In a digital age where new marketing strategies can appear as quickly as we can implement them, it’s important to gauge what opportunities are knocking on your door.
We’d love it if we had limitless money for advertising, but that’s sadly not the reality. Since every business is operating with a finite marketing budget, it’s important that you identify which placements are worth pursuing.
Every business is different, attracting a specific audience with unique buyer personas. In the digital landscape of search engines and social media platforms, it’s not always apparent where it’s best to allocate your budget.
Let’s touch on a few fundamental topics as well as some up-and-coming strategies that you’ll want to consider when building your e-commerce marketing plan.
Fundamental Components of E-Commerce Strategy
Like all effective marketing plans, they ought to be well planned, responsibly executed, accurately measured (tracking and analytics are paramount), optimized for efficiency and maximization, and then interpreted.
The main idea of this article is to help you understand how to think about developing your approach to e-commerce campaigns.
Execution will require your due diligence to know the platform(s) you inevitably choose to use.
Analyzing the results will ultimately shed light on the effectiveness of the strategy and if it’s worth the investment. However, you mustn’t jump the gun right away because not every e-commerce campaign may soar right away. That’s where optimization and testing play a part.
Finally, you need to be able to interpret the ROI from the campaign and understand if the marketing activities are creating gains.
Technology
Automation is becoming more and more fluid with most advertising platforms, enabling advertisers to arrange initial settings and goals, then allowing machine learning to replicate desirable results.
However, be cautious with AI straight out of the gate. Often, it takes close monitoring to ensure that the results rendered from AI are useful results. It can often require manual manipulation by the advertiser to generate the data the AI requires to effectively handle it. Optical character recognition (OCR) can be employed to localize ad content in your campaign to appear in other languages for a wider reach.
Ultimately, consumer engagement is becoming more diverse. Over half of B2B businesses utilize a chatbot that typically ties the user to a live agent. More and more consumers are starting to expect chatbots as an alternative to phone calling and emailing through a contact form.
Consider how a chatbot could be leveraged for your brand and the growing expectation from your audience to provide one on your website.
Influencer Affiliation and Guest Content
Identifying and connecting with one or more internet personalities that carry a following that contains your audience could be a great way of delivering your offer.
Try to arrange for a widely-regarded internet content creator to share in the messaging of your product or service. It may just be the key to supercharging your campaign.
Along the same lines are external sources providing backlink content to your website via guest bloggers.
Expanding your digital content library on your website with both internally contributed content and externally-contributed content can be a strong driver of organic traffic.
Get Ready to Adapt to Future Mediums
Many of us thought Mark Zuckerberg was a little off-target when he prophesied a virtual world where you could purchase and own property and possessions. We reacted to this “Metaverse” much like the world did to the internet when it was in its infancy.
We don’t have a crystal ball, but it has become more and more apparent that businesses are adapting to the metaverse, even while the world is still learning what it is.
What’s common now is that larger businesses are setting up their own proprietary “-verse” to remain competitive if it takes off. For example, Wendy’s is a physical restaurant, and even they felt the push to virtualize their brand.
Compare this phenomenon to the early 2000s, when Google and Yahoo vied for dominance as the preferred internet search engine. That scenario is shaping up to repeat itself, but on a larger scale.
Now, every brand ought to consider its identity and placement in a virtual environment. What can your brand provide virtually? What does your brand have to offer? These are important questions to start asking now and may even become essential questions to ask in a few years.
Test As Much As You Can
We’ve only scratched the surface, but there are thousands of techniques to driving user engagement and sales through your website.
Try things out. If one doesn’t work right away, it may be a sign that it isn’t the best method for your brand. But give it time and be diligent in giving each strategy a thorough attempt.
With the right expectations and a clear understanding of your audience and their needs, you can begin trying out different methods to bolster your e-commerce campaign with your website and turn it into a sales engine.
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