While running an online store providing excellent products and having a user-friendly website is crucial, you can’t underestimate the role of marketing in getting revenue. In this industry stiff competition is the reality. Global retail e-commerce sales will reach $4.5 trillion by 2021. Your store probably competes with many other businesses in your country or maybe even international companies.
It can be a hard nut to crack, but there are several digital solutions which can help you get to your consumers and boost your e-commerce.
Use Content Marketing
Today the lowest price is not enough to win customers’ hearts. Building brand and product awareness are equally important. In this approach, marketers focus on creating and publishing content for a targeted group. A survey shows that 72% of marketers admit content marketing increases engagement and the same percentage say it has increased the number of leads.
Start with Finding out What Are Consumers’ Needs.
Check out Google Trends and other reports in your industry so that you’ll know what’s in fashion. Consider what can be helpful for your customers on a certain time, i.e. before Christmas, it’s smart to prepare buyers guides with gifts recommendations. Get inspired by the best publishers, and you can search for attractive topics via BuzzSumo. To find out what Internet users are searching for in your brand’s or keywords context is Answer the Public. Thanks to those few tools you can get essential information about your audience and create demanded content.
Nowadays customers are not passive, they actively look for the best products, and they want to know more about what they buy. Content is suppose to be educational so that it helps build trust for the brand and builds its image as an expert in the field. Remember that content doesn’t only mean articles, you can also create infographics as well as video. When it comes to e-commerce video format can be effective for presenting products. That way it’s easier for a customer to make a purchase decision, as he takes a closer look to the product. Prepare a few different forms about the same topic and analyse which one performs the best.
Once you create a great piece of content, you need to distribute it broadly so that your audience can get familiar with it. Of course, some articles are also helpful for SEO purposes, but the content has an additional function – it’s supposed to attract people interested in a particular subject, and therefore might be interested in your products or services. Use several channels to reach your potential clients, like social media, e-mail, Google Ads and so on.
Take Advantage of Social Commerce
Social media is a powerful channel of communication between brands and customers. Online stores that have a social presence have 32% more sales on average than stores that don’t. Organically it became tough to promote a business, but there’s still a chance to go viral if you have a great idea. Additionally, social media expand advertising possibilities.
How to Use Social Media for E-Commerce?
- use the shopping feature on Facebook – it’s a great way to make customer journey shorter (your followers can get directly from your Facebook page to the desired product);
- publish user-generated content and cooperate with micro-influencers – these actions give your audience social proof that your products are worth buying;
- engage your followers – ask for an opinion, organise competitions, offer discounts only for your followers;
- tag products on photos on Facebook and Instagram;
- target your ads for people potentially interested in your products and use remarketing to reach users that have already visited your store and viewed certain products.
RocketLink allows you to track not only links to your website. In practice, that means that you can share on social media a link (boosted by RocketLink) to any site, i.e. to the article about 2019 trends on the popular fashion platform. You can identify your audience, so customers interested in this particular topic – curious about the newest fashion trends. Next step is creating a relevant ad and promoting it on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest or Google AdWords. Moreover, you can add a call to action button to the links you share.
The most significant is a holistic marketing strategy that includes social media. While planning your activities on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn, you’ll need an excellent calendar to do it efficiently. Kontentino is an intuitive tool that enables scheduling posts, assigning tasks and analysing performance. Once you schedule a post in Kontentino, you can boost in via Facebook Business module.
Personalise Your Communication
Very resultful can be those ads and messages that are personalised. No wonder – people always like to feel special and treat individually. SalesForce’s survey revealed that 62% of consumers expect companies to send personalised offers or discounts that are based on products they’ve already bought. Such an approach seems time-consuming when it fact thanks to marketing automation it’s the opposite. Thanks to several tools you can adjust content to recipients and increase your revenue.
Web push notifications is one of them. The idea is to send notifications to subscribers while they use an Internet browser (so they don’t need to visit your website to receive notification). Your page’s visitors become subscribers while they accept web push notifications – it’s only one click. What’s important is that you can send mass campaigns but also design scenarios that will automatically send notifications to a particular customer that did a specific action on your page.
What can you do via web push notification campaigns? Here are a few ideas to consider:
- save abandoned shopping carts – remind customers about items they added to carts in case something unexpected disturbs their shopping;
- increase the return rate – let your customers know you’re waiting for them after a while they haven’t visited a store (for example, after few weeks since the last visit);
- remind about recently viewed items – you can refer to exactly the same products or other items in this category;
- sent special offers and discounts at the right time (for example, before birthday as a gift from your brand);
- motivate to the next purchase – you can send a discount code right after first shopping;
- use cross-selling and up-selling – this option supposes to encourage for buying more, like another item from the set of products.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, there are a lot of solutions in the market that can help you promote your business. Use tools that can boost your efforts and increase your revenue. Don’t hesitate to try out many marketing techniques. Choose ones that suit your e-commerce the most.
