How to Create eCommerce Strategy (Part 2)

How to Create an eCommerce Marketing Strategy (Part 2)

This is the second part of the eCommerce marketing guide. Click here to read Part 1.

Matching Marketing Tactics to Your Marketing Goals

Once you've made a list of goals, metrics, and KPIs, you can start identifying relevant tactics to help you achieve your objectives.

While general eCommerce marketing tactics are similar for all companies, each business can have a unique marketing strategy. The strategy consists of a mix of the necessary tactics coupled with smart timing and a creative approach.

The most beneficial marketing tactics for eCommerce businesses include:

1. Setting up Pay-Per-Click Ads

Paid search tactics are highly efficient for your eCommerce goals. You can reach a wide target audience and pay only when the user clicks your ad. By taking advantage of Search, Shopping and Display Ads you can reach over 90% of internet users across 2 million websites.

Pay-per-click ads are also excellent for your remarketing strategies. Besides helping you bring back consumers who visited your website but didn't buy anything, it can assist with achieving your customer retention goals.

2. Implementing a Referral Program

This tactic is excellent for brand awareness, lead generation, and customer retention efforts. It involves incentivising existing customers to become your brand ambassadors.

Different types of referral programs exist. You need to set one up based on your audience's behaviour and preferences.

3. Creating Relevant Content

Different types of content can help you achieve different marketing goals.

● Brand awareness — blogs, guest posts, newsletters. Anything that has to do with sharing high-quality content across all available channels contributes to brand awareness.

● Customer education — guides, e-books, and newsletters can help educate customers and make them achieve success with your products.

● Customer engagement — blogs, articles, social media posts that generate comments and responses serve as customer engagement tools.

● Lead generation — high-quality content such as guides, e-books, case studies, and articles can be exchanged for contact details.

● Customer retention — top-notch content can be used to keep existing customers interested in your offers.

● Credibility — blogs, articles, and e-books that demonstrate your extensive knowledge can help build brand authority and credibility.

In eCommerce, the right content should accompany every step of your marketing strategy. To develop strong content and implement related tactics, you need to pinpoint the buyer persona and the audience's location in the sales funnel.

4. Managing Social Media Accounts

Posting content on social media can help you drive traffic to your website. Additionally, social media is excellent for brand awareness and consideration. Many eCommerce companies are showcasing and selling their products on social media.

Taking full advantage of paid advertising and shopping options can help turn your social media followers into regular customers.

5. Powering up Video Production

Almost 80% of internet users watch online videos every week. This makes creating and implementing high-quality videos a robust eCommerce marketing tactic. Videos can help you build brand awareness, improve brand authority, educate your customers, and much more.

6. Implementing Email Tactics

Email marketing tactics are excellent for driving conversions and boosting retention. These tactics include:

● Creating personalised emails to improve engagement.

● Segmenting your target audience to ensure a better reach.

● Educating customers about new products.

● Re-engaging inactive subscribers.

Email tactics allow you to reach customers and connect with them on a personal level. They are excellent MOFU (Middle of the Funnel) and BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) tools.

7. Beefing Up SEO Tactics

Search engine optimisation tactics for eCommerce can achieve a variety of goals, the main one being steady high-quality traffic. No matter what your marketing strategy is, SEO should always be working behind the scenes. Efficient SEO tactics include:

● Publishing high-quality content (consistently)

● Optimising your website for user experience

● Beefing up technical SEO

● Working on backlinks

Search engine optimisation is less expensive than paid search marketing tactics. However, these two strategies complement each other seamlessly.

Developing an Implementation Plan for Your Marketing Activities

Once you have a list of tactics that work best for achieving your goals, you can start executing your plan.

1. Set Proper Expectations

No matter how excellent your marketing efforts are, it will take time to see results. Your team, sales department, managers, and stakeholders should have a clear understanding of what to expect. SMART goals (you can read more about them in Part 1) can help with setting expectations.

2. Make a List of Necessary Resources

Which resources will you need to implement your marketing plan? For example:

● Marketing automation tools

● Social media management tools

● Content writing team

● Technical talent for website design

● Marketing analytics tools

You need to decide whether you can amass these resources in-house or outsource some work to a third party.

3. Communicate with Your Team

Both your in-house marketing team and any third-party partners should know about your expectations, goals, deadlines, and timelines. Make sure all parties involved understand how the process will work and what their responsibilities are.

You may want to document your marketing plan to turn it into a reference. Centralising all your ideas and tactics can help you through the process.

4. Get into Details

You need to assign each tactic to a team member or a marketing partner to make sure each person understands what they are responsible for.

Each task needs a clear definition. The person handling it must see how it fits into the rest of the marketing plan. Determine how long each task should take and communicate the details to the responsible parties.

5. Create a Dashboard for Tracking Progress

Proper tracking is one of the pillars of a successful marketing plan. Figure out how you are going to track the progress of your campaign.

Take advantage of available marketing software to keep all the metrics and KPIs centralised. It can help see how well your efforts are paying off before visible results become available.

Create Your eCommerce Marketing Strategy Today

Creating an eCommerce marketing strategy may seem complicated. However, if you have a simple structure to follow, you can come up with a comprehensive plan within days.

With the right understanding of the process, each eCommerce business can design a unique and efficient marketing strategy.