It might sound crazy, but there isn’t a marketing strategy that would work best for everyone at every time. The efficacy of any marketing tactic (be it traditional or modern strategies) varies from time to time and business to business. In fact, one marketer’s best strategy can prove to be another’s epic disaster. Unlike traditional marketing, eCommerce marketing strategies are driven by the data collected from the same medium. Depending on the factors such as industry, potential customers’ traits, target market’s regulations, and your primary products, you need to always define a unique marketing mix for your unique business. It doesn’t matter if your immediate competitor is selling the same kinds of products as you. You can never be sure- what works best for them might not work with equal efficacy in your case. Yet, you can still win this battle. While even the proven marketing strategies might not work for everyone, certain approaches are independent of the factors. Taking inspiration from the successful examples, you can define your personalized marketing strategies from the legacy tactics, too. Let’s go through 5 such strategies that are independent of time, as they have worked in the past and will continue to work in the future as well. 1. Content Marketing It’s a cliché but also an undeniable fact — Content is the king of your marketing mix. Not because content promises tons of traffic, but more because it’s always reliable. You can rely on this effective strategy to enhance the performances of your all other marketing channels. When applied right, the content can attract traffic and also increase your brand awareness, infuse product education, boost your SEO, convert information seeking readers into paying customers, engage customers, and bring repeat sales with customer loyalty. So, what’s the right way to do it? First, clear your ambiguities about the definition of ‘content’ in your content marketing strategy. Content marketing is a blend of different forms of content, which work as marketing tools to help you meet your objectives. Depending on your marketing objectives and accessible channels, your marketing mix may contain the forms such as blog posts, testimonials, podcasts, storytelling, case studies, infographics, email newsletters, push notifications, images, Gifs, and videos, too. Anything that attracts your target audience is content for you. However, be advised to use this timeless marketing channel for attracting your customers, not selling directly. You want your content consumers to appreciate the value they are getting from your content, and the best way to do it is by being helpful. Create content to educate them about your products, not to sell. By raising awareness about your brand, you can instill trust and reliability, which later results in sales, repeat sales, and customer loyalty. You can use research tools such as UberSugget, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Google Search Console, and Google Trends to know about popular keywords, trending topics, and competition research relevant to your brand. Identifying the workable topics, you can create different forms of content for the channels accessible to you and reach a wider section of your target population. 2. Affiliate Marketing Also called referral marketing or word-of-mouth marketing, this is yet another strategy that has been in the traditional marketing mixes for years. Back then, businesses would hire agents to bring customers in exchange for commissions. Today, eCommerce businesses allow anyone to join their affiliate programs and earn commissions by referring customers to them. It’s all an automated workflow in eCommerce websites. You just need a good eCommerce software with either an inbuilt affiliate marketing feature or support for a popular third-party tool. Affiliate marketing or referral system is one of the best marketing strategies, which online businesses of all kinds have used for rapid growth. It is based on the fact that customers trust the word-of-mouth from the people they trust. So, if a business can, by any means, encourage a person to encourage other people in their circle to trust the brand, it can get some really quick results. Now, to encourage a person to encourage another person, you must build trust among the first person. For that to happen, you can offer incentives in the form of affiliate commission, discounts, and other perks. The more customers they bring to you, the more they make. If done right, referrals are the fastest ways to gain brand awareness and sales in eCommerce. 3. Influencer Marketing Modern influencer marketing is yet another result of a continuous evolution of the market. Back then, brands would hire celebrities to endorse their products and influence their fans. Today, brands hire micro-influencers on online ecosystems to do the same job. Influence marketing is similar to affiliate marketing, except the person doing word-of-mouth for your eCommerce store would cover a bigger circle of people. Apart from asking a common person to encourage a few people in his/her circle, you can also ask an influencer to do the job. An influencer could be anyone with a significant following and power of persuasion over a group of people. They can be from social media, video-sharing platforms, blogs, or anything that people pay attention to or rely on for information. You can approach a Tech YouTube Channel or a Tech Blogger to influence their followers to purchase tech products from your store. They would blend the promotion of your products in their regular content. For example, unboxing, tech review, and recommended product lists, etc. Here is a screenshot from the popular YouTube Channel of Marques Brownlee. The creator produces regular videos about tech products, and this is how the affiliate products from different brands fit right into his regular content. 4. Social Media Marketing Social media is one such channel that you can find in all strategies and marketing mixes. In fact, the above three strategies have social media as a channel in one or the other forms. For example, you can have content marketing via social media, affiliate marketing via social media, and social media micro-influencers. However, the use of social media is not limited to these three tactics. It’s an independent marketing strategy in itself. It can, with no help from other channels, independently boost your brand awareness, attract traffic, and bring in sales. Social media is an ecosystem with billions of active users on dozens of of platforms, and it’s still growing; right from Facebook to Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tik-Tok, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Quora, and many others. People spend a lot of time interacting on these platforms. With a proper presentation of your brand on these channels, you can accordingly engage billions of potential customers right in their ecosystem. You must use your social media pages to gain followers and keep them engaged by offering information via your posts, replying to their comments, integrating social media chatbots on your store, etc. In short, use social media platforms to stay relevant among your target customers, and you can explode your sales via a boosted brand awareness in minimal investments. 5. Premium Digital Ads Digital Ads are some of the quickest ways to explode your sales. They are a little expensive, but when done right, you can expect some of the quickest results in the short term. You can find digital ads on almost every online platform today. These large numbers of channels ensure that customers get your conveyed information in every possible manner. If your budget permits, run digital ads on prominent spaces such as Google Search Ads, Googles Display Ad Network, Google Shopping Ads, Bing Search Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, Reddit Ads, and Pinterest. These Ads are inorganic ways to not just boost your sales but also to use different Ad formats for various goals such as boosting your social media visibility, fast-tracking your affiliate programs, getting more referrals, and improving the reach of your discount campaigns, etc. These are some proven ways to boost your eCommerce sales in a quick time. Having a balanced mix of all five strategies in your marketing campaigns is definitely a great idea. You should read more and more about each of these individual strategies, as we have just scratched the surface in this post. Each strategy is deep enough to contain dozens of tactics to get the best out of your investment. The more you read, the more you learn, and the more effective your campaigns become.
