Written by 1. Attract your target audience with Content Marketing
There are many types of content you can create:
- Blog posts
- Whitepapers
- Success stories
- Videos
- Infographics
- Tutorials
Content marketing is great for both big and small businesses. It doesn’t require a huge money investment and you can use the channel and the type of content that best suits your industry, your audience and your brand.
2. Work on your SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of combining different techniques that help improve the position of a website in search engine results and gain more visibility. The cornerstone of SEO is keywords, the words or phrases your target audience uses to find products like yours.
You need to take your time and do a lot of research to find out which keywords suit you and are the most used by your target audience so you can focus your SEO efforts on those specific ones. There are a lot of online tools you can use to identify keywords such as Google Trends, Ubersuggest or Semrush.
Once you have identified the keywords you want to target, you need to add them to your website’s content and metadata: slugs, SEO title, SEO description, images ALT description and headings (H1, H2, H3). It is also a good idea to create content that focuses on specific ones that are the most valuable to you.
3. Run paid ad campaigns
With SEO you gain traffic organically via search engines, while with ads, you pay different channels to show your site to your potential customers. You can choose to advertise on social media or search engines and do retargeting campaigns to customers that are most likely to complete a purchase.
For social media ads, each platform has its system and they are very simple to use and setting up campaigns is very easy. You can segment your audience by age, language, and country and serve them tailor-made ads that have higher chances of getting clicked.
The good thing about social media advertising is that you don’t necessarily have to have a big budget. You can promote posts to a very big audience with little money spent and achieve great results. This makes social media ads a great option for small businesses that want to get their brand out there with smaller budgets.
4. Send web push notifications to bring users back
Two types of web push notifications can bring users back and increase traffic:
- Automated web push notifications: notifications that are triggered by individual user behaviour and delivered automatically with hyper-personalized messages based on users’ actions on the site. They are great for recovering abandoned carts when users leave without completing a purchase and you can create as many triggering scenarios as you want such as category retargeting, product retargeting, cross-selling or recurrent purchase reminders.
- Manual web push notifications: these bulk notifications are the equivalent of newsletters. They are sent to all users’ databases and are great to inform about offers, promotions or limited-time flash sales like Black Friday. They are amazing at generating lots of traffic very quickly.
5. Social Media Marketing
The first thing you need to do when planning your social media marketing strategy for e-commerce is to identify which platforms suit your brand the best. Depending on the products you sell and your target audience, you will find more and better use of a specific social media channel over the others.
According to a recent study, out of 7.82 billion people in the world, 50.64% of the population use social networks, regardless of age or internet access. This can easily be translated into: if you have an e-commerce and want to connect with your target audience, you must have a social media presence.
6. Referral programs
All of the tactics we mentioned above are great proven ways to drive traffic to your e-commerce website, but none will ever be as powerful as mouth-to-mouth marketing. That is why encouraging customer referrals is still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your e-commerce website. Having good quality products and ensuring a great customer experience will help you get good comments, reviews and possibly, recommendations. But why stop there? Give your customers more reasons to talk good about you and make them want to recommend your products to their friends and family with customer referral programs.