image.
Advertising
Advertising is vital if you are in the e-commerce business. While you can engage with your audience via social media, the engagement will not drive business if you do not help the customers with their next steps in the buyer journey. With proper advertising, you can take the customers to your product’s landing page so they can make a purchase.
You can use different ads to take people to your product page. You can run targeted ads and reach out to those customers who can be your buyers. You can also experiment with tools like Google Shopping to drive people to your product page.
Partnerships and Collaborations
Collaborations play a huge role in popularizing your e-commerce company in front of a wider audience. When you collaborate with a company, your communication about the collaboration reaches out to your followers and their followers. Hence, the engagement number shoots up. Also, if you are coming up with a new product in collaboration with another brand, you can use the product to create a buzz. You can also contact social media influencers to promote your products.
The influencers have a great reach; hence the reach of your products also increases to a certain extent.
Conclusions
While there are thousands of e-commerce companies, your marketing strategy can help you emerge as a winner. You must create a strategy to grow your e-commerce business as, without a strategy, everything will be quite haywire. You can even find synergies between two or more marketing strategies and combine them for the best results.