Introduction
There are many different ways to market your eCommerce site. With so many options, it can be difficult to determine which ones will be most effective for your business.
In this post, we’ll cover fifteen of the most important factors you should consider when marketing an eCommerce website in 2022.
How to Market Your Ecommerce Site
Identify Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is one of the most important steps in creating a marketing strategy for your eCommerce site.
If you don’t know who you’re selling to, then how will you know what they want? How will you know how to reach them or engage with them? You need to start by doing some research.
Find out where these people hang out online and see what kinds of products and services they’re looking for.
Know What They Want
You should also be sure that whatever it is that your customers want, it’s something that’s available on your website. If there are specific products or services that people are searching for on Google, then those options must be present on your site as well.
Conduct Market Research
Conducting market research is the best way to get a clear picture of your audience and their needs. Market research helps you understand the market, competition, product and goals.
Know Your Audience
The first step in marketing your eCommerce site is knowing who you’re selling to. Try to make a list of everyone who might purchase from your business. This can include potential customers, current customers and referrals that have not yet bought from you.
Understand The Market
Once you know who your audience is, it’s time to learn more about them so that you can speak directly to their needs when marketing your eCommerce site.
What do they like? What don’t they like? What do they want in an online shopping experience? How much do they spend on average per month or year on various items (iTunes cards vs Amazon Prime memberships)?
You should also consider any other sources outside of social media that provide valuable information about these demographics such as government reports or surveys conducted by third-party organizations such as Pew Research Center or Gallup Polls.
Understand The Ecommerce Landscape
If you’re new to the eCommerce space, or even if you’ve been in it for a while, it’s critical that you understand who your competitors are and what their strategies are. This will help inform everything else on this list.
Know What The Market Is Like
It’s important to know what the market is like so that your product can stand out from others. If there is an over-saturation of similar products on the market then maybe now isn’t the right time for your brand or idea. On top of this, if there are gaps in certain areas then maybe now is a great time for you to enter into that niche!
Optimize Your Site for Mobile
Your site should be optimized for mobile. Mobile is the future, and it’s growing rapidly. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, you will lose out on a large amount of business.
Mobile users are more likely to purchase than desktop users; they are also more likely to share content on social media and leave reviews, which can help your SEO efforts immensely. They also tend to engage with your brand much more than desktop users do—which means that optimizing your eCommerce site for mobile is essential if you want to grow sales!
How to Optimize Your eCommerce Website for Mobile
- Make sure your site is responsive, and make it easy for users to find the information they need on any device.
- Use a mobile-friendly theme.
- Make sure your website loads quickly on all devices and formats.
- Use a mobile-friendly checkout process.
Prioritize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to get more traffic from search engines like Google, you need to make sure your site is optimized for them.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an ongoing process that involves the use of various strategies to increase the visibility of a website in organic (non-paid) search results.
The goal of organic search engine optimization is to achieve top rankings in Google, Bing or Yahoo! Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). By ranking highly on these SERPs, it’s possible for any business with an online presence to get noticed by potential customers who are looking for what they offer.
This can be especially important if you’re selling products online via eCommerce sites like Amazon or eBay—although there are many other ways that SEO can help drive inbound sales too.
Create Valuable and Actionable Content
When it comes to marketing, the content you create is your biggest asset. Content can be used to educate and entertain your audience, drive traffic back to your site, increase brand awareness and trust, build relationships with potential customers and even help you increase sales.
Content Creates Traffic
Content plays a key role in driving traffic back to your site. Creating valuable content that is relevant to your target audience will make them want to stay on your site longer as well as share it with others via social media or email it out.
This helps spread the word about who you are along with what type of products or services you offer which ultimately increases brand awareness for both current customers as well as potential ones.
Actionable Blog Posts
In addition to creating valuable content, you also want to make sure that your blog posts are actionable. This means that they don’t just give out information but instead give readers a call to action such as “read more about this topic here” or “click here to get started”.
This will make your audience feel like they have taken an important step in moving towards their goals which will encourage them to come back for more of what you have to offer.
Leverage Social Proof Through User-Generated Content
User-generated content is a great way to increase trust, build community and boost brand awareness. In fact, it’s also a great way to help you grow your audience — because if people like what they see, they’re more likely to share it with their friends and family. And who doesn’t want that?
When it comes to user generated content, there are many different ways that eCommerce brands can benefit. For example:
Builds Trust
User generated content helps you build trust by showing potential customers who have already shopped with you firsthand how much value your site has delivered for them. The more positive reviews and social media posts about your business out there in the world (like Instagram photos tagged with your branded hashtag), the better!
Attract New Visitors
User generated content helps attract new visitors by increasing search engine rankings, especially when other sites link back to yours from their own pages (which is known as “backlinks”). It also makes sense, if someone reads something on another website about how great a certain product is (or how awesome an experience shopping with this brand was), then chances are good that person might decide he’d like some of those things too.
Get Listed In Online Directories
When marketing an eCommerce website, it’s important to get your site listed in online directories. This is a great way to get your site noticed by other people and search engines alike. While there are many directories out there that you can list in, the more you’re listed in, the better! The more places your eCommerce site is listed, the more likely it is that people will find it when they search for products similar to yours online!
