If you want your eCommerce business to succeed, it’s not enough to have a great website.
Taking the time to have a stellar layout, great product descriptions, superior navigation and a shopping cart that’s easy to use are important. But if your competitors are using digital marketing strategies to drive more traffic to their eCommerce sites and you’re not, you could be fighting a losing battle. They’re optimizing their sites and acing it on social media sites for a reason–because those strategies work.
To be successful—or more successful—with your eCommerce business, you need a solid digital marketing strategy. You need to effectively leverage search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing and social media marketing. To highlight the importance of digital marketing to ecommerce success, consider these year-over-year stats compiled by
Hubspot. From 2013 to 2014:
- Email marketing as a source of visitors to ecommerce sites increased by 218%
- Visitors to ecommerce businesses from social media sites increased by 308%
- Organic searches for ecommerce sites increased by 145%
Said differently, if you’re not using email marketing, or social media or SEO to drive traffic to your site, you’re not being found by this growing number of online shoppers. If you’re ready to grab more of that traffic, you need to integrate the following
5 digital marketing strategies into your marketing campaigns:
1. Post useful content
People don’t go to
Homeadvisor only to hire contractors—they also go there to view how-to-videos, or project planning checklists. When your website becomes the go-to location for helpful advice, more people will go there. When consumers trust you to give them authoritative information, they’ll trust you more than your competitors when it comes time to make a purchase.
2. Get quick results with PPC
There’s a running debate about the effectiveness of pay-per-click (PPC) vs. SEO. The truth is that they’re both effective, but in different ways. Especially for small businesses which are new to digital marketing, using paid advertising on Google or Facebook is a way to increase web traffic quickly. A well-executed PPC campaign can send push prospective customers to specific products and services on your website. It means choosing the right keywords, creating ads that relate to those keywords, and sending online shoppers to webpages that relate to those ads.
3. Optimize your website
Whatever business you’re in, you can bet there are thousands of online searches every day for the products and services you sell. You can grab some of those customers if your website is well-optimized. According to
Search Engine Watch, the first page of Google results gets more than 91% of all web traffic. If your site doesn’t show up on that first page, the odds of connecting with prospective customers searching for your products drops dramatically. SEO can be complicated, and not generally a do-it-yourself project. When trained SEO experts optimize your ecommerce site, however, you’ll see a steady stream of new customers flocking to your online store.
4. Get social
Customers you acquire through social media platforms—like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram—tend to be more loyal than those you get through other channels. The trick is to post useful content on social media sites that includes relevant links back to your website. Said simply, social media marketing works. Recent studies have shown, for example, that more than 40% of B2B businesses have acquired new customers through Facebook, and 42% have done the same using Twitter. Social media platforms are a great way to drive more customers to your ecommerce site.
5. Boost ROI with eMail marketing
Marketers responding to Econsultancy’s
Email Marketing Census 2016 reported that email marketing delivers the best ROI of all digital marketing strategies. Another analysis, this one from
Search Engine Journal, found that the average ROI for email marketing campaigns was 4300%. To get the best results, used gated content to obtain more email addresses, then send those leads targeted emails that address their particular needs and drive them to your online store. And make sure your emails are optimized for mobile to take advantage of the growing number of mobile searches.
Partner with Digital Marketing Experts
Digital marketing, when effectively implemented, will increase traffic to your online store and increase sales—but it can be complicated. Your best bet is to partner with digital marketing experts who can integrate digital marketing strategies like the ones noted above seamlessly for optimal results. To learn more about the ways our Magento ecommerce solutions and PPC, SEO, email and social media marketing services can help you boost sales and grow your ecommerce business,
contact us today.
