Discovering and building your own e-commerce business is an amazing feat. It takes research, knowledge, and a lot of courage to get your business to the point that it is ready to scale up. But if you have done this, reached the point of scaling your business, and then asked ‘what next?’, then you have arrived at a point where you need to discover marketing. As it is hard to scale a business that nobody knows about. So where do you need to start to ensure your marketing strategy will be effective. Well, it can be different for each business and industry, but Patch Agency has compiled five key nuggets of marketing knowledge you should be across if you are serious about lifting your business up to the next level.
Email marketing essentials
Understanding the power of email marketing is crucial to forming a link between your business and your customers. It can also be a great goal to increase your consumer base but setting email gathering as a marketing objective. Once you have a decent list of fans and followers, sending personalised emails to your customers at optimal times can drive a significant return on investment. Just make sure you are only emailing when you need to, as bombarding inboxes is a great way to get unsubscribes.
Driving traffic from social
Many, if not most businesses, have a page or at least a presence on social media in the 2020s. This is because social media has the capability to expose your products and services to millions of potential customers each day. There are two ways this can happen. One is that your social page is so amazing and creative that it goes viral and drives truckloads of customers to your site organically (cost no money); or two, which is much, much more likely, you put a budget behind your content and pay to reach as many people as you can afford. This will fundamentally drive traffic (people) to your website and expose your business to new potential customers. If you are interested in learning more about paid social media marketing be sure to read our numerous articles on the subject.
Drive traffic from paid ads
Outside of the social media marketing world, you have every other form of digital marketing available. There is little to no organic (free) traffic to come from many other platforms, so prepare to pay for any activity on these platforms, which include pay-per-click advertising, display advertising, integrated marketing, advertorials, the list goes on. If you have little to no experience buying advertising inventory online, then it is probably a good idea to contact Patch Agency for some advice.
Optimise for conversions
It is worth knowing that when trying to promote your eCommerce business you are aware of just how integrated and interlinked marketing platforms are with your website (probably already without you knowing). Shopify, for example, has amazing ways to link with Facebook, for example, so that you can specifically run advertising campaigns that optimise for driving conversions (usually sales). This means you can monitor how effective ad campaigns are by actually how many sales they make, in a way that is tracked and measurable against the amount of money you spend. Ultimately you want a ROAS (return on ad spend) as in you want to make more money in sales than you spend on marketing. Wouldn’t that be something!
Use analytics to uncover important insights
In the same vein as conversion optimisation, is to appreciate that online marketing and e-commerce websites both working together can wield quite a lot of data around your marketing activity, your customers, and even your products desirability. This data usually comes in the form of analytics, and by understanding it, analysing it, and playing around with it you could be surprised as per the little insights nuggets that fall out. Knowledge is power, remember.
We really have just scratched the surface of learning how to market your burgeoning e-commerce business. Having all the right levers pulled and polished at the right times can definitely be more of an art than science, so if you are interested in learning more, or even better, having Patch Agency show you what we can do to boost your e-commerce sales then reach out today!
