Brands need more than a web traffic strategy to be successful in the market. They require an approach that scales and converts people in the door to repeat customers.
Remember, customers are harder to please than ever before, and only those companies that can gain their satisfaction or preference will survive.
In this blog, we have included some methods that, if implemented properly, can assist eCommerce platforms in drawing prospective customers and turning them into recurring shoppers.
Ben started his online store last year.
But despite creating an aesthetic website and high-quality products, his business isn’t going well.
It’s not just Ben.
There are many other businesses that are making the same mistake, which is overlooking marketing.
A good marketing strategy helps people find your business, resulting in increased sales.
Building A Strong Marketplace Brand
Building an online marketplace requires a lot of planning, strategic decision-making, and accurate implementation.
Here are some factors to consider when building a strong marketplace brand.
Crafting A Compelling Brand Story
Ever felt a special connection with a brand, like it’s speaking only to you?
That’s the power of a great brand story.
A good brand story includes business values, mission, and journey, which are combined into a compelling narrative that resonates with your audience and draws them closer to your brand.
Share your future vision with your audience and discuss the differences you plan to make in your related niche market to create an emotional connection with your audience.
You don’t have to write long stories about your brand; you need something short, genuine, authentic, and relevant to impress your audience.
Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
Every eCommerce business needs to identify a UVP that differentiates it from its competition and explains to potential clients why they must use its products or services.
To develop an effective UVP, analyze your target market’s pain points and needs and how your business’s features and benefits address these issues.
Finally, ensure your UVP is communicated properly on your website, social media, and marketing channels to turn visitors into conversions and grow your business.
Developing A Consistent Brand Identity
Keeping your brand consistent means ensuring its story and identity align across all your channels while creating a strong impression on your audience. It leads to positive brand recognition, showing your customers who you are.
A recent study notes that 68% of companies believe brand consistency has increased revenue by at least 10%. If people know of you and feel good about you, they are better able to buy from you or remain customers in the long term, and that’s what a compelling brand story does.
Acquiring And Engaging Customers
Acquiring and engaging customers helps foster stronger bonds with customers, increasing customer loyalty and driving revenue growth.
Here are some effective ways to do it:
Customer Acquisition
1. SEO For Marketplace Visibility
SEO is essential for boosting your store’s visibility on Google and other search engines, helping you attract more organic traffic.
Unlike general SEO, eCommerce SEO focuses on optimizing product pages, category pages, and other sales-driven content, including blog posts.
To grow your eCommerce brand, check out what your competitors are doing with their SEO strategies.
Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to analyze their best-performing pages and find their primary keywords. This will help you identify areas for improvement in your on-page optimization and content, such as blog posts.
2. Paid Advertising Strategies
Running Google Shopping campaigns is important to ensure your products catch the eye of potential buyers.
It’s also easy to set up: just link your Google Ads account with your Merchant Center. As long as your product details are up-to-date, Google Ads will pull in info like reviews, product names, and images for your shopping ads.
Another medium for paid ads is social media, where people spend a lot of time, allowing you to reach new customers.
You can share photos and videos of your products/services and highlight any special events or discounts.
Consider combining Google Shopping with engaging social media content to boost your brand’s visibility and attract more shoppers.
3. Content Marketing
To attract customers, an online store requires high-quality content, such as blog articles, social media marketing, podcasts, videos, or product descriptions.
Good content contributes to a good content marketing strategy and shows your goals and other essential details about the business your customer wants to learn about.
If you are thinking of starting marketing through content, blog posts are the easiest way to go. Blog posts are an effective tactic in content marketing, through which you release articles, guides, product reviews, and other engaging content that will naturally promote your product and resonate with your audience.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing helps businesses to reach their target market.
People love getting promotional emails with offers and discounts directly in their inboxes from favorite brands.
Email marketing offers excellent return on investment opportunities, with $1 invested returning up to $36.
To get started, build your email list, choose your content, personalize messages, use automation, and analyze results. Combine engaging written and visual content to drive traffic, close deals, and boost profits.
You can also send regular newsletters to your subscribers and update them on new discount offers, product tips, or any relevant company news.
