What is the Importance of Digital Marketing in eCommerce?

Is your eCommerce operation struggling to gain ground on its rivals and convert its target market? There’s a good chance that you’re not using digital marketing to its maximum potential.

With the eCommerce landscape growing larger globally every day, the best way to attract sales-ready consumers to your online platform is via digital marketing strategies.

However, as the pandemic has dramatically hastened this shift online, ensuring your business benefits from the latest trends in eCommerce is more critical than ever. 

In fact, spending on digital ads increased by a staggering 49% in the first half of 2021 alone. If you’re not willing to invest in digital marketing for your business, you undoubtedly risk getting left behind.

What is eCommerce Digital Marketing? 

As your competition is likely using eCommerce digital marketing to their advantage already, getting up to speed on the ins and outs is a great idea. 

Using a range of digital marketing methods tailored to the eCommerce marketplace, the goal of these techniques is to drive customers towards your online platform. Whether you’re looking to boost sales or simply spread brand awareness, high-quality eCommerce marketing strategies make this and much more possible.

Across search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), social media content and many other types of eCommerce digital marketing, capturing the attention of your target market and getting them to take action is the ultimate goal. 

The Benefits of eCommerce Marketing

As the eCommerce industry grows broader, digital marketing offers an array of advantages when a personalised campaign is planned and executed correctly. This is crucial for digital marketing in Australia.

Here, we’ll delve into both established and underutilised eCommerce marketing strategies to help your operation reach the next stage of its journey.

Reach Your Customers Online

The obvious benefit of digital marketing for eCommerce businesses is how you can reach and convert your target market. With so many different advertising and marketing strategies at your disposal, researching where your customers exist online means you can generate a targeted campaign. 

For instance, if your eCommerce website specialises in an industry that’s hugely popular on Instagram – such as beauty, cosmetics or fashion – a social media or paid ads campaign on the platform can create massive success.

By developing an in-depth understanding of your core target market and knowing what makes your business different, eCommerce marketing strategies can generate enormous rewards.

Enhance Your Branding

Let’s face it, there are literally millions of eCommerce websites on the internet. Although they might not all be your direct competition, everyone is competing for attention in an increasingly crowded landscape.

As modern customers have a shorter attention span than ever, finding a way to rise above other eCommerce brands and encourage your target market to choose your business is hugely important. 

By using digital marketing methods to increase the visibility of your eCommerce store’s branding, you’ll increase your website traffic and conversion rates. Through social media posts, PPC ads and more, it’s possible to educate your target market about why you’re the best choice.

Boost Your Visibility

Achieving maximum visibility is the aim of the game when it comes to eCommerce marketing strategies. If you don’t use techniques to boost brand awareness and ensure customers know that you exist, there’s little chance of convincing them to shop with your business.

There are numerous ways to make your business more visible to your target market. For example, a comprehensive SEO campaign ensures you climb the search rankings and reach consumers conducting relevant queries. 

Meanwhile, a research-driven social media marketing strategy will help your business develop content that appeals to your ideal customers and ensure they understand what makes you the perfect choice.

Educate Consumers

If your eCommerce operation is looking to grow its reputation in the marketplace, you must develop methods to prove your trustworthiness to customers. After all, why should they choose a business they know nothing about? 

Taking a dedicated approach to content creation is the perfect way to achieve this goal. By creating a thoughtful content strategy that explores subjects that matter to your customers, you can drive them to your website. 

For example, posting this content on a blog has the power to generate 67% more leads per month. Meanwhile, you might decide to create product guides on your YouTube channel or take people behind the scenes of your business.

Skyrocket Accessibility

If you operate a brick-and-mortar store, you might feel like launching an eCommerce element to your business is unnecessary. While it’s definitely not something you can start overnight, this decision will massively improve accessibility around your business.

With an eCommerce store, you’re no longer restricted to converting customers that live in your immediate area. However, you need a way to promote this store to consumers living interstate or even overseas.

How is this achieved? Alongside powerful digital marketing methods, you can boost your brand’s visibility and increase accessibility to your eCommerce website.

Grow a Community

Fostering wonderfully loyal customers who engage with your content is the best way to ensure they continue to purchase long into the future. But achieving this objective is easier said than done. 

To ensure someone feels a certain amount of allegiance to your business, you have to focus your attention on creating an emotional connection. This starts with the way you position your content, as a personal and welcoming tone can help people feel a part of your success.

Meanwhile, you can also adopt forward-thinking digital marketing strategies like a loyalty programme. By rewarding customers who shop frequently or bring in friends that make a purchase, you can return the favour with a discount code or a special gift.

Benefit from Insightful Data

One of the core benefits of digital marketing is how your campaign can be easily tracked, measured and analysed with the right know-how. For example, you can see what customers care about specific products and how content delivers the best conversions.

With this information at your fingertips, it provides remarkable insight into consumer behaviour and the evolution of the market. As this data can highlight a new direction, you might focus on specific categories or content formats that are clearly trending upwards.

