In pre-internet days, businesses could promote themselves through billboards, television spots, direct mail, or store window displays. But with commerce and consumers moving to the online world, marketing, and advertising have moved online, too. Marketers can now reach their target audience via digital channels such as social media, search engines, websites, text messages, and mail. These comprise what we think of as digital marketing or online marketing.
Top 10 Digital Marketing Tips
Understand your Customer
Understanding your target audience is an essential step in e-commerce marketing. Who are they? What are their interests, needs, and desires? Where do they spend their time? To identify and understand your customers, you should conduct market research: this can be as simple as surveying some of your existing customers.
With a clear picture of your target customer, you can create targeted marketing campaigns that speak to their interest. And don’t forget customer feedback: this is a great source of data you can use to improve your offerings and your brand’s customer experience.
Create Compelling Content
One of the most important steps of digital marketing is creating compelling and relevant content that draws people to visit your website. Clickbait content might get shoppers’ attention, but if it doesn’t provide value to your target audience, they’ll likely leave before making a purchase.
Regularly Optimize your Website for SEO and Conversions
Your website and published content should also include top search keywords the words and phrases that customers type into search engines when looking for products. Services, and websites like yours, google, most e-commerce platform providers, website builders, and other companies offer free tools that can help you research keywords and optimize your content accordingly.
Build a Presence on Social Media Platforms
Most of your current and prospective customers spend a large part of their days scrolling their social media accounts, or hanging out in online communities at Reddit and Discord. Here are some social media marketing tips to help you take advantage of these ubiquitous platforms.
Create Mobile-friendly content
Did you know that the top 1000 North American-based online retailers receive 70% of their traffic from mobile devices? If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you are likely losing new customers. Make sure that your website looks good, loads quickly, and is easy to use on all devices. Optimize your site so that it’s responsive on all digital devices like mobiles, tablets, and laptops. Measure your page speed as this is a critical factor to hook customers to your website. If the web pages load at a slow speed, chances are that your customers would leave the website. When farming mobile-friendly content.
Integrate Marketing Across Multiple Platforms
A key component of digital marketing is integrating your messaging, branding, and campaigns across many different platforms at once. Managing content across digital channels can be a challenging task but it’s critical to succeed online. Here are some digital marketing tips for integrating across platforms.
Get on Google My Business
Google my business is a free platform that allows businesses to create a listing on Google. It’s free to use and a great way to reach potential customers, especially if you are a local business with customers who live near you. Make sure to claim your business listing and fill out all the information correctly.
Use Email and SMS/Text Marketing Efficiently
Sms marketing especially when it’s two-way and conversational helps you build relationships, create a sense of urgency, and meet shoppers where they spend the majority of their time on their phones. Though a majority of marketers rely on email marketing, research firm Gartner has found that text marketing campaigns have response rates that are 7X higher and click-through rates more than 30 times higher than email. Texts are an ideal channel for high-conversion marketing messages, such as abandoned cart reminders, black Friday sales and other promotional content, and personalized or segmented messages based on user data.
Invest in Digital Advertising
Pay per-click advertising is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for reaching your target audience and driving traffic to your site. It can feel risky to spend money on digital ads, but in the highly competitive e-commerce marketplace, PPC ads are table stakes.
PPC ads can be a useful tool for experimenting with your message and brand, with the end goal being that you learn what gets the most clicks and can constantly improve your ROI. Google Ads and YouTube Ads are examples of PPC advertising, as are social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Personalize Content
Every day we share key pieces of information about ourselves online. As an e-commerce business, you can harness this data in respectful and legal ways to better understand your shoppers and connect them with the products they need and desire. This kind of personalization whether it’s addressing emails to customers by their first name, or notifying customers that an item they browsed at your website is back in stock is a key competitive advantage in digital marketing. Research from Demand Metric finds that 80% of customers feel more positive about a brand after engaging with personalized content. By personalizing your content to shoppers needs and interests, you’ll be able to improve your conversions and see a higher return on investment for your efforts.