5. Affiliate Programs And Partnerships
An eCommerce marketing plan is incomplete without a solid affiliate program.
It’s a powerful way to expand your reach and spread your brand’s message. Find influential affiliates to promote your products across various platforms. This is a cost-effective approach since you only pay based on performance.
To make it work, prioritize offering value, avoid overloading emails with links, promote top-notch products, and focus on building genuine relationships rather than just pushing sales.
Customer Retention
1. Loyalty Programs
Setting up a customer loyalty program is a great way to appreciate your most loyal customers and big spenders.
Loyalty programs give your customers extra reasons to shop, refer friends, and help them memorize your brand through automated reminders.
Loyalty programs allow you to reward customers in a manner and at a time of your choice. For instance, one can apply a point basis where customers earn them through the number of purchases made. These can then be redeemed for discounts, free shipping, or even gifts.
2. Multilingual Customer Support
Identify the languages your customers speak the most and then connect with them.
You can outsource it by hiring representatives who can communicate in these languages or create a multilingual chatbot to solve queries.
Provide support across e-mail, live chat, phone, and social media and implement a multilingual FAQ or knowledge base on the website to help customers with their questions and inquiries.
Seller Acquisition And Management
Attracting high-quality sellers is essential because they enhance your brand reputation and deliver a better experience for customers as well as sellers.
To attract more sellers, you must highlight what makes your brand unique and share some success stories.
The next step is to make the onboarding process smooth and user-friendly. Give your sellers the tools and resources they need to promote their products/services, and keep the scope of communication open with regular feedback and support.
When properly used, Social Media serves as a free promotional tool for eCommerce. Using sites such as Facebook and Instagram can quickly attract the type of customers you want, driving an audience to your website.
Depending on which platform you post on, short and attention-grabbing videos or engaging content can help you receive website traffic and conversions.
To increase your following, focus on finding solutions for your customers’ issues, use hashtags and keywords properly, and maintain an engaging and updated profile.
Measuring And Optimizing Marketing Performance
There are several factors involved in measuring and optimizing marketing performance.
Let’s have a look:
1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are used to determine the success of a business’s marketing campaigns as they indicate how well your campaigns are performing.
KPIs are associated with customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion rate, return on investment, and other indicators that define business growth.
Implementing KPIs means regularly tracking these metrics using tools like Google Analytics or CRM systems. This can help you pinpoint what’s working and what needs to be changed, making data-driven decisions that boost performance.
2. Analytics And Data-Driven Decision Making
Guesswork won’t take your business anywhere, but using the data to make informed decisions will.
Tools like Google Analytics help you identify customer behavior, traffic sources, and sales paths, helping you spot the best marketing channels. Getting this data is important as it allows you to allocate your budget and focus on profitable strategies smartly.
Analyze customer preference and history to help you in creating focused and personalized campaigns.
From e-mail marketing and social media advertising to recommendations on products, data-driven campaigns ensure better engagement, higher conversions, and increased revenues with just the right message delivered to the target audience.
3. A/B Testing And Experimentation
A/B testing involves comparing the two versions of your marketing content to determine which one yields better results.
For instance, you want to compare and choose one out of the two different landing page designs.
How will you choose the best landing page design?
You can test them out, and see which more resonates with your audience.
This process of testing is called A/B testing, and it helps to fine-tune the strategy for one to have better engagements and conversions.
For eCommerce businesses, this means boosting sales and keeping customers coming back.
Tools like Optimizely or Google Optimize make it easy to run these tests and analyze the results, so you can make the small changes that create big successes.
4. Continuous Optimization
As the digital space develops, so must your marketing strategies.
You can stay ahead of your competition by constantly analyzing performance data, experimenting with new things, and tweaking how you do stuff. This means that for online marketplaces, delivering customer satisfaction is an ongoing task, and adapting to the changing marketplace landscape allows you to maximize your return on investment.
This requires an ongoing commitment to learning and course correction, where analytics results, A/B tests, and automated campaigns keep your strategies optimized and relevant.
Social Media Marketing