6 Digital Marketing Tactics that are your Roadmap to Success
Simple ways to optimise your e-commerce offering
During the last decade, e-commerce has been a booming trend worldwide, and within the last year, the COVID19 pandemic has heavily impacted the world economy and purchasing habits, further boosting online shopping.
Experts advocate that e-commerce is expected to grow further in the coming year with 40% of all retail e-commerce to be generated via smartphones.
But how can you stand out between e-commerce giants such as Amazon, eBay, and others?
Here is a detailed roadmap featuring 6 tactics to implement in your e-commerce business.
1. Referral marketing
Also known as word-of-mouth marketing, usually happens organically. It can be a powerful component in your marketing mix, but don’t leave it for chance, invest in it!
Referral Marketing makes a big difference and it simply involves working with your biggest fans and influential people. It makes use of their recommendations to promote your brand and your products.
In fact, a word-of-mouth impression drives at least 5x more sales than a paid impression as customers deem to have higher profit margins. Besides, referred leads convert 30% better and have a 16% higher lifetime value than leads acquired via other channels.
Referral marketing is cost-effective, powerful, and trusted. By human nature, when we have a good experience with a brand, product, or service we are keen to share it with others.
But how do you implement referral marketing?
2. Content marketing
Content marketing is referred to as inbound marketing, so you bring the audience to you through blog posts, infographics, and videos on search engines,or social media networks.
Product content influences 87% of shoppers during their online purchase. In fact, once your website visitor lands on one of these pages, he or she is moments away from converting. Thus, the content on that page is what makes the difference between him clicking “add to cart” or bouncing off the page.
It is important to understand the type of content that makes the strongest impact on your customers (such as UGC and meaningful messages). You need to provide something unique if you are going to attract customers.
Therefore, as an online retail brand, you need to take your content beyond the blog post if it is going to be truly engaging.
3. Social Media marketing
Social media marketing consists simply using of social media platforms and websites to promote a product or service. Popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram continually introduce new features and tools to help brands and SMEs effectively reach their target audience.
What are the most important and significant social media platforms for E-Commerce?
Facebook has 2.4 billion monthly active users, which means most of your audience is on the platform.
- Set up your business page, clear business name, optimized product photos, and user-friendly content, and list your products that customers can purchase directly from your Facebook page.
- Invest in Facebook ads, the CPC is lower, you can drive high-quality clicks that produce value for your business if you play your cards right.
Instagram is an image-based platform and the majority of its users are Millennials and Gen-Zs, with each user following at least one or more business accounts.
- Set up your “shop” - share your product catalog with your Instagram profile, and promote your products directly to users through posts, Stories, in the Explore tab and a special Shop tab on your profile.
- Start Using Shoppable Posts, where you can showcase your brand by tagging a product in an image, highlighting its name, price, and purchase, and your customers can directly interact with it.
- Grow your followers - Instagram is based on followers, when your account has more than 10,000 followers, you have the opportunity to add direct links in your stories, and take a user to your website with just one swipe.
- Invest in Instagram Sponsored ads.
- Create partnerships and sponsorship with high interactive users, influencers, and Instagram bloggers.
Twitter’s advantage for you is that they can generate clicks for literal pennies on the dollar.
- Optimize your Twitter page, with the relevant and striking cover photo, present your logo as your profile picture, and state your business info in the bio.
- Create promotional fun tweets showcasing your product or service, and announcing specials, sales, or promotions.
- Invest in Twitter paid ads, with pennies for the CPC.
- Use relevant hashtags and visual content to attract more leads to your account.
- Interact with your customers, Twitter is a great way for your customers to contact you quickly and easily with problems or complaints or even for the positive feedback.
Pinterest is an image-based platform, with over 322 million monthly active users, it represents a prime location for e-commerce retailers to market their goods.
- Brand your profile, show users that you are open for business.
- Post creative content to build interest around your business, use eye-catching images with clear easy to read texts.
- Create compelling product pins, and interact with users by commenting on pins.
- Promote your pins to deliver more reach, for a price. It will drive more users to your web page. You can promote a single pin, a carousel (two to five photos in a single pin), or a video.
- Optimize your Pinterest titles with keywords.
- Add the “Shop the Look” to your pins, where users can click white dots on your Shop the Look pins to land on your web page.
LinkedIn, is the perfect platform for B2B organizations, with over 100 million business professionals, it offers a window to meet other small business owners and entrepreneurs, with opportunities to build successful partnerships as well as straightforward sales.
- Showcase your business story, mission, and vision.
- Develop your connections, meet your potential customers, all while increasing your online visibility for better SEO.
Snapchat is used by brands that target a younger audience, with 16.4 million users between 12 and 17-years old.
