In order to grow your online business you need to craft an effective eCommerce marketing strategy that not only engages your target audience, but that also ultimately steers them through your sales funnel and turns them into fully fledged buyers.
This starts with gaining a really clear understanding of your marketplace, your potential customers and your competition.
Market Research
Traditional marketing practices often talk about building up personas for each of your target segments, and this can be a really useful exercise to help you think about who you are selling to.
What is the typical age of your ideal customer?
Are they male or female?
What types of hobbies are they interested in?
How active are they on social media?
Companies engage with their audiences differently depending on who they are, and this applies just as equally online as it does offline.
A thorough understanding of your competition and the way they market themselves is a great place to start when you are building your strategy.
How do they engage with their audience?
Are they active on social media?
What keywords are they targeting though content marketing?
Thankfully there are a number of tools that you can use to help build up this picture of the competitive landscape. For example, using SEMRush.com, you can see how well your competitors rank for different keywords.
Another tool, Answerthepublic.com, enables you to analyse the types of questions that people are asking online relating to specific keywords.
AsOne has experience using these and many other tools, to help gain a clear picture of the business environment that our clients are operating in.
Turning Insight into Strategy
Once you have built up a solid understanding of your customers and the marketplace, you can use this knowledge to craft an effective eCommerce marketing strategy.
This will include identification of the preferred marketing tools to reach your audience, including:
Content marketing – Blog posts or articles are a great opportunity to proactively answer potential questions that you audience might have. It is also an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and credibility which will in turn improve your conversion rate.
Social media – Being active on social media is a good way to reach and engage with your audience more directly, for instance by responding to tweets or facebook messages.
Facebook ads – PPC ads on Facebook are an excellent way to quickly target a very specific sub group of people. For instance you can choose to only serve ads to people that share similar hobbies to those you identified in your ideal target persona.
The initial research is essential to understand which of these channels will be most effective for you. For example, a more B2B eCommerce marketing strategy might choose to advertise on LinkedIn rather than Facebook, as this is where potential buyers are more likely to congregate.
Analyse and Evolve
Monitoring the analytics across these channels will enable you to see how well your marketing messages are being received.
For example, you can look at the number of comments or shares relating to your blog content, you can see how many people like your social media posts, and you can look at the click through rate of your paid ads.
A core part of your strategy should then be to evolve the tools and tactics used over time, testing different approaches to see what resonates best with your audience.
With such a wide array of tools and marketing channels available it can be difficult to decide which approach is right for you.
If you’d like some support or guidance, why not speak to someone from our digital marketing or creative teams about how they can use their in depth industry knowledge to build a digital business development strategy to take your business to the next level?
