eCommerce Marketing
Getting traffic to an eCommerce website can be very challenging at times. Some people just want to browse the internet and not be shown any ads, while others will actively go looking for things to buy.
There are plenty of different channels that you could use to advertise your website, but all of them would generate you different results. This is why trying and testing is so important; once you find out what works, you scale it up. But sometimes finding a method that works is the hardest part of it all, so lets at different eCommerce marketing methods you could try.
eCommerce Marketing Strategies
AdWords
AdWords is among the most popular among the traffic acquisition channels by merchants and can drive targeted traffic for a good ROI.
This platform works on a Cost Per Click (CPC) model. You bid money on keywords, which are the search phrases people type into Google and are charged an average cost for every click on your advertisement.
Check out this Google AdWords tutorial to see how it works.
Facebook Advertising
Advertising on Facebook is very popular for eCommerce website owners and there is a lot of potential through this medium. You can target very specific groups of people on Facebook, such as people over a certain age who live in a particular area and are interested in something of your choosing.
This platform enables you to laser-target your audience with advertisements and many eCommerce merchants swear by this method of promotion to drive traffic and sales. Our guide on Advertising for eCommerce has a section on Facebook Ads you can look into.
Google Shopping
Google shopping is a feature integrated into AdWords, and you must send a feed with the products available on your site containing the required information in order to advertise through this channel.
This advertisement will then be shown in Google search engine results for specific keywords, possibly alongside other companies who are advertising as well.
If you want to know what Google Shopping is, take a look at that guide.
If you want to see Google Shopping in action, go to Google and search for “buy white sneakers”, and a few ads should pop up in the results.
Price Comparators
Price comparators are instruments that compare certain products across multiple platforms. The aforementioned Google Shopping is a price comparator.
These are quite popular among consumers who like to perform research on the products they are interested in before they buy them. Price comparators can actually be a great way to promote an eCommerce website and shouldn’t be overlooked.
Here are some popular ones you may have heard of:
Google Shopping
Bizrate
PriceGrabber
Social Media
You are probably aware of just how large social media has become, even if you don’t use it. There’s no denying that it’s changed our world forever and the way that we can communicate as well.
There are plenty of ways to generate eCommerce social media traffic, both free and paid. The choice is yours and different methods would work for different websites.
Regardless, social media is global and can bring a lot of exposure to your eCommerce store. Even if you don’t want to utilize this medium for paid advertising, there are plenty of free ways to promote your website using social media. You should also create company profiles on these platforms at the very least.
Influencer Marketing
With the rapid rise of social media, Influencer Marketing has become a main form of marketing for many brands.
It consists of finding people on social media, mainly Instagram, who have a decent and engaged following. Depending on the influencer, their followers could be highly-targeted for your website and advertising to them through a sponsored post could even be more effective than Facebook and AdWords advertising.
Instagram Influencer Marketing
Instagram is fast becoming one of the most effective marketing channels for eCommerce activities and is obviously a great way to move traffic and interest to your site – especially if you know how to target the most influential people. In addition to sponsored posts, you could also do Instagram shoutouts, which are basically mentions and can be cheaper than an ad.
Start by sifting Instagram to search for the most popular accounts that may want to recommend your product to their hundreds or thousands of followers.
How are these popular accounts found?
Looking through WEBSTA, a site that lists the most popular hashtags and Instagram users. By typing the hashtag in the search bar, you will see both the most popular relevant hashtags and users who have the hashtag in their usernames or biographies. You could also use a tool such as Ninja Outreach to contact influencers as well.
Also, just as important, at the top you can find a link to their contact page. This page provides a telephone number, an email and a contact form. From this page, you can interact with them if you aren’t able to send a DM.
Another effective way to target influential people on Instagram is to use the Instagram app for smartphones directly. You can check the “popular” page that contains the trendy photos that have thousands of likes. Look for photos related to your industry and click on the user’s profile to see if they have a sufficiently large audience, and a method to contact them.
Blogging
Blogging is a proven method for generating traffic and promoting a website.
Not only could you get direct traffic from people sharing your posts on social media, but you could also get search engine traffic as well and improve your websites rankings.
Content Marketing should be an integral part of your eCommerce promotion strategy and starting a blog should be on your list of priorities.
Your blog could also help make your website stand out from your competitors and establish you as an authority within your niche.
Email Marketing
Although many believe that today has now completely lost its effectiveness, email marketing is still a very important tool. Obviously, as long as it is used correctly. In comparison with interacting users through other channels, newsletter subscribers are more collaborative, develop a closer connection with your business and buy more products.
How to convince users to subscribe to your newsletter? The first step is to choose the right incentive to offer to people in exchange for their subscription. For example, some eCommerce sites offer a discount coupon to be used on all or some categories of items in stock.
Where this process of constructing your email contact archive foresees its use, consult our article on how to create an effective Landing Page. In general, this page must “compel” the user to subscribe to the newsletter: it must, therefore, be communicative, engaging and – above all – must not present elements of distraction that may take them away from the objective.
