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Digital Marketing: Key for an e-Commerce Startup

Tag: Social Media

Digital Marketing: Key for an e-Commerce Startup

Digital Marketing: Key for an e-Commerce Startup

You have a great idea; you have registered your name and your business; you have complied with the tax regulations, you have chosen a brand name, you have signed up for your domain, you are developed your website, you have selected a shopping cart plugin for your site or developed your own shopping cart, you have selected your payment gateway you have stocked your inventory.

Now you are all set! Your maiden e-commerce venture is about to begin! But, how do you get the word out that you are a new e-commerce venture and how do you attract customers to buy from your website, whether it is a marketplace or a single store. The answer lies in Marketing. Considering all forms of marketing available nowadays, the most effective form is to market through the digital form, especially social media.

The following factors are the reasons why you should concentrate on digital marketing:

  1. Variety of Content:

    As a business, you would have multiple forms of content that you can leverage to educate the consumer about differentiating factors of your e-commerce platform, be it blogs, infographics, images, etc…. From a content creation standpoint, focus on the USP of your platform and the experience that your platform provides.

  2. Pervasiveness of Search Engines:

    Most consumers search online looking for products to buy. Hence it is an imperative for your e-commerce platform to be SEO friendly. You should have optimized all the pages of your site/platform to be picked up by Google/Bing/Yahoo. Well, the most popular search engine is Google, therefore optimization of product pages on your site is a necessity. Most importantly, ensure your site has a search bar for any consumer to search for a specific product they are looking for. Search engine crawlers tend to rank sites higher with a product search option. This also enables your site’s product page to be featured for product searches done on the search engine.

  3. Analytics and Targeting:

    The role of analytics in the digital marketing space has grown over the years and it proves to be a great barometer of consumer assessment. You can often target a consumer who spends more time on your site by pushing out relevant ads of the product pages he has browsed, through remarketing (either google remarketing or facebook remarketing).

  4. Growth of Social Media:

    It is a no brainer that social media platforms such as facebook or twitter have grown to become hubs for consumer conversations. It adds value to have a strong social media presence and market yourself effectively on social media to create awareness about your new e-commerce venture.

  5. Social Listening:

    Using advanced social media listening tools to gain insights about your consumer, as in picking up clues from his conversations, actions, etc… Social listening tools enable you to keep a tab on your competitor and their navigation of the digital space. It is a must for analysing consumer behaviour and analysing competition.

  6. Video Marketing:

    Videos in the digital world are known to capture the consumer’s attention in a very short span of time. Video content can be used for paid/non-paid digital advertising leading the consumer to go to the site and browse through or purchase. It pays to invest in video marketing, as the ROI over a period is going to be highly profitable for you.

As you can gauge by now, digital marketing is an intrinsic lever to grow your e-commerce business. What are you waiting for? Start now! Subscribe to our blog to gain more insights on e-commerce. You can also sign up for a demo of our Payments Solution to understand the value that we can bring to your e-commerce venture.

7 Tips for E-Commerce Success

7 Tips for E-Commerce Success

The 2016 Pitney and Bowes Global Online Shopping study estimated 66% of online consumers are international. This percentage is likely to grow in the coming years.

Having said that, before you jump the international e-commerce bandwagon, it is important that you focus on certain areas for long term success. As we provide you with the following tips, you would need to be mindful of the fact that the e-commerce race is a marathon and not a sprint!

  1. Don’t Hurry: Launching your e-commerce site shouldn’t be done in a hurried fashion. There is only one shot you have in launching your site. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all functionalities of the site are working properly. Do a thorough testing. You can purchase a domain name and create a pre-launch page on the lines of “Coming Soon”, but until you have done significant groundwork in terms of content, technology, functionalities, SEO, paid advertising planning, don’t launch!
  2. Consumer is the King: The user or the consumer should be the focus of your e-commerce venture. Notwithstanding the recent advances in augmented reality and artificial intelligence, the big shortcoming that you would have to deal with is the fact that the consumer cannot touch, feel and smell the products before buying. You can compensate this by offering better prices, free shipping and more importantly, simplified shopping carts and a hassle free checkout with a seamless payments solution.
  3. Testing: At every stage of your e-commerce business (pre-launch, launch and growth), you should test everything, right from functionalities to user experience and user interface. Hence, it is imperative to invest significantly in testing and analytics.
  4. Social Focus: Do not outsource social media marketing at the starting phase of your e-commerce venture. It is indeed the heartbeat of your business. Through social media you can gain valuable insights into prospective customers. As an entrepreneur, you would need to be hands on with your social media. You can employ a community manager but you need to keep a close watch on your social media marketing. Include social elements on your e-commerce website. Small elements like reviews, social login options and follow/sharing buttons help in conversion.
  5. Mobile: Way back in 2014, Goldman Sachs had predicted that global mobile commerce will account for nearly half of e-commerce by 2018 amounting to a figure in excess of $620 Billion*. If you aren’t building your e-commerce portal with a mobile first approach, then there’s no point in venturing at all.
  6. SEO: Over time, Search engines have evolved to be more valuable for e-commerce sites. In fact, most of your traffic will come from search engines as people are increasingly searching for products on Google, Yahoo or Bing. Therefore ensure that you stay on top of SEO to stand out among competition. You may need to hire an agency to help you out with SEO in the beginning.
  7. Information and Evolution: Make it a point to collect as much of customer information and build databases to aid future launches of different versions, categories or a new sister site. Lastly, evolution is a critical element because technology, trends and consumer tastes/preferences change over time.

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*Source: Digicommerce 360