How to Build an Effective eCommerce Marketing Strategy

Many people have grand ideas for eCommerce but fail on the execution.

Knowing what you want to sell online is one thing, but knowing how to do it successfully is something completely different.

If you have big aspirations for your online business but aren’t sure what steps to take to achieve success, we’ve got just the article for you!

There is so much competition online these days that if you get your product out there and see how well it sells, you are guaranteed to be disappointed.

However, you can absolutely make it work with a detailed and effective marketing strategy and most of all patience and commitment.

In such a healthy, growing market, there’s no reason you can’t make a big splash, as long as you take your time to plan a proper marketing strategy and use all the tools you have at your disposal.

We will also provide a simple marketing plan example at the end that you can take and beef out to use as a reference.

With that in mind, let’s begin our guide to building an effective online marketing strategy:

SET SMART GOALS & TARGETS

In fact, the only thing that’s undeniably more im必利勁
portant is making sure your targets are SMART:

S-Specific

M-Measurable

A-Achievable

R-Realistic

T-Timely

As long as you set goals that are all of the above, there’s not much that can stop you achieving them.

The huge benefit of such targets is that they provide a frame of reference for your progress, so you can check back every now and then and see how well you’re progressing on your targets and get an accurate measure of how well things are going overall.

As of right now, you don’t need to worry too much about how you’ll achieve these goals – during the eCommerce planning stage, they are just to provide benchmarks for what you can achieve, by when.

As long as you’ve been reasonable and made sure they are achievable, the rest of this list will be packed full of ideas to get you there:

KNOW YOUR TARGET MARKET INSIDE OUT

Anybody who has made eCommerce business plans before, or worked in marketing, will tell you the importance of demographics.

The more you know about the type of person that would be interested in your product, the more easily you can target that person specifically with your marketing strategy.

This includes the obvious details such as:

• Gender
• Age
• Salary
• Hobbies & Interests
• Location

But there are also some slightly less obvious ones you should take into account such as:

• Favourite books
• Favourite TV shows
• Downtime hobbies
• Creativity

All of this comes together to give you a full picture of your target audience.

By the time you come to write your first piece of marketing material, you should know your demographic so well that you are able to easily answer questions like:

• What problems do they regularly experience?
• How does your product solve these problems?
• How does no longer dealing with these problems improve their lives?
• What might influence their purchase?
• What kind of information would they want to see before being 100% sure of a purchase?

If you can answer all of those questions, you are starting your marketing campaign from an excellent position, and you can plan advertisements and written copy that appeals to your target audience on a personal level and converts them more effectively.

Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to ask even more advanced questions like:

• What percentage of this target market has historically bought from you?
• What percentage has bought from your competitors?
• If the competitor percentage is higher, why?
• What percentage doesn’t buy products for this at all?
• What could convince them that your product will improve their lives?
• How much revenue would you be making if the entire demographic bought from you?
• How close can you reasonably get to that number in a year? Two years? Ten?

There is one really good trick you can use to keep all this information in one, easy-to-read place and use it as a reference, and that’s called persona marketing:

Build & Maintain Accurate Personas For Ecommerce Marketing

A marketing persona is when you essentially fabricate a fictional character profile based on all the demographic data we mentioned above.

This gets all of your team on the same page and keeps the target audience in sight, preventing anyone at your business from getting mixed up or losing track of who you’re supposed to be targeting at any point.

This is a great tool for making sure your marketing copy, images, customer communications, social media pages and everything else are aligned to the same targets and individually optimised to be as attractive as possible for your specific audience.

COMPARE YOUR SITUATION TO THAT OF YOUR COMPETITORS

It’s important to be aware of the current market as of the time you’re entering it.

This includes detailed research on your competition, their strengths, weaknesses, and how you can align yourself to take advantage of those weaknesses.

We highly recommend surveying your customers at this point – they know what appeals to them, what doesn’t, and the steps you should take to be more attractive better than you could ever figure out without them.

Outside of surveys, another good way to learn about this is to read your competitor’s reviews on Amazon or Trustpilot – especially the ones that aren’t particularly glowing.

This allows you find answers to questions like the following, straight from the horse’s mouth:

What was the product missing that the customer expected or wanted?

How can you make sure your product fulfils this desire?

This isn’t just about comparing the product itself, either.

It’s also your chance to look at pricing, shipping options, promotions, customer service, and any other aspects that could convince a customer to purchase or to turn away.

TAKE ALL SALES CHANNELS INTO ACCOUNT

Even when you’ve completed your website launch and marketing plan, there are tons of possible sales and marketing channels to help you make more revenue.

These include but aren’t limited to:

• Amazon
• eBay
• Affiliate Marketing
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Magazines/Print Publications
• TV
• Physical mail

If you’re starting out from scratch and running your business alone, doing all of these from the start will probably be too time-consuming.

But regardless, each and every one of them is a potential route to make more money, so once you have the resources, you will want to expand into them as quickly as possible.

Conclusion For Ecommerce Marketing Plan

We hope this guide to eCommerce marketing strategy has been useful! If you think any important information is missing, please let us know as we would like to make this a definitive guide on how to write a marketing plan.