When running an eCommerce store it can be difficult to know how you can best market your store, which is why eCommerce businesses are always on the look out for the best eCommerce marketing strategies that will allow them to hit their business goals.
There are an awful lot of different takes on what makes up a successful eCommerce strategy though, but the truth is that it’s not a cookie cutter approach where every website can use the same approach and get the same results. So what is an eCommerce business supposed to do? It all starts with understanding what an eCommerce strategy is meant to do.
What an eCommerce strategy is meant to do
It’s easy to assume that an eCommerce marketing strategy is just about how you sell more products through your eCommerce store, this is a gross oversimplification though. Your eCommerce marketing strategy needs to sell things, but it should also align to your wider business goals. Looking to increase your brand awareness? Then your marketing strategy should reflect this as well as focusing on generating sales.
Determining what your eCommerce marketing strategy is meant to achieve can only be done by yourself ( or by consultants and agencies working with you) as your situation is unique, and unless someone has access to your business data then no-one can make any solid suggestions about what you should be doing.
You also need to be aware that your marketing strategy isn’t just a checklist of channels that you use to generate sales. Each channel can be used to achieve all aspects of your business goals, and often in very interesting ways if you start looking at your approach as a singular strategy and not siloed channels. When it comes to your eCommerce marketing strategy, the whole is often greater than the sum of it’s parts.
How to create your eCommerce strategy
Creating your eCommerce strategy starts with understanding your audience. The sorts of questions you need to ask about your audience include:
- What Social media platforms does you audience use?
- Is there an active community online that your audience engages with?
- Are there any influencers that your audience will be watching?
- Why would your audience be interested in the products you’re selling?
- Why would your audience use your store and not your competitions?
- Are there any magazines or websites that your audience uses?
There are a lot of questions that you can ask about your audience, but these can work as a starting point for developing an understanding of the audience.
Why does understanding your audience matter though? Because if you don’t understand them you won’t be focusing your budget in the right places.
To give you an example, if you’re looking to sell your products to Middle class professionals with high levels of disposal income, then using adverts on TikTok as your main revenue driver won’t likely drive many sales, but if you know there’s a niche community that exists on TikTok despite your core demographics not using it massively, you can target it through your Digital PR budget rather than your Paid Social budget, and get better results overall.
eCommerce marketing channels that you’ll probably end up using
Whilst all strategies are unique, the reality is there are probably a handful of channels that you will end up using in some form or another. The exact way you utilise them will vary from one business to another, but almost all eCommerce stores use certain channels. To make the most of these channels requires you to understand what they’re good at and how you can use them.
What is PPC ( Google Ads, Bing Ads) Good For?
Useful for: Reaching Mass Audiences that are actively searching for your products
Why you should be using it:
Did you know that 41% of traffic from Search Engines goes to the top 3 ads in Google? That means that unless you’re in the top 3 d spots, you’re missing out on a significant amount of searches for your traffic
41% of traffic in Search Engines goes to the top 3 ads on Google, which means if you aren’t visible here you’ll be missing out on hundreds of sales every month. What’s even worse than this though is the fact that people searching for products in Google and Bing are the people who are ready to buy, which means you’ll be missing out on 40% of your audience that are ready to purchase!
As a channel, PPC ads are also very easily scalable, meaning that you can get benefits from it from almost any level of investment you make, and over time you can easily increase your budget to generate better results. The downside is that seeing significant sales can be very expensive, and you may need large budgets to properly invest in the channel.
Best Approach in 2022:
If you listen to the spin that comes out from companies like Google you’d think that you could just turn on your campaigns with a few click and you’ll be able to watch the sales roll in! This isn’t at all accurate though.
Google’s recommendations will function for you, but they won’t maximise your returns. Relying on their AI and and just their suggestions you can end up wasting money. Working with specialist PPC agencies ( we would always advise you talk to Premier Google Partners) can help you plug any skills gap you have that might be preventing you from moving away from reliance on Google’s AI and suggestions. This is especially true as their are significant changes to Google Shopping campaigns that are happening right now.
What is SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation) Good For?
