October 31st 2020

E-commerce marketing is part of the digital marketing landscape, and beyond, where e-commerce businesses can enhance their sales, distribution, and branding through targeted campaigns toward their desired audience, convert it into loyal customers which can potentially refer the brand to others. Usually, e-commerce businesses can kick off their digital marketing strategy by mastering a single channel then expand for a more integrated digital marketing strategy.

Digital Marketing as a Tool for Business Growth

Digital marketing is a sub-set of marketing which uses the Internet, and online platforms to drive a marketing strategy. Digital marketing channels offer opportunities to reach small audiences with a high degree of personalization, thus growing businesses even with lower budgets and a better understanding of those audiences.

Digital marketing uses the internet and other online-based digital technologies, mainly with computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services for better reach.

The importance of digital marketing in modern-day businesses cannot be overemphasized as it g helps your business make use of contemporary techniques and strategies that will attract quality traffic to your business for better engagement and conversion from interaction to purchase. Digital marketing also makes it possible not to fly blind into the world of advertisement. It helps to measure every click with analytic tools, which will assist you as an e-commerce business owner in drawing up patterns that consumers exhibit, which may influence buying. It also helps to give detailed insights about the best way to reach your target audience so that you can channel your energy in a particular direction due to the amount of data that you can gather with the help of Digital Marketing.

Venture capitalist, Dave McClure, coined the acronym AARRR which is a simplified model that enables to understand what metrics and channels to look at, at each stage for the users’ path toward becoming customers and referrers of a brand.

There are many channels of digital marketing, some of which include:

Paid search marketing
Pay per click (PPC) marketing
Social media marketing
Content marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Affiliate marketing
Email marketing

Paid Search Marketing

The paid search digital marketing is an advertisement method that generates traffic from paid adverts on various search engines. It may also be called search engine marketing (SEM). Paid search campaigns can be run on Popular search engine platforms Google Ads, Yahoo Ads, and Bing Ads.

Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing

Pay per click (PPC) digital marketing is a type of advertisement where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad, or per thousand Ads. Facebook Advertising and Twitter promotions are examples of this.

Social media marketing

This type of digital marketing encompasses all advertisement you run on social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Twitter. It is one of the best ways to gain exposure for your business and engage with your customer base on your business’ social media account; marketing your business on social media without promotions takes a lot more time and effort, but if you hop on proper trends and discussions, in the long run, it can deliver good results.

Content marketing

Content marketing is one of the most powerful commercial activities which focuses on leveraging content production (text, audio, video, or other formats) to attract a targeted audience. Content marketing focuses on building a strong brand, but also to convert part of that targeted audience into potential customers.

Content marketing involves any digital marketing activity that uses content assets like eBooks, blog posts, images, infographics, videos, etc. to engage customers’ awareness, which will eventually lead to a higher amount of clicks, and eventually sales. Your content should be one that encourages feedback, interaction oriented, and a source of solution to capture adequate attention.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Amazon SEO represents the set of marketing tactics that sellers on Amazon can employ to better rank their products’ pages organically (without paying for placement), thus building a continuous stream of customers on the store. In short, Amazon SEO leverages Amazon search capability to rank e-commerce pages and make more sales.

This digital marketing technique involves the effective arrangement of content and keywords on a website as well as the structure of your website to improve rankings in search engines, as customers are unlikely to go to page two after a search, so you need to rank as high as possible, even on the first page. SEO can be applied with a couple of more non paid marketing strategies, as its aim is to ensure that your content surfaces as many times as possible to ensure a higher ranking. This strategy will be discussed more with more details in chapters to come.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing describes the process whereby an affiliate earns a commission for selling the products of another person or company. Here, the affiliate is simply an individual who is motivated to promote a particular product through incentivization. The business whose product is being promoted will gain in terms of sales and marketing from affiliates.

Affiliate marketing basically is paying a third party (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website. Rather than pay for clicks, you pay a commission to that third party for traffic or sales that have been referred by that website.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a much underrated part of digital marketing because it is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing; however, it is still one of the most effective digital marketing methods. Virtually everybody checks their emails daily, even when they don’t have enough time to actively go on their social media applications. Sending email updates, promos, freebies, and special offers, etc. to a list of subscribers can be a great way to keep up contact with your existing customer base and also give skeptical potential customers reasons to make a purchase.

Other digital marketing types

Influencer marketing involves the marketing of products or services that leverages the popularity, expertise, or reputation of an individual. Influencer marketing is often associated with those who have large social media followings, but popularity should not be confused with influence. Influence has the power to change consumer perceptions or get their audience to do something different.

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy designed to attract customers to a brand with content and experiences that they derive value from. Inbound marketing utilizes blogs, events, SEO, and social media to create brand awareness and attract targeted consumers. By attracting or “drawing in” a targeted audience, inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing which actively pushes a brand onto consumers who may have no interest in what is being offered.

Guerrilla marketing is an advertising strategy that seeks to utilize low-cost and sometimes unconventional tactics that are high impact. First coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his 1984 book of the same title, guerrilla marketing works best on existing customers who are familiar with a brand or product and its particular characteristics.

Multi-level marketing (MLM), otherwise known as network or referral marketing, is a strategy in which businesses sell their products through person-to-person sales. When consumers join MLM programs, they act as distributors. Distributors make money by selling the product directly to other consumers. They earn a small percentage of sales from those that they recruit to do the same – often referred to as their “downline”.

Challenges of digital marketing

Keeping Up with Web Trends might be difficult because it will require a huge amount of online presence to know what people are talking about. As a new business, you may not have the capacity to employ a full-time social media manager.
In a highly competitive digital space, content creation professionals will be needed to create content that will Generate Traffic and Leads, and not just generating them. Still, it must be able to have a high conversion rate. You may decide to contract out your content creation, but it cannot be as effective as having a content creator who knows the nooks and crannies of your business and the content to create in that regard. But funding for an increased salary structure may be a barrier.
Sometimes getting a new set of customers via marketing overwhelms E-commerce businesses that they tend to neglect the old ones, which should not be so because your customers are your greatest assets.
Budgeting the amount you want to use for marketing may be difficult, especially when you use pay per click channels; as much as it is advisable to be prudent with spending, slashing your marketing budget may not allow it to yield proper results. The budgeting decision sometimes becomes a herculean task.
Determining the returns made from marketing will require a lot of communication with your customers; you need to know what marketing channel is making enough conversion from clicks to know where to focus your energy. It is easy to determine the number of clicks you get, but if you are using more than one marketing channel, it becomes difficult to know which clicks gets the most conversion. Organizing surveys for new customers to ask how they heard about your platform may help you handle this challenge.

In this age, Prospective customers are typically almost on their smartphones, surfing the internet, devoting a ton of attention to it, so effective digital marketing must mean that it can grab the attention of internet users by communicating things that are in sync with your target audience. However, Keeping in mind that different marketing channels take different times for results is usually nice to merge various channels to properly target your audience.

Read Also: Amazon Business Model, Etsy Business Model, eBay Business Model, E-commerce Business Models, Platform Business Models.

Read More:

Business Models
Competitor Analysis
Digital Business Models
Distribution Channels
Business Strategy
Value Proposition
Marketing Strategy
Brand Building
SWOT Analysis

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