With nearly every marketing operation now taking place online, it can be tough to distinguish between the various types of digital marketing people use today.
What is eCommerce marketing?
Ecommerce marketing is the act of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service electronically.
To attract visitors and enable online sales, eCommerce marketers can use social media, digital content, search engines, and email marketing.
Let’s explore the concept of eCommerce advertising and how it compares to marketing for an eCommerce business before getting into more depth about what eCommerce marketing is and how to develop your campaign.
Ecommerce Advertising
In similar fashion to the way advertising falls beneath the umbrella of marketing, eCommerce advertising falls beneath eCommerce marketing — and you can more effectively reach your audience members to boost conversions and improve brand awareness.
Now, let’s get back to our in-depth discussion about eCommerce marketing.
Types of Ecommerce Marketing
Here are some popular marketing channels and how you’d deploy them to establish an online store to give you an idea of what an eCommerce marketing plan looks like.
Social Media Marketing
Brands, publishers, contractors, and growing businesses all launch pages on today’s most popular social networks to connect with their audience and post content that the audience is interested in.
You can take your social media posts a step further by creating shoppable content, which is content that enables visitors to buy right away. That can include anything from strategically placed display ads within a social feed to additional tags that take users directly to a shopping cart.
An eCommerce business is no stranger to product reviews, either. Using a Facebook Business Page to share product praise is a perfect fit for businesses that already solicit customer reviews across their online store. We’ll dive deeper into product reviews below.
Optimize your product page copy.
Optimize your product pages for product-specific keywords that contain the product’s name. If you sell wedding dresses, for example, a Google search for “brown bridesmaid dress” is more likely to produce product pages like yours if you’ve included that term on the page.
Optimize your product pages for product-specific keywords that contain the product’s name. If you sell wedding dresses, for example, a Google search for “brown bridesmaid dress” is more likely to produce product pages like yours if you’ve included that term on the page.
Create guest posts for external websites.
Guest posts can get you and your products in front of relevant audiences (oftentimes for free). Submitting guest posts will also help you get more domain authority for your eCommerce site, thereby telling search engines that you have a reliable site.
You’ll need to look for websites that rank for keywords that are relevant to your goods. You may not even need to write a complete post at times. If a site already has relevant content, offer to build on it by adding more context, such as a video or an infographic with a link to your site.
Put product-related videos on YouTube.
YouTube has over a billion active users … chances are your target audience is somewhere in there. It’s also the second-largest search engine behind Google. If you’re looking for a massive, captive audience, YouTube is where you’ll find it. Use highly searched keyword terms to determine your topics, then share videos that are related to your product and helpful to your audience.
This is also a wonderful choice for lesson videos that educate current customers on how to use your product – these tutorials may educate people on how to use your product in the most efficient way possible, enhancing customer happiness and building long-term relationships with website visitors.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing (SEM) includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising. While SEO relies on your knowledge of Google’s ranking algorithm to optimize content, SEM can involve pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, display campaigns, or product-specific ad campaigns (think Google Shopping), which allow you to pay for top spots on search engine results pages.
On Google, PPC campaigns guarantee that potential buyers will see a link to your page when they enter search terms that match the terms of your campaign. But because you’re paying Google each time a person clicks on your result, the payoff to you should be high.
This is why eCommerce marketers often register with Google AdWords and promote their product pages through PPC campaigns. The campaign puts searchers right in front of the business’s product when they click on a paid result, increasing the likelihood that the searcher will purchase before leaving the business’s website.