Useful for: Reaching Mass Audiences that are actively searching for your products
Why you should be using it:
SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, has many of the same benefits as PPC. They both tap into the same audience pool, but the audience engages with PPC Adverts and Organic Results in different ways, which means hitting both channels is absolutely essential.
41% of people using search engines click on the Adverts, which means 59% engage with the organic search engine results. That means you’d be foolish to not have an SEO strategy, regardless of whether or not you’re doing PPC advertising as you’d be missing out on getting in front of the majority of people who are actively searching for your products.
What’s even better is that if you are running PPC and SEO campaigns at the same time there are a number of ways you can synergise your activity and improve both campaigns such as:
- Taking key terms that are converting well for PPC and making them the focus of your SEO campaigns
- Using SEO research to guide what content to out onto the pages that you’re driving your advertising traffic too.
- Testing copy and layout changes for SEO conversions by running traffic through Adverts to target pages.
Best Approach in 2022
Getting even the basics of SEO right can be very difficult, and in highly competitive environments, there’s a lot of trouble with getting even the basics right. In order to prosper ith SEO you need to ensure that you have the following three areas covered:
1) Make sure your on-site SEO basics like your keyword research and copy optimisation are in place
2) Improve your backlink profile
3) Create supplementary blog content that will allow you to attract users at every stage of the buyers journey.
What is CRO ( Conversion Rate Optimisation) Good For?
Useful for: Maximising your sales from the traffic you already have and generating higher ROI from your marketing budgets.
Why you should be using it:
CRO ( or Conversion Rate Optimisation) is an area of your eCommerce strategy that I can almost guarantee you’re currently ignoring. The basic principle behind it is to maximise the number of sales you get from your current levels of traffic, so that you’re able to generate more sales and get a better return on your investment for your marketing budget.
Whilst CRO can encompass a wide variety of different areas and it can lean into all digital marketing channels ( and a few off line channels as well), it normally focuses on improving the user journey through improving site load speeds or running a/b and multivariate tests to identify ways you can improve features on your website or the layout of pages, all with the aim of increasing your conversion rate and generating more sales for your eCommerce store.
Best approach in 2022
Whilst there are plenty of tools that are readily available to handle the basics of your CRO strategy, such as Google Optimise, the reality is that CRO isn’t just about testing the colour of your buttons. A full and proper CRO strategy involves developing an in depth understanding of how people use your website and engage with your brand.
Meeting the requirements for this can be difficult for most eCommerce businesses, which is why it’s almost always advisable to consult with CRO experts to assist in analysis of your current site, and developing a strategy that will deliver meaningful results for your store.
It’s also important to consider that CRO doesn’t need to JUST be about increasing sales immediately. It can also be used as a means to acquire additional emails for your email marketing campaigns, allowing you to turn potential customers into loyal customers over time.
What is Digital PR Good For?
Useful for: Increasing brand awareness, improving your search engine rankings.
Why you should be using it:
Digital PR’s main focus in your eCommerce marketing strategy is twofold: Firstly you can use it to improve your Organic SEO rankings by acquiring backlinks, but it can also help improve your brand awareness if you’re setting up your Digital PR strategy correctly.
How do people get Digital PR wrong?
The first thing people get wrong about Digital PR is that they assume that it’s identical to traditional PR. The truth is that Digital PR has more tools available to it. A great example of this eios the invention of the Advertorial. Rather than just pay for advertising space you’re able to pay for space and provide value to your target audience in a way that was more difficult in traditional PR.
The key to Digital PR though is to understand your audience. If you don’t know where they congregate online then you’ll struggle to get the full benefits of digital PR. By identifying where your audience is online, you can both increase your brand awareness by appearing on website they visit, and you’ll be able to improve your SEO, as the chances are those websites are high quality and the backlinks they provide you will be very beneficial for your SEO as well.
It’s important to remember though that there’s a secondary type of Digital PR that can still be very beneficial, especially for SEO. This type of Digital PR is more focused on backlink acquisition and improving your rankings for target key terms, and this can be a good area to focus on, especially if you don’t have significant budgets available to you, but to get the full impact of Digital PR you need to be looking to appear on the website where your audience is already visiting.
If you’d like help in improving your eCommerce Strategy, then sign up for an eCommerce review with our Director of Growth.
