Digital marketing for online stores is the process of driving traffic to your ecommerce and converting that traffic into customers. It seems easy, but to achieve conversions you have to do a lot of work. We are going to see the best online marketing strategies for your business to take off.
For any business, especially online businesses, allocating a number of resources to digital margining is essential, otherwise our business will go unnoticed. It will be as if we opened a physical business on a street where no one passes.
In this post we are going to see everything you need to know about digital marketing, from the different channels you can use to reach your customers to the different tactics to achieve conversions, that is, sales.
1 – What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing or online marketing is any type of marketing that is carried out through electronic devices to transmit promotional messages and connect with potential customers through the internet.
The advantage of digital marketing is that the impact of campaigns can be measured.
In short, they are the campaigns that appear on our devices (computer, tablet, telephone…).
The main online marketing channels are:
- Social networks
- SEO
- Content marketing
- Online advertisements (Ads)
The objectives of online marketing can be several:
- Increase brand awareness
- Interact with our business by performing an action (question, comment, subscription…)
- Make a purchase
2 – Marketing plan for online stores
The first step to setting up an online store is to create an excellent website. It’s clear. But then what? The fact of having a magnificent store with many products for sale does not mean sales, because potential customers will not find us, much less buy from us.
For an ecommerce to be successful, you have to develop a marketing plan that helps attract traffic to your website and convert that traffic into sales.
The key and essential components to carry out a good marketing plan for online stores are these:
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
The unique selling proposition is what differentiates our online store from the competition. What do we offer that others don’t? Why do people have to buy from us?
We must solve this before we start thinking about a marketing strategy, even before setting up our online store.
Once we know what our sales proposal is, we must highlight it in our marketing strategy.
Target audiences
We need to know who our audience is, our potential clients, in order to direct our digital marketing campaigns to them. Not everyone is worth it. We must make a portrait of our “buyer persona”: age, gender, location, interests, income…
The more specific the better. Once we know who our target audience is, we can start thinking about our online marketing campaigns because we will know who they are aimed at.
The goals
What do we hope to achieve with our marketing plan? Here we outline our objectives that can be diverse and that we can achieve in steps.
For example, brand awareness, driving traffic to our online store, converting potential customers into customers, increasing sales…
You have to be quite specific and realistic with the goals we set for ourselves in order to measure the success of our campaigns.
Assign a budget
The key question, how much do we allocate to our digital marketing campaigns?
Obviously, this will depend on the size of the company, but you always have to have a budget for online marketing, especially when we start the business.
There are many profitable tactics. What we have to do is look for the ones that are going to be more profitable for our business and that we can afford. Some examples:
Create content and promote it on social networks and other channels
Create mailing lists of current and potential customers
Coupons and other promotions
Various forms of marketing can be started at once by spreading the budget.
As online marketing provides us with data, it is about carrying out a study of the processes that we have put in place to adjust them.
3 – Marketing channels for ecommerce
There are several channels that we can work to bring traffic to our online store such as paid advertising, organic search, email marketing, social networks … among others.
Seeing the channel to which we dedicate the most investment will depend on our budget, the products we sell and our target audience.
Online ads
Online ads (Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram, Linkedin, Bing…) is one of the fastest ways to get potential customers to know our brand or our website. It’s a great way to get immediate results.
We can show our products to people who are already looking for them.
The downside is that it is expensive advertising and you have to study the ROI (return on investment) very well and make sure that the campaigns are profitable. You have to see if the investment in advertising compensates for the sales made.
The good thing is that everything is measurable and we can see its profitability, as well as carry out different tests to find the most effective ones.
Organic search
Do SEO. Any owner of an ecommerce should have notions of SEO despite the fact that later that work is outsourced.
In this post you can see several free SEO courses taught by great professionals or companies that are very worthwhile.
The advantage is that once positioned there is no need to invest more. The downside is that it is slow and it takes time to see the result of our SEO actions.
The key to getting positioned in the search engines is the research of relevant keywords for our online store and that help us bring customers to our business. We then need to include those keywords in our product descriptions and content on our website.
Email marketing
Email marketing is an excellent way to connect with our customers and promote our products.
The first thing we need to do is create an email list. Many online stores offer discounts and other incentives to get you to sign up for their mailing list.
Once we have a list of subscribers we can send regular emails with product updates and special offers.
Email marketing is one of the best forms of online marketing since it is free and it depends on us who have a list of clients and potential clients who have visited us, have bought or are simply interested in our products.
What you have to avoid is falling into spam and not bombard with uninteresting emails because if you don’t, they will unsubscribe or send our emails to spam.
Social networks
Social networks are an ideal way to connect with our customers and promote our online store.
The key is perseverance. Be active, provide good content, and respond to questions and comments.
Social networks are also an excellent customer service tool, solving customer doubts and problems.
In social networks, we must bear in mind that each one of them usually has its own audience and some are more recommended than others, depending on the product we sell. Therefore, it is not necessary to be in all of them.
Lastly, avoid too much self-promotion and provide valuable content. If you sell furniture you can talk about trends, for example, and not just about your products.
4 – The best marketing strategies for online stores 2023
As we have seen, there are many forms of online marketing and depending on how our potential client is and our budget, we will have to use one or the other.
There are many tactics to try that will help us increase traffic and achieve our goals.
We are going to see 5 marketing strategies for online stores that work and that should be added to our digital marketing strategy.
Email marketing
One of the best ways to make customers feel valued is to personalize your brand experience.
The easiest way to do this is through your data, collected through forms, subscriptions, navigation, sales and other interactions that will allow us to show you products, offers and content relevant to them.
From here, marketing can be automated by creating sales funnels.
Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is a very interesting way to reach potential customers and promote our products.
Partner with influencers in our industry who have built a loyal following in our market. With this we manage to reach their numerous audiences and promote our products.
Social media advertising
In all social networks you can hire ads that will appear on the timelines of people with similar tastes to our products. It is about finding out where our buyer personas are.
The advantage of social networks is that it is not very expensive advertising compared to other methods and a lot of brand visualization is achieved.
Search Engine Optimization
The SEO strategy must be essential in any online store to be well positioned in searches related to our products.
We must have our ecommerce optimized for search engines and that our potential customers can find us easily.
SEO involves many different actions ranging from optimizing the content of photos, descriptions and other elements to internal and external linking or web architecture.
Retargeting
Retargeting or remarketing ads as Google calls them are online ads that are shown to people who visited our store but did not make a purchase.
It’s a great way to increase conversions by reminding potential customers of your product, after they’ve shown an interest.
Conclusion
These five actions are excellent to start designing a marketing strategy that allows us to be known by potential customers and get sales.
Following these tips described in this post we will get visits to our online store and see the conversion rates, the purchases that are made.
Remember that our online site must be clean and easy to navigate, optimized for search engines and with quality content.
The products for sale are the soul of an online store, but without a budget allocated for their promotion we will not get traffic or sales in the short term, which may lead us to abandon the project.
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