5 Winning Marketing Strategies for E-commerce This Year

Creating an online store is one of the best ways to start your own business. However, with millions of other e-commerce businesses out there, you’ll need to find ways to set yourself apart.

You can offer amazing products at great prices. But if no one can find your store you’ll never make any sales. This is why marketing is such a key part of building a successful e-commerce business.

So, how do you effectively promote your products?

We’ve outlined 5 marketing strategies below that will help get your store on the map. Most of these will work whether you’re selling from your own site, starting an Amazon business, or selling on any of the other online marketplaces. Let’s dive in.

Why is e-commerce marketing so important?

The internet is how most consumers find the products they’re looking for these days. So, if you’re going to start building a successful business you need to make your items easy to find in search engines and social media.

This doesn’t happen on its own. If you don’t invest anything into marketing you likely won’t get any traffic to your pages. This could leave you stuck with a large amount of ecommerce inventory that no one is buying.

For those not familiar with online marketing tactics, the process might seem intimidating. But rest assured, it’s not that difficult. And the best part is, the more you work at it the easier it gets. As your store and products gain traction online you’ll naturally start moving up the search rankings and generating more sales.

With all that said, let’s go over the five strategies you can use to build your business.

Optimize your product listings for search engines

This is one of the easiest and most important steps you can take to promote your items. It won’t cost you anything and if you do it right you’ll greatly increase the amount of traffic you receive.

In order to optimize your product listings, you’ll need to include keywords throughout the text. So, the first step is figuring out which keywords you should use. You may have an idea about what keywords should be included, but for the best results, you need to use a tool to figure out which terms people are actually searching for.

If you’re selling from your own site use a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs. For those selling on an online marketplace, try to find a tool specific to that site. For example, there are a number of keyword tools available for Amazon sellers.

Look for the terms with the most monthly searches, and then use those keywords in your title and body copy. Those selling on their own site can also include your keywords in the following places:

• Image titles
• Image alt text
• Meta title
• Meta description
  

For marketplace sellers, you likely won’t have access to some of the areas listed above, but there may be other options. For example, Amazon gives you a field where you can add backend keywords.

One last note about keywords: don’t overuse them. You need to make sure your text still makes sense. Search engines can tell when you’re stuffing your copy full of search terms and customers will be turned off by listings that don’t read well.

Paid search ads

Ideally, your products will start showing up organically in search results. However, this usually takes some time. So, it’s a good idea to pay for some search ads. These are the ads that show up at the top of search results on search engines like Google or Amazon.

These ads have two main benefits:

1. They help your products get found: Organic SEO takes time to work. By paying for search ads you’ll start showing up in searches for your target keywords right away.

2. They convert really well: When people search for your product, there’s a very good chance they’re interested in buying it. This means the conversion rate on these types of ads is a lot higher than a display ad on a content site.

The ads are easy to set up. Generally, you just need to pick the keywords you want to show up for and include a title and description.

If you’re selling on your own site use Google ads. For marketplace sellers, most of these companies will have their own ads that will allow you to get found in searches on that site.

Social media marketing

Social media is one of the best places to promote your products.

As you can see, if you want to build your brand you need to be on social media. To start, create pages on all the major platforms and post content regularly. This could be things like promotions, product demonstrations, or just news about your business.

Try to focus more on educational and fun content, rather than sales-focused posts. If people see that you’re just constantly promoting your items they’re going to lose interest really fast. Instead, start conversations with people and get them to engage with your content. This strategy takes a while, but it will have long-term benefits for your business.

You can also advertise on social media to drive traffic to your site and product listings. Facebook is by far the most popular platform to advertise on, as it has a number of options and allows you to target people based on:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Employment
• Interests
  

Determine who your ideal audience is and then target them with eye-catching ads. Facebook ads are fairly cost-effective and a great way to build your customer base.

Influencer marketing

Ok, so after reading all about social media marketing you’re probably thinking that it’s going to take you a while to build up a large following. And you’re right. This is why it’s a good idea to hire influencers to promote your products for you.

An influencer is someone who has a large following and the power to impact the purchasing decisions of many different people.

Generally speaking, the more followers an influencer has the more they’ll charge to promote your products. Luckily though, you don’t need to hire a mega-influencer for this strategy to work. Even a nano or micro-influencer with the right audience can be a powerful ally for you.

Find influencers in your niche and reach out to the ones that you’re interested in. There are also services that can help you find influencers with an audience that suits your brand.

Affiliate marketing

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could promote and sell your products for you? This idea isn’t far-fetched. In fact, it happens all the time.

Affiliate marketing is when you reward people for referring customers to your store. If the person they send to you ends up buying something they receive a small percentage of the sale.

All you need to do is give your affiliates trackable links to share with their followers and subscribers. Since there’s a monetary reward for promoting your business these people are very motivated to help you generate sales.

Luckily, there are solutions that make setting up these types of programs easy. Tapfiliate offers top affiliate tracking software that seamlessly integrates with your online store.

The best part about this strategy is that once you build a powerful network of affiliates they’ll do most of your marketing for you.

Conclusion

Building a new e-commerce business takes work, but with the right marketing strategies you shouldn’t have any trouble generating sales. Try some of the tips above and before you know it you’ll have your own successful online store.