E-commerce Marketing: How To Dominate Any E-com Niche

If you do a quick Google search for "E-commerce Marketing," you're going to find a wide range of different e-commerce marketing strategies that may or may not work to grow your e-commerce business. Rather than just writing a bunch of e-com fluff, we want to tell you "exactly" what e-commerce strategies work and should be implemented in your business right away. So, if you're ready to start getting e-commerce results in 2022, follow this e-commerce guide below and dominate your niche. Let's get started.

What Is E-commerce Marketing?

Just in case you don't know, e-commerce marketing is going to refer to the action of driving awareness and action toward a business that sells its product or service digitally.

E-commerce marketers can use SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), social media, digital content, search engines, and email campaigns to attract visitors and encourage online purchases.

Types of E-commerce Marketing

There's a wide variety of e-commerce marketing strategies and tactics at your disposal. To give you a sense of what an e-commerce marketing strategy looks like, let's take a closer look at the most common marketing channels and how you'd use them to build an online store.

(1) Content Marketing

When you hear "content marketing," you might think of blogging and video marketing — content that is meant to improve your website's ranking in search engines and answer questions related to your industry. But if you're selling a product online, do you really need articles and videos to generate transactions? You sure do.

Here are some ways to use content to market your e-commerce store.

• Blog Posts: Blogs are a great way to showcase your e-commerce products and go in-depth to help users understand your products better.

• Video: While contextual content is great, videos are powerful and can give potential customers an experience with your products without having to buy them first.

• Reviews: You can also write reviews on your products to explain the pros and cons. You also can ask customers to contribute with reviews.

(2) Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a very powerful e-commerce strategy to sell online products. SEO focuses on driving organic traffic to your e-commerce store by ranking keywords that are closely related to the products you sell. For example, if you're selling beach towels, you'd want to rank on the first page of Google for keywords like beach towel, towel for the beach, buy a beach towel, dark blue beach towels.

SEO is a process that takes time; it's important to remember that if you're going to be doing your own search engine optimization or you outsource SEO to an SEO expert, SEO relies on creating online content that covers a topic in-depth. Take our beach towel example: to give us better odds to rank for that keyword, we'd want to create content that targets beach towels.

Since Google is the largest search engine and owns around 85 percent of all global search engine traffic, you want to make sure your SEO follows Google's guidelines. You can learn more about that here.

As you're learning now, SEO can integrate with many other areas of your e-com marketing — it can relate to content marketing, social media marketing, email, and more.

(3) Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to collect leads and turn those leads into paying customers. The great news: email marketing can be fully automated. If you're not familiar with automation, it refers to setting up an email campaign that can collect leads, nurture leads, or turn leads into customers without you having to be there. An email marketing system has to be built before you can enjoy the automation, but once it's built, it can run its own as long as you have email marketing software to power it.

Your email list should be one of the highest converting traffic sources you have. There's a lot of different ways to build your email list, here's a few ideas that work great:

• Giveaways

• BOGO offers

• Discounts

• Holiday prices

• Free gift

• Free shipping

• Surprises

(4) Social Media Marketing

Social media is a powerful digital marketing strategy to implement for your e-commerce brand. While I'm sure you're already using social media marketing, the question you have to ask: is my social media marketing working? Unfortunately, most people don't utilize social media correctly to get a positive ROI. Here's how you can change that.

Your Primary Social Media Platform — Instead of posting content on multiple platforms, the key is mastering one (1) social media platform and then expanding from there. You need to figure out which social media platform is best for your brand. Which social media website do you perform best on now?

What Do Your Customers Want To Consume — There's a wide range of social media content types you can use to determine what content gets the best results.

• Does your audience prefer contextual posts or video?

• Does your audience respond to discounts or giveaways?

• Does your audience engage with funny memes, or is it more professional?

The key is figuring out what types of content perform the best with your audience.

Get Those Feedback Loops Going — If your social media content is not getting responses and engagement, it's time to open the stage and give them the mic. You need to start having conversations with your audience, and pay close attention to what they say. Look for patterns to repeat — this can give you direction and insights to what content they want to consume.

You can also use paid social media placements to reach more customers. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok all have paid ad opportunities. While this article will not dive deep into social media ads, there are a few important things you should be aware of.

• If you already have an email list of paying customers, you can use that email list to build look-a-like audiences to target.

• Facebook allows you to have private groups; this is perfect for building strong communities of loyal fans.

• Social media ads are still relatively affordable compared to other advertising options.

(5) Search Engine Marketing

While we discussed SEO earlier and how it allows you to drive organic traffic to your e-commerce store, you can also pay to get into Google — this is called search engine marketing (SEM), also referred to by pay-per-click marketing (PPC). Google PPC is the fastest way to get your store in front of potential customers, but at a cost.

SEM can be a powerful marketing strategy, but you can also lose a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing. It is one of the quickest ways to get on the top page of Google; you can launch a Google PPC campaign in just a few minutes.

