Online shopping has gained tremendous momentum in the last two decades and shows no signs of slowing down.
As a result, strong eCommerce marketing is essential for any storefront seeking to gain a competitive edge in a crowded market. With a well-executed digital marketing strategy, businesses can drive customers to their landing pages and motivate them to make a purchase.
What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?
Your eCommerce business will not get very far if no one knows about it. Word of mouth remains the most effective way to reach an audience, but that’s not usually where small businesses start – it’s more like the goal. Instead, the best way to ramp sales and scale is through a cohesive, well-roadmapped eCommerce marketing strategy.
Roadmapping is how you’ll ensure the success of your digital marketing strategy – it should be firm with just the right amount of flexibility so that unexpected obstacles don’t send the entire plan crumbling. The ultimate destination of your roadmap is to enhance visibility, drive conversions, connect with a target audience, and meet your eCommerce goals.
The digital marketing strategy should be topical, supporting new launches, news, and evergreen, meaning it constantly supports the business, even between updates.
Digital Marketing Strategies vs. Digital Marketing Tactics
While some tend to conflate digital marketing tactics and strategies, they’re distinct entities. A digital marketing strategy is the actual plan itself, the directive that will drive implementation. Digital marketing tactics are the actual techniques; they’re the actionable items and deliverables that comprise the strategy.
For example, if your digital marketing strategy involves increasing organic traffic through content, one of your tactics could be to research informational keywords relevant to your desired target demographic and fill a content calendar with items designed to answer those questions and provide value to the reader.
How To Create a Digital eCommerce Marketing Strategy
Define The Audience
An eCommerce brand is likely already vaguely aware of this: who is the target audience? Even if a general idea exists, taking a step back and getting in-depth with this analysis is a pivotal first step in an eCommerce marketing strategy.
What does the shop sell, and to whom? What kind of person is going to turn into a repeat buyer? Who is likely to tell their peers about the product or service? Understanding a target market is more than just having a vague idea of who would buy what.
Explore data on demographics, their interests, pain points, shopping habits, and opinions. Figure out where they’re getting their information and how they process it.
Marketing teams can locate and analyze this information through several different avenues. Polls, forums, surveys, focus groups, reviews, and data from sites like Google Analytics can help zero in on what an ideal customer looks like – and how to market to them.
Set Goals
The next step in creating an eCommerce marketing strategy is to eliminate distractions and vanity metrics by laying out clear-cut goals. Setting SMART goals takes lofty ambitions and shapes them into actionable steps. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
Someone’s eCommerce goal might be “Make more money in Q3 over Q2.” This goal is understandable and definitely worth chasing, but it offers little in terms of laying out the next steps. It is vague and unmeasurable—technically, if a brand makes even $1 more than they did the previous quarter, they’ve succeeded by this goal’s loose definition.
Instead, a SMART eCommerce goal should be
- Specific (How much more revenue? Why? On all products, or just in one category?)
- Measurable (What will indicators of that success look like?)
- Achievable (Is the goal realistic?)
- Relevant (Is it necessary?)
- Time-based (By what date in Q3 should this be achieved?)
When applying SMART goal setting, a renewed ambition might be: “See a 15% increase in preorder sales on the Q3 product launch by getting followers excited about the upcoming launch through sneak peeks and preorder incentives posted on Instagram and TikTok well ahead of time.”
When starting a digital strategy for growth and goal-hitting from scratch, it’s best to have two or three SMART goals to lay the foundation for the rest of the roadmap.
Establish Monetary and Tech Stack Budgets
Digital marketing strategies are more than just posting freely on social media. According to Gartner’s 2022 report, the average budget for e-commerce digital marketing was only 10% of total business revenue. Some brands might allocate more, while others require less – a mixture of revenue, goals, and funding usually decides this.
Consider allocating marketing spend on:
- Expertise: marketing or SEO professionals, freelance advisors, consultants, and similar subject matter experts
- Content Creation: photographers, graphic designers, designers, videographers/editors, content writers and copywriters
- Tools: automation tools, email services, keyword research tools, performance tracking platforms, social media management tools
- Campaign costs: advertising costs, paying influencers, hosting fees, etc
Lay Out Tactics
With goals, budgets, and a clear view of the target audience in mind, it’s time to begin choosing the tactics that will make those goals attainable. The ideal roadmap will include elements designed to attract and convert customers and foster a relationship wherein brand resonance and recognition are born.
Three phases of the eCommerce marketing journey should be considered when selecting tactics: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Awareness describes how the target audience will learn about the brand and its products or services. This is where growing organic traffic through content, social media, and influencers comes into play.
Consideration is the next step. Once someone has given the business their attention, how is it retained? Email marketing, newsletters, and targeted social media advertising can help here.
Finally, decisions are where the conversions begin. If customers are aware of an eCommerce store and its services, how will they be convinced to finalize a purchase? Email automation, social media, and search engine marketing and optimization will all be critical in this stage of the journey.
Value Proposition and USP
The internet is vast and well populated, with hundreds of thousands of eCommerce sites over dozens of different platforms. No matter what someone sells on their eCommerce site, there is a strong chance that they’re not the only one doing so.
This is where two essential factors must set a brand apart: value proposition and unique selling point (USP.)
Find out what makes one brand unique, and double down on that angle. It doesn’t have to necessarily be the products themselves (though they’re also essential). Still, a brand’s voice, style, marketing approach, and unique value propositions like subscription services or ingredient transparency will help push consumers from one brand to another.
Track Results
Once the roadmap is laid and the action items are in the works, tracking eCommerce metrics will help ensure that every goal is met and that the tactics are carried out smoothly.