Alongside a talented digital marketing team like First Page Australia, you’ll remain on the cutting-edge of analytics to achieve massive success with our marketing and advertising eCommerce campaigns. 

Influence Buying Decisions

Consumers have virtually untold choices when it comes to shopping online. Unless you operate in a tiny niche, you likely have dozens of competitors that offer a similar range of products. So how can you make sure you’re recognised as the number one operation?

By planning and executing a compelling digital marketing campaign, you can establish trust with your target market and highlight how you go above and beyond the competition. From the moment a lead comes across your brand, you need to be pushing them along the sales funnel. 

With the power of eCommerce marketing and advertising, you can convince consumers that your business offers the best possible online shopping experience.

Compete with Your Rivals

Considering the enormous uptake of eCommerce, don’t be surprised to learn that the vast majority of your competitors have already established their own platforms. 

As this means your rivals are bound to attract more customers and outperform your business, there’s a good chance you’ll end up getting left in the dust. 

As you can be 100% certain that eCommerce isn’t going away anytime soon, keeping up with the changing times is imperative to your success.

Backed by a comprehensive eCommerce marketing strategy, you can dramatically increase your brand’s reach and convert sales-ready customers.

Advertise More Effectively for Less

The top eCommerce marketing strategies are so popular with modern-day businesses because they are often more effective while costing less than traditional methods.

In the past, retail stores relied on expensive newspaper, radio and television ads. Despite this wide reach, tracking returns from these advertising techniques proved a big challenge. 

However, the highly measurable nature of digital marketing means companies can routinely assess and fine-tune their approach for even more success.

With strategies like remarketing, social media advertising and pay-per-click generating an awesome ROI when targeted effectively, these methods can take your operation to the next level.

Tips to Create Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategies

We’ve explored why digital marketing is central to success in the eCommerce landscape. But what techniques will take your eCommerce marketing strategy’s profitability to even greater heights? Consider whether these ideas make sense for your online business and target market.

Customers Want Video Marketing

Video marketing has risen to become the preferred way customers like to engage with brands. In fact, 66% of people say they prefer to watch a short video to learn about a product over reading a text-based blog.

By developing razor-sharp video marketing across product overviews, explainer videos and video testimonials, you can ensure customers pay attention to your brand’s content. 

This content format is exceptional for lead generation because video is now such a key part of the world’s leading platforms. After uploading your content to YouTube, share it on your social channels and community forums for maximum exposure.

Personalisation Drives Conversions

If you’ve been following the latest trends in eCommerce, you’d know that personalisation is one of the words on everyone’s lips. But how does this fit into a broader eCommerce marketing strategy? 

Due to the widespread availability of data reporting tools and artificial intelligence, it’s possible to predict what individual customers will most likely be interested in purchasing. This means you can send personalised advertisements or email campaigns that respond to their precise needs. 

The best part of personalisation in digital marketing is that customers love it too. In fact, one recent study discovered that 80% of consumers are actually demanding more personalisation from the brands they shop with.

Increase Loyalty with User-Generated Content

Finding a way to encourage your customers to produce user-generated content (UGC) can be incredible for your brand. This is where users create blogs, videos, memes or anything else that includes a reference to your business.

So why is this so helpful? Primary, it’s great for your brand reputation because users are willing to share content organically. This helps spread awareness about your products and increases your visibility with an engaged target market.

In addition, brands can reshare this content on their own social media feeds to highlight to their followers how people are making the most of their services. With the right approach, you can foster a supremely loyal audience.

Mobile-Friendly Browsing Boosts Sales

The majority of your brand’s customer base is likely browsing your eCommerce store on their mobile device. To maximise your reach and conversions, having a mobile-friendly website that makes browsing effortless is vital to your success.

This is especially true since Google implemented what’s known as ‘mobile-first indexing’ some few years ago, which gives search ranking preference to brands that have clearly paid attention to this aspect of their website.

Alongside a mobile-responsive website design that features easy-to-read fonts, ultra-fast loading times and no annoying pop-ups, you can ensure customers checkout without any drama.

Remarketing Campaigns Reach Engaged Customers

Most brands are already using highly optimised paid advertising campaigns to drive targeted consumers straight to your website and product page. But you achieve an even higher conversion rate with a remarketing strategy.

This is a form of PPC advertising where the people targeted have already previously engaged with your website, email campaigns or app, yet never made a purchase. By tracking these users through snippets of code, you can reach out to this segment with specially targeted display advertisements.

As these people have already gotten to know what your business is about, convincing them to make a purchase comes easier than regular PPC marketing campaigns.

Chat with the Experts

Virtually every thriving eCommerce business needs a strong digital marketing campaign to help achieve its goals. If you’re ready to launch a fresh approach, the experts at First Page Australia have unmatched experience leading eCommerce marketing strategies.

As we’ve generated millions in sales for some of the world’s largest online retailers, you can trust our talented team to deliver the goods for your eCommerce business as well. 

By working closely with your business to understand everything that makes it unique, we have what it takes to design and execute a first-class strategy that surpasses your expectations. 

Ready to level up your sales? Start a conversation with our award-winning agency today and find out what makes us different.