Google gives you a variety of different targeting options and campaign options to help you sell more products.

(6) YouTube and Video Marketing

Video is the most powerful digital marketing strategy you can use. If you're watching a video, it feels like a one-on-one conversation. Video is more engaging than reading an article. Digital trends prove that video is the most important weapon in your marketing arsenal. Are you using video effectively?

YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine, and it is the top video search engine. YouTube also has big SEO benefits, so hosting your videos on YouTube is the right strategy to use. YouTube makes it easy for users to engage with your video. You can record videos and upload them there, or you can do livestreams.

You'll want to make sure you're creating videos about your products and brand. Not only can you utilize the YouTube platform with video content, you can share that video content on all of your other online platforms to reach more people.

(7) Affiliate Marketing

If others can sell your products for you, why not? Sure, profit margins are always going to be discussed. But is it better to sell a product more — or not at all? If I'm bringing in 30-percent profit margins for a product, I'm glad to give someone 15 percent of that so I can make 15 percent I would have never made otherwise. Right?

There's also a hidden benefit of affiliate marketing many people don't talk about — the branding and marketing component. If you bring on 20 affiliate marketers, they will be out there actively promoting your products. This is a quick way to get in front of a much larger audience.

Remember, if it wasn't going to sell anyway, wouldn't you rather make a few percent than nothing at all? E-commerce affiliate marketing can be a powerful way to immediately begin seeing more sales.

(8) Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing focuses on people or brands that influence your target market. The term is commonly used to denote Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube accounts with several thousand followers, but it could also mean a celebrity or community that your target audience follows or belongs to.

Influencers already have existing communities of followers that know, like, and trust them. Due to this, it's easy for them to get attention around your online product. If you can find an influencer in the same niche as your product, it could be a great way to bring in some fast sales.

Optimize E-commerce Products

Now, let's talk about making your products perform better.

(1) Product Images

Product images are extremely important. You want to make sure potential customers can view the entire product. This means you should be using multiple images for each unique product. These images should be of the highest quality. Consider adding a relative background to your images to enhance the experience.

(2) Product Videos

You should also utilize videos on your product page. These give potential buyers a more in-depth experience versus just having product images.

E-commerce Marketing Tips

There are countless e-commerce marketing tactics that you can employ to drive visitors to your online store beyond the traditional methods that we reviewed above. Let’s get into some more creative ways you can market your e-commerce business.

(1) User-Generated Content

If you have great e-commerce products, customers will write about them. However, sometimes you have to remind them to create that content. Imagine if you have an army of customers writing content about your products — it can be POWERFUL!

(2) Loyalty Rewards/Program

You always want to take care of your most dedicated customers. You can do this by giving them rewards - like a loyalty program. A loyal customer is a long-term customer. Every e-commerce merchant wants repeat business, right? A loyalty program provides an incentive for a customer to continue doing business with you through relevant offers and discounts.

It can help you with:

• Repeat customers

• Repeat referrals

• Customer retention

• Word of mouth

• Reviews

• Testimonials

(3) Shopping Cart Optimizations

This is where your money is made or lost; it's the most important page on your website. Yet, for most e-commerce business owners, it's an afterthought. Don't think like that. Instead, think how you can make it better.

Focus on:

• Access to instant customer service

• Money-back guarantees

• Great shipping options

• Clear, simple return policy

You want to make sure you give potential customers every reason to buy from you.

(4) Responsive Web Design

You likely already know this: having a website that is responsive on all designs is extremely important. For instance, a brand that was worth $45M — despite their e-commerce store being not fully responsive — was selling tens of millions in products. Can you imagine how many sales they were missing?

We live in a time where mobile is king now. People love shopping from their phones, and they want an easy process. If they're having trouble accessing your site on mobile, they'll go elsewhere and you're going to lose the sale.

E-commerce Marketing KPIs

So, what are the most important e-commerce marketing KPIs?

With paid Google ads or paid Facebook ads, you can track your ROI fairly easily as long as you're using the right tracking codes. The same can said about your affiliate marketing, as programs track these KPIs for you. If you're tracking ROI from SEO or your email list, that can be very difficult.

You can track a lot with Google Analytics, Shopify, and WooCommerce. Some of the most important KPIs are going to be website visits, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer acquisition costs.

Make sure you're using all the tracking tools you can so you can get accurate data to determine e-commerce ROIs.

Put the Right Tools in the Right Spots

As we've discussed, e-commerce businesses have many marketing tools at their fingertips. If you use digital and inbound marketing the right way, you can create powerful campaigns that are designed to help your online store attract customers and grow.

These same e-commerce marketing tactics and strategies have generated billions in sales. They are very effective, but it can take time to find the best e-com marketing strategy to use for your specific business.

If you want to learn more about being successful in e-commerce and want to rub shoulders with some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet, make sure to join PDMI. You can become a member here.