Guest Posting
Guest Posts are articles written by you which are then published on another website.
Sounds weird, right? Giving free content to another website…
Well, Guest Posting is a proven method to generate traffic, increase authority, and improve search engine optimization.
This is considered to be among the best and safest SEO techniques to practice and is very popular.
Content Marketing
When we mentioned blogging before, that is just a very small part of content marketing.
There are many different types of content marketing, and as a result, there may be ones which are better suited for your eCommerce website than others. You could not only write blog posts, but also create videos, eBooks, interviews, and landing pages to provide value to your visitors and promote your website.
Product Reviews
Reviews are a megaphone for your eCommerce website. Not only do they talk about it, but they are spontaneous voices, which communicate to the users an authentic opinion and not a promotional message. Getting and disseminating reviews to your products from others can increase the credibility of your brand and its reliability.
You should be encouraging people to leave reviews on products they have purchased from you. Not only can this help to drive sales, but it could also contribute to improving your websites SEO as well.
In addition to encouraging customer reviews, you could also get them by offering your product to an influencer in exchange for an unbiased review. The legalities around this will depend on your country of origin and your consumers country of origin, as there may need to be some sort of disclosure for this type of deal depending on the applicable laws and regulations.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the art of making a website appear higher within search engine rankings.
High rankings mean organic traffic, and it could also mean a lot depending on what keywords you rank for.
Some keywords are more competitive than others and could be dominated by global brands in your niche. These keywords are not worth targeting for SEO purposes unless you’re a global brand yourself and have a large budget for SEO.
Having said that, there are a lot of niches and keywords that aren’t dominated and there’s plenty of room for you to cut in. Even in seemingly saturated niches such as pet products, there’s still keywords that you can target and rank for.
SEO can be done yourself or you could hire a company to do it for. Both options are hit and miss.
If you do it yourself, spend a couple of months reading up about it, then questioning everything you just learned. There’s a lot of outdated information on the internet regarding SEO and it’s an ever-changing game as well.
There are three factors which will ultimately always be good for your website:
Unique, relevant, and authoritative content
Proper On Page SEO
Links from niche-related authoritative sources
Interviews
Producing textual content is a powerful weapon for any online business because it makes it possible to effectively attract the attention of search engines. The curious thing is that different entrepreneurs do not take advantage of this opportunity but maybe some are just waiting to be reached out to.
One way to quickly and easily produce exceptional content for an article is to interview someone important and well known in the field in which you operate.
If you sell sports equipment, a soccer player or a coach; if your business is the Food Industry, a renowned chef, food critic or a producer of organic products; if you deal with publishing, an author or an academic.
Interviewing an authoritative figure in your niche can drive good traffic to your website and as a result; sales.
Imagine if you have an eCommerce website selling kitchen products and you managed to get an interview with Gordon Ramsay! The amount of traffic you can receive could be massive.
Maybe even you could be interviewed and you could get it seen in the form of a Press Release.
Competitions
People love free stuff, and getting free stuff from your eCommerce website shouldn’t be any different.
You can run a monthly competition that people can enter and the prize can be a free product.
Competitions can go crazy viral on social media and bring a lot of traffic to your website.
When the competition is over, send the product to the winner on the condition that they must post the product on social media as proof.
This way, everyone can see that it’s legit and it gives your brand credibility.
Competitions should be entered by gathering email subscriptions and you should also create separate lists for your competitions. Most people who subscribe to this list are just trying to get something for free, but you always have a chance to re-market to them and convert them into a sale in the future. This is why you should create separate lists so that your main list isn’t tainted with lower quality subs.
Once the competition is over, send an email to the list announcing the winner and provide a good discount code to everyone else.
This can actually drive a lot of sales, even though these people signed up to the list to win something for free. You also now have an extra email list to market to now so make sure you refine your email marketing strategy.
Forums
Forums, or online message boards, aren’t quite as popular as they used to be since social media has taken over. However, there are still a lot of online communities dedicated to specific niches.
If your niche has a forum, it may be worth joining.
You can join using your brand name, providing it’s permitted, and then create threads and respond to messages in order to establish your authority.
If it’s allowed, you can link to your website, but this should be done sparingly as most forum users don’t want to be directly marketed to.
If you just leave a link to your site in your signature and provide valuable content to people, this could be enough to drive some sales for your website.
Some forums allow banner advertising as well. So if you find a niche-related forum with many people highly interested in what you do, it may be worth buying some advertising space there.
You can find forums in your niche through some simple Google searches.
For example, if you were in the fitness niche you could go to Google and type:
YouTube
YouTube should not be underestimated and it’s a great medium to promote your eCommerce website from.
If your type of niche would be suitable for video marketing, then go for it. Create some awesome videos such as product demonstrations and blow your competition away.
If you find some nice keywords to target and create in-depth videos around them, you could generate some serious traffic to your website.
Not only this, but YouTube also has an advertising platform built into it as well. This could be another good option for promoting your website and bringing targeted visitors to it.