The Best Marketing Strategy for New eCommerce Retailers

When developing a Marketing strategy as a new eCommerce retailer you can easily get overwhelmed with all the decisions you have to make.

Ensuring you make the right decisions for the long-term health of your business requires extensive knowledge and experience in the eCommerce space to know where to focus the majority of your efforts to see the best return on your time and money.

Our Hampshire eCommerce Web Design experts at BytesizeMe will share the best practices they have picked up over the years to ensure your eCommerce Marketing Strategy results in the long-term success of your business.

 Starting a Marketing Strategy Best Practices

Before evaluating what marketing channels you are going to focus on for your eCommerce website it is best practice to ensure that you understand your product(s) in relation to the wider marketplace. To do this you need to perform extensive market research to understand a few key things:

• Where do your customers generally go to find the products you offer?
  • Search engine queries
  • Third-party marketplaces
  • Social media platforms
  • Niche magazine websites
  • Etc…
• How many competitors are there in the spaces where your customers gather?
• Where does your product fit in relation to the wider marketplace – are you good value for money?

Market research for your eCommerce products

Any business that wants to survive long-term must be customer-focused first and then build around that focus. eCommerce is no different, you must first understand your customer, and their shopping behaviour and then set up your Marketing system to cater for that shopping behaviour.

The first place to start when understanding your customer is to first create a ‘customer profile’ from the assumptions you have about your potential customers

Creating a customer profile for eCommerce

When creating a customer profile as a new business you have to rely on your assumptions about the customers in your marketplace, as your business grows and you get more data from your marketing efforts you will be able to create more accurate customer profiles and increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

To start you need to understand the who, how, where, when and why of your target customer.

• Who is your typical customer?
  • Are they a high earning professional
  • Do they have a family or are they single
  • Are they Male or Female
• How much your typical customer spends on your products?
  • How much of their disposable income would they spend on your product?
  • Is it a major purchase for your customer?
  • Is it a small impulse purchase?
• Where they go to research/find your product?
  • Do they use search engines like google
  • Do they rely on hobbyist forums for product recommendations
  • Do they research your product on social media
• When would your customer typically buy your product?
  • Is it a planned purchase
  • Is it an impulse spend
• Why your customer buys your product?
  • Is it a product that serves a hobby
  • Is it an essential product they need

Once you have answered these basic questions on ‘your assumptions’ about your customer’s behaviour you can then develop your marketing strategy with these ideas in mind. Over time you will be able to assess whether the assumptions are correct or not and as you get more and more data you will be able to further optimise your marketing strategy increasing your long-term profit.

With the data you now have regarding your customer’s behaviour you can now begin to assess the environments you will be marketing in.

Performing a Competitor Analysis As A New eCommerce Company

Once you know where you are looking for your customer you can begin to map your competitors and understand better how to position your products to convert the prospective customer.

We will assume for the purpose of this guide you are a high-end gardening equipment supplier for home and commercial gardeners. From your previous work on customer analysis, your ‘average’ customer is a gardening hobbyist, more likely to be male than female and does a mix of google searching and hobbyist forum reading before finding the gardening tool they are looking for.

You know then there are two areas you will need to focus on to ensure your marketing efforts will reach the most potential customers. Here you will also find most of your competitors and begin to understand where you sit in the marketplace. Once you have the data you can optimise your product offering to be better value for money for the customers – whether that’s by simply undercutting your competitors or by adding unique value to your product.

Google Shopping & Google Search Carousel

Google shopping is generally the best way to perform market research on your competitors as it allows you to see not just who shows next to your products but also enables a degree of filtering so you can find your exact price range competitors.

Performing a google search for “Premium Garden Shears” reveals the following results

The google shopping tab and the google search carousel reveal all of your competitors for that search term.

Using this real-world data you can then begin to better develop your pricing strategy alongside your marketing strategy.

Performing this type of search also highlights to you whether or not your product targeting is correct. For example in the products shown above are you best positioned as “shears” or as “Secateurs”?

If your customers spend a lot of time on hobbyists forums you would have to create an index of all the major gardening forums that appear in a google search for variations of “Gardening Forum” and then begin to note down the types of products being marketed on those Forums.

Once you have this data you can then begin to formulate the final stage of your eCommerce Marketing Strategy

Creating The Marketing Strategy For Your eCommerce Business.

From the previous activities you should have the platforms you are wanting to target. Generally speaking, most eCommerce companies will want to target Google Shopping as a primary focus – they will then want to assess which secondary platforms have the highest concentration of prospective customers.

We will carry on with the example of the premium garden tool supplier and assume the Primary Marketing Channel is Google Shopping and that the Secondary Marketing Channel is hobbyist forums.

We will then map out the budget allocated we will split between the two marketing channels based on our assumptions of the likely ROI from each. If we expect 80% of our marketing revenue to come from Google Shopping we will allocate 80% of our marketing budget to that channel then the remaining 20% to forum marketing.

Once we have our marketing budget we will then begin creating a marketing campaign on each channel for our products. Initially, with any new marketing campaign, we will be focused on collecting data before we can begin optimising our campaigns to be maximally profitable.

To explain how to optimise a marketing campaign in detail goes beyond the scope of a guide like this and is generally best left to a digital marketing agency with expertise in eCommerce marketing. Fortunately, at BytesizeMe we have eCommerce and digital marketing experts on hand who can not only perform a detailed marketing strategy for you but can build highly optimised and profitable marketing campaigns.

Contact us today for a free no-obligation consultation so we can understand your needs and create highly optimised Marketing Campaigns to help grow your business – Contact Us

Read more articles on eCommerce and Shopify from our in-house eCommerce Experts:

• eCommerce Web Design Hampshire
• What Is Better Than Shopify For Starting A New eCommerce Business? 
• How To Start A Small eCommerce Business In The UK
• Best eCommerce Store To Start For New Businesses
• The Most Common eCommerce Platforms
• Building a New eCommerce Website Checklist 

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