- Create a day-to-day operations diary to walk your followers through your workplace.
- Interact with other users.
- Invest in Snapchat Dynamic Ads. You reach potential Snapchatters customers by personalized ads, built directly from your product catalog.
Youtube is a prime search engine destination where people go to consume content, to be more precise, to consume video graphics.
- Optimize your channel with creative videos and content (TrueView format).
- Encourage your subscribers to interact with your videos, to like and comment.
- Invest in paid Youtube ads and embrace them.
- Build partnerships and sponsorships with Youtube influencers.
In short, social media marketing has become an essential part of e-Commerce marketing, especially during the COVID19 pandemic, and the reason is the immense reach these platforms possess and the sheer volume of traffic and sales that these channels generate.
You just need to stay interactive with creative posts.
The key to success is consistency. The more you do and post on social media, the more you’ll get in return.
4. Email marketing
The email marketing strategy should be a key part of your business, it helps you to stay in touch with your loyal customers, update them on their order information, generate more sales with transactional emails, as well as to inform them about offers, new promotions, share your latest product line with promotional emails.
Therefore, to have a successful email marketing strategy, you need to follow these steps:
Build a qualified list of email contacts
- Collect your users’ email addresses by yourself to build loyalty.
- Create an updatable database.
Spend time on your email content and design
- Create a newsletter campaign with relevant and clear objectives with visuals and infographics.
- Use your newsletter campaign for promotional offers and events to build goodwill with new customers.
Keep Track and use of your data
- You can use multiple online platforms to create your email marketing campaigns and track them, such as HubSpot, Salesforce Pardot, Mailchimp, and others.
5. SEO marketing
SEO is making changes to your web page, its content, and the promotion of that content to improve your visibility in the organic search engine result. In fact, for your potential customers to find you online, ranking at the top of search engines needs to be a high priority for you, and SEO can help you achieve this. SEO can draw traffic to your website and ensures that your products get discovered online.
For an optimum SEO marketing strategy, you need to follow these simple tips:
Optimize your keyword research
- Making sure you are targeting the right keywords is essential to your SEO efforts as it can affect the traffic to your business.
- Use Product-Focused Keywords, taking into account your homepage, product categories, and blog content.
- Focus on long-tail keywords for more specificity, in fact, Long-tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value.
Optimize title tags
- Your title tags play an important factor that search engines rely on during a search query to determine its relevance.
- Place top-performing keywords in descending order with relevance to drive more traffic and improve your SEO.
Create unique content
- The content needs to be relevant to what your potential customer would search for.
- Take care of your users, share ideas, tips, and tricks that will help the user make the most of your product.
6. Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC marketing is one of the most important techniques in e-commerce as it is scalable and measurable. In fact, it allows you to track ad performance to adjust and improve accordingly.
Several e-commerce advertising platforms, such as Google AdWords, Amazon Advertising, and Google Shopping, aim to drive visitors to your site and get higher ranks where you literally have to pay per click.
As a business owner, you need to be ready to pay an average of 1$ and 2$ per click to advertise on a search engine, such as Google.
The most relevant PPC marketing campaigns for e-commerce are
- Paid Search
When you search for something on a search engine, such as Google, the paid ads are identifiable at the top and bottom of the organic result with the “Ad” logo. (Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads)
- Display ad
Your adverts will be visible across the search engine partner websites, with a more targeted market. It is more fine-tuned and specific to have the best return on your investment.
- Social media advertising
When you are targeting in a more selective method, your customers on their social media platforms, according to specific demographics. (Facebook ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, Snapchat Dynamic Ads, etc.)
- Google Shopping
The results are often showed in a carousel above the main Google search results, where the customers see products related to their search and prices.
Here are some steps you need to follow to optimize your PPC campaign:
- Create the Best Ad Possible
- Mention Product description and price in the Ad Title
- Focus on a mix of primary and Long-tail keywords
- Send the traffic directly to the buying page
- Maximize your exposure to increase your traffic
- Keep track of your analytics and conversion rate
Therefore, by simply following a few steps with a Cost-effective Pay per Click campaign, you will have a better target audience thus a better return on investment.
With the rise of e-commerce and the expansion of mobile and digital technology adoption across the globe, especially during the COVID19 pandemic, the once traditional consumers are switching to online shopping, for a faster, easier, and most importantly safer experience.
It is time for you to join the trend and invest in e-commerce to remain competitive in this fast-moving economy!
About this article
This article has been written by a student on the Grenoble Ecole de Management’s Advanced Masters in Digital Strategy Management. As part of a content creation assignment, students are given the task of writing articles based on their digital interests and disseminate the articles online. Articles are marked but we make minimal changes to the content. Thanks for reading! James Barisic, Programme Director, MS DSM.