There are plenty of great directories out there, but a few of the best include:
Yahoo! Shopping
Yahoo! Shopping is an excellent place to get your site listed. They have a variety of categories for you to choose from and will list your website based on the product categories that you select. This is a great way to get people interested in the products you sell because they’ll find them easily and quickly when they search for similar items online!
Shopzilla
Shopzilla is another directory where you can list your eCommerce site. This one focuses specifically on online shopping and has over 10 million listings so far!
Bizrate
Bizrate is another directory where you can list your site. They have an easy-to-use interface that allows you to create a listing quickly and easily.
Google Product Search
Google Product Search is a great place to list your eCommerce site if you want people to find it easily when they search for products online. This directory is very user-friendly and easy to navigate through.
Tap Into Existing Customer Networks with Brand Advocacy Programs
Brand advocacy programs are one of the best ways to build a community of loyal customers. You can encourage customers to share their experiences with your brand, and even reward them for doing so.
A good brand advocacy program will help you build a relationship with your customers that’s mutually beneficial: they get something in return for sharing their experience, and you get more exposure on social media. This is a win-win situation!
Here’s how it works: give your customers something valuable to share (like coupons or discount codes), then create an incentive for them to do so by rewarding those who participate in the program. For example, if a customer shares a link about your product on Facebook or Twitter, he’ll be entered into a monthly drawing where he could win free products from you!
Offer Exclusive Discounts To Loyal Customers
Offering exclusive discounts to loyal customers is another great way to incentivize them to shop on your eCommerce site more often. It shows your appreciation for their loyalty and makes it a reward for being a customer for a long time.
There are many ways you can go about offering exclusive discounts, but here are some ideas you can use:
- Offer free shipping on orders over $50
- Send an email with special offers (only available to people who signed up)
- Send exclusive discount codes to repeat customers
Consider Using Live Chat for Customer Support
Live chat is a great way to provide customer support and improve your marketing activities. It can be used to answer questions and help customers find what they are looking for, which will help you keep your customers happy.
Live chat also gives you an opportunity to collect data about your visitors. If someone comes into contact with your live chat team and has an unhappy experience, it could be because there was something wrong with the product or website that caused the problem. You can use this information to improve the site so that similar issues don’t happen again in the future.
Use a Marketing Automation Platform to Drive Growth
In the past, you had to manually track and report your eCommerce website traffic. With a marketing automation platform, you can automate the process of re-engaging users who are not converting.
The best way to choose a marketing automation platform is by looking for one that’s easy to use and gives you easy access to reports. Once you’ve selected a software vendor, it’s important to set up your account properly so that it works for you:
- Set up triggers for email sequences in order to promote different products or services at appropriate times throughout the year (e.g., run an offer on Black Friday).
- Create dynamic content based on user actions such as clicks on certain links (e.g., if they click through from an email campaign but don’t buy anything yet).
Use Facebook Ads to Grow Your Ecommerce Business
Facebook Ads are a great way to reach your target audience. They can be used to drive traffic to your site, increase sales and build brand awareness. Facebook Ads are also a great way for you to build an email list or capture data about who’s visiting your eCommerce website.
Facebook ads allow you to target people by age, gender, interests, education level and location. For example:
- If you sell skateboards then you could target people who have searched for “skateboard” on Google in the last 30 days in your local area.
- If you sell high-end sports cars then maybe it makes sense for you to only show these ads to a particular gender for example, based on statistics on sports car consumers.
Use Social Media to Engage & Educate Customers
Social media is a great way to interact with your customers, as well as educate them on your products and services. It’s also a great way to create a community around the brand, which can help you build a loyal following of customers who will become advocates for your business.
Here are some tips for using social media:
Educate Customers
Create content that educates people about your products and services in general, and how they can use them most effectively. Your organization could also write about the latest news in your industry, and thus become a valuable resource for readers. For example, if you have a vegan food store online, you could write about health or environmental news.
Content should be educational but also relevant to what you sell — if you’re an online clothing store, talk about trends in fashion or how different types of fabrics feel on different body types; if you sell electronics, explain why certain features are useful; etcetera.
Share Content from Different Writers
Share articles written by others that relate to your industry (and don’t forget to give credit where credit is due). This will not only help spread awareness within the community about other people doing great things with their businesses, but it will also give readers new ideas about what kinds of products and services they should be considering.
Encourage Engagement
Encourage users who comment on threads or like posts from other brands/businesses within those pages, they may return later down the line when looking for companies similar to yours!
Create Press Releases for Your eCommerce Site
If you have something newsworthy going on with your company or product line, press releases are one way of getting the word out about it. Many newspapers will publish a press release if it’s interesting enough; however, they do charge a fee for this service, so include it in your marketing budget.
Although the focus is often on social media marketing, using traditional methods of communication is a great way to reach a specific audience and stay authentic.
There are many different ways to market your eCommerce site, and each method has its own unique benefits. You should use each method for the right reasons, and in the right way.
Conclusion
We’re excited to see how you use these tips to build your eCommerce business. Remember that no single strategy will work for everyone, so experiment with different approaches until you find what works best. If you’re looking for more information on how to market your website, check out our other guides and research articles!
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