Your Guide to Creating a Marketing Strategy for a New eCommerce Website

In today’s world, starting an eCommerce website to sell your goods and services is a great idea. People are already on the internet purchasing things so this is definitely where you want your business to be.

However, the only tricky part comes in when it’s time to actually be able to get your brand in front of the eyes of those buyers. This is done with effective advertising.

Keep reading to check out how to create a marketing strategy for a new eCommerce website to generate leads and sales from the beginning.

A marketing strategy isn’t about the individual tactics that you implement. Even though your tactics may represent a single aspect of a comprehensive marketing strategy, your strategy should be so much more. It’s about getting your business from one point to another using well thought out actions that represent the direction you want to take.

This is like a road map that guides you on the path that you follow every step of your way. Your strategy is supposed to include all your goals in one document and a clearly defined plan for your team to follow to achieve the goals.

Without understanding who you’re selling to, you might end up wasting a lot of time and money. Instead, take your time to craft a buyer persona, and you’ll be able to design all your marketing campaigns to the relevant audience and increase your efficiency.

A buyer persona is a fictitious representation of who your ideal buyer is. It’s advisable to draft all the qualities of your buyer so that your team can easily create content that relates to the buyer.

Here is the information you’ll need to create your buyer persona.

• Age
• Job title
• Income
• Challenges/Interests
• Wants/Needs
• How they find the information
• Shopping behavior

For your ideal buyer, there is a particular path they take before purchasing a product from a company. When crafting your buyer’s journey, begin with a general journey that caters for your ideal persona.

Go an extra step of creating a buyer’s journey for all your buyers personal, and come up with a reason why they might leave at each point. Address all pain points throughout the sales funnels.

For every business or project to succeed, it has to have a set of specific goals. This applies to a marketing strategy as well.

When stating your marketing goals, make sure you’re clear and detailed about them. Write down exactly what completing a goal would look like to avoid confusion. This dramatically increases your level of success because your team will only move to the next thing after they accomplish what they’re working on at the moment.

Remember to account for hiccups and challenges that you’ll meet along the way when setting goals. Set realistic goals and be prepared for the setbacks.

Here are a few good examples of how to set specific goals for your business:

• Increase of product page Y
• Increase conversion rates by X
• Grow the email list by Z
• Increase website traffic to X

As you document your goals, it’s vital that you set your key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you stay on track. In digital marketing, KPIs are what you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of every tactic you use and optimize them to boost your returns.

For example, you may use click-per-head to determine the efficiency of your paid ads. Similarly, cost-per-lead can help you know if you’re targeting the right market, and your cost-per-conversation can help understand the efficiency of your conversion funnel.

Remember to set this, in the beginning, to help you with measuring progress and success.

As an E-commerce brand, all your business mostly happens on your website. It’s, therefore, important that your website is professionally optimized to drive conversions.

Some of the characteristics of an optimized website include.

• Buyer can accomplish their goals on the website on any page of the website
• Presence of reviews
• Valuable pop-ups (for example, you can provide a useful piece of content before the visitor leaves your site)
• Mobile friendly
• High-quality images
• Social login (This helps the buyer to pick up from where they left, every time they visit your website. This feature also helps in understanding the interests of your buyer.)
• Search bar included

Now that you have a deeper understanding of who your buyer is and your website is ready, the next thing is to decide the marketing platforms you’ll use for your campaign.

This will be easy because you already discussed where your ideal buyer gets their information. For instance, if you’re selling to the millennial, typically the best place to find them is Instagram. However, if you’re targeting stay at home moms, you’re likely to find them in Pinterest.

Missing this step may cost you a lot of resources, as you may end up advertising to the wrong crowd. This is a great time to figure out how to integrate social media into your marketing strategy efficiently.

Being SEO ready and findable on the internet is a big deal for eCommerce websites. Do keyword research to know what your buyer is searching for and provide the relevant answers.

Keyword research also helps in understanding the different variations of the phrases they use when searching for content. Research and learn more about SEO, as this will help you easily rank in your platforms and increase your visibility.

Now that you have everything in place don’t wait for too long for everything to be perfect. Launch your campaign and give it time to see how it performs.

You can always make a few changes based on the results you get.

As an E-commerce Shop, your success is a result of your marketing efforts. Focus on figuring out who you want to talk to and how to deliver messages to them. Find the right platforms to do so and track results carefully.

For better results, take your time to create a marketing strategy before launching any campaign. For more tips on more marketing trends, you won’t want to miss out on your strategy, check out this article.