A few metrics to watch while carrying out a digital marketing campaign include monthly search traffic, page views, conversion rates, views, comments, click-through rates, engagement rates, and more.
The Ultimate eCommerce Marketing Strategy
No two businesses are built alike. When plotting out an eCommerce marketing strategy, best practices dictate that it should be tailored to a brand’s exact needs, goals, niche, and audience. What works for some might not work for others – no standard template or rubric can be applied to every business. One business could have been running for years but realize they’re hitting a sales plateau. Another might just be starting out, with little to work with in terms of team size, and a much smaller goal besides.
This is why building out a marketing strategy is sometimes as important as the strategy itself. It should be considered a high-priority item, as it is what will drive results at the end of the day. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in a sea of strategies and tactics. Learning how to lay the foundations for this pivotal piece of the eCommerce puzzle is critical.
With the roadmap laid, here are a few examples of effective strategies to explore.
Ad Campaigns
When it comes to online advertising, the most common model is pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Businesses of every size utilize PPC to get the word out about their products and services because it’s data-backed, scalable, and usually comes with a positive return on investment when it’s done correctly.
Google is currently the most effective place for running a PPC ad campaign since users are already typing in queries with commercial intent – meaning, they’re using search terms meant to bring them to shopping pages. Users arriving with the intent to buy is why many eCommerce businesses see so much success with PPC.
Ads can also be placed on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and a variety of other social media platforms. There are also mobile ads that will appear on smartphones and tablets as banner ads, pop-ups, and videos in some cases. Figuring out if mobile or internet ads work best for your brand comes down, again, to demographics. You can use sites like Google Analytics 4 to see what devices your visitors use to access your shop the most and tailor your PPC campaigns accordingly.
Influencer Marketing
It’s no secret that influencer marketing packs a punch. It’s one of the biggest marketing trends we’re seeing headed into 2024, and more and more brands are trying to get in on the action. In fact, influencer marketing is now a 21.1 billion-dollar global industry.
While Instagram is the most popular channel for getting in touch with influencers, YouTube and TikTok are perfect for reaching a younger, Gen Z audience that prefers video content. As part of the target audience research step, discovering where your demographic uses social media will come in handy here.
Because influencers have already curated their audiences, it’s easy to find one that matches up with an eCommerce site’s ideal consumer base. Find an influencer that aligns with the brand’s values and individual voice, and begin planning a campaign. Partnering with someone on social media will usually require payment to the influencer, plus sending over products for them to use as part of their regular content.
While running an influencer marketing campaign can be an eCommerce marketing strategy in and of itself, it can also be a tactic in a larger social media strategy.
Investing in SEO
eCommerce search engine optimization (SEO) is how an online store is optimized for both organic and paid search on search engines – namely Google, but there is value in optimizing for Bing and Yahoo search as well.
The ultimate goal is to get pages on a website to rank within the top ten spots within search engine results pages, or SERPs. Landing in that prized #1 spot is even more rewarding, but twice as difficult. An eCommerce website can increase organic traffic and drive conversions by investing in SEO.
The tactics used when a site invests in SEO as a digital marketing strategy might involve:
- Performing intensive keyword research and creating a list of target focus keywords. There are numerous tools for keyword research and tracking that can be employed here.
- Creating a content strategy. Post high-quality content, like blogs, white pages, ebooks, and social media posts, consistently. This content should provide value to your readers in some way.
- Building backlinks through white-hat link building. “White-hat” link building means obtaining backlinks through practices that do not break Google’s terms of service – don’t purchase links or find spammy ways to get your website seen.
- Optimizing product pages. Ensure that meta tags, like the title and meta description, are accurate and unique, and markup each page with structured data.
- Streamline user experience. How easy is your eCommerce experience for the user? Can they find what they need quickly?
- Add in an FAQ. Answer your customers’ questions before they have to send a customer service email on a Frequently Asked Questions page.
Email Marketing Strategies
An email marketing campaign is still a practical approach to eCommerce strategy, even with the prominence of social media. The key to using email as a part of an eCommerce marketing strategy is first to nurture valuable leads. A valuable lead is one within a brand’s target demographic that is likely to not only open the email, but click through to the site with it.
An email marketing campaign should be strategically sound. Sending too many and flooding your audience’s inboxes will turn them away and lead them to unsubscribe. Emails that don’t catch the customer’s attention will quickly find themselves lost among the other promotions. While this is a tricky strategy, it is proven effective and can even help improve the overall customer experience.
Customize emails, but don’t spend too much time individually typing out a welcome email to every new user who inputs their address. Thank you emails, newsletters, promotional emails, and shopping cart abandonment emails can all be templated and personalized.
As part of allocating budgets for a digital strategy, consider researching email marketing platforms and finding the best one that suits the needs of this particular campaign. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, as well, will help keep track of customer data, which will help with the ‘measurable’ portion of a SMART goal.
eCommerce Marketing Strategies: The Key To Success
eCommerce marketing is the most surefire way to ensure that a business grows. Laying out a cohesive, intentional, strategically sound roadmap will ensure that the path ahead is clear, and that SMART goals can be easily met and tracked. When hosting a shop through Shopify, finding success all comes down to the time and effort spent on laying out a digital marketing roadmap and executing it with care and consideration.
Author Bio:
Lisa Nichols-Jell, Co-Founder of Bloom Ads Global Media Group, located in Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Lisa is an experienced and highly regarded communications strategist who has worked for over two decades on some of the world’s best brands. As Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, she drives client innovation through cross-channel media campaign development and is charged with leading the agency’s strategic vision. Her expertise intersects with key brand and department leads to develop new services, expand on existing ones, and drive agency growth.
