A great product is one thing, but getting the world to hear about it is another. This is why marketing and promotion are vital to the success of your ecommerce business.
Below, we look at the marketing and promotional tools you can use to create a joined-up experience, alongside the building blocks you need to ensure everything runs smoothly from the get-go.
SEO
Driving traffic, sales, and building a brand’s reputation, SEO has one of the best ROIs of any ecommerce marketing effort.
Excellent SEO results can be achieved through various content marketing activities and fundamentally, producing high quality relevant and original content, but controlling the technical elements can help you make an even bigger splash.
As an online retailer, you need to be able to control URL structure and metadata on your pages to ensure they’re optimised for SEO purposes, and don’t compete against each other in organic search rankings. Not all ecommerce platforms give you this control.
SEO is set to be impacted in 2021 by the announcement that Google will be incorporating core web vitals into their search rankings. Ecommerce stores on slower legacy platforms are likely to find themselves slipping down the rankings as a result.
Find a platform, like Aero, that gives you the speed and performance required to compete in organic search.
After all, only 0.78% of clicks take place on the second page of Google results.
Content Marketing
Defined as ‘a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online materials’, content marketing benefits you by building up your brand over time, with content that people can revisit — unlike ads, for example.
Having the right building blocks for your content marketing starts with your ecommerce platform. Choose a platform that lets you create content blocks for web pages and customise them as you need to.
This will allow you to integrate blogging software to create SEO-rich blogs, which don’t just help with rankings but provide content to push via all your other channels.
Tao Digital Marketing, specialists in content marketing, advise that without high-quality, engaging content, users are going to click off your page. When creating informative content, you should be answering questions the users are searching for. This is known as writing content for search.
Some software tools can allow you to see what your audience is searching for and therefore help with content ideas. For example, if you are selling aquatics products and notice that there are a lot of searches around setting up a marine aquarium, you could create a lengthy piece of content that recommends various products throughout the steps, inserting internal links to your product pages.
This helps users to see you as an expert in your field and therefore increases trust enough for them to make a purchase. Some site owners may assume that content writing is a waste of time for eCommerce sites, but this is not true - your visitors can be moved down the sales funnel once they understand what they actually need to help them. Going back to the aquatics example, some beginner fish keepers may not be aware of the type of equipment they need and therefore are not searching for a specific product. Once they find out what they do need to purchase through your content, they are likely to click through and buy.
Content can be updated over time to keep up with new trends and emerging questions, making sure you continue to move up the rankings. The more people share your content, the better - as mentioned, social media is a great way to do this.
Social Media
No content marketing effort would be effective without social media.
Approximately 3.81 billion people in 2020 use social media, almost doubling in the last 5 years.
Aside from sharing written content, imagery, and video hosted on your website, it’s a place to reach a huge number of potential customers.
Overall, it can help you:
Build brand awareness
Generate attention
Communicate authority
Show authenticity
Encourage engagement
Grow organically
Meanwhile, paid social media can help you reach potential customers who haven’t found you yet. In June 2020, eMarketer found that nearly 30% of respondents in the US had used social commerce to complete a purchase.
Often your social media content will drive people back to a specific page on your site. Can you create landing pages quickly and easily with your current ecommerce platform?
Email campaigns are a great way to communicate directly with your loyal customers, whether you’re giving them special offers, advance access to new products, or sharing news.
With close to four billion daily email users and 59% of people saying marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions, you can see why it’s still as relevant today as it was 10 or 25 years ago.
PPC
Pay-per-click has an important part to play in helping people discover your products and driving them to your website: 33% of people click paid search ads.
However, it’s important not to rely on this too much but to incorporate it into a wider, 360° marketing approach.
Scheduling
While social media can be scheduled through each platform, tools like Hootsuite is just one of several scheduling platforms that bring your profiles together in one place. Other tools, such as Mailchimp, allow you to schedule email marketing campaigns.
For busy ecommerce businesses, the ability to plan and schedule sales, offers and discounts in their online store has proven difficult; if you want your promotion to go live at a set time in the future, legacy platforms can’t show you ahead of time what your pages will look like and the fallout of this going wrong can be significant.
That’s why we created the Time Shift feature for Aero. It allows you to schedule price changes of products, before seeing a version of what that product looks like in the future. That way you can rectify any mistakes so you don’t miss out on sales.
Having several scheduling tools, which work together and can be implemented into your platform, are essential to bringing together and managing effective marketing campaigns.
Making marketing work for your business
Marketing covers a wide range of online areas and is essential to success in an increasingly competitive digital sphere. While all marketing and promotional tools are important, to achieve excellence, the foundations of your online store need to be solid.
We built Aero to support your marketing and promotion efforts so that online shoppers can find and buy the products they want quickly and easily.
If you want to learn more about an ecommerce platform which helps you run effective short- and long-term marketing strategies, get in touch with the Aero team today.
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