5 Ecommerce Marketing Strategies Your Small Business Needs

If you are running a small business online, just pay attention. One major challenge many small business owners face daily is how to increase online sales. One fact you must know is that it is a rat race for small businesses out there online. That makes it a really difficult task to know where to start and how to stand out from the thousands of other e-commerce sites online. A real challenge no doubt! That is where e-commerce marketing strategies come in really handy if you know what you are doing. Give a try to these here 5 marketing strategies that have been proven to work for many e-commerce businesses in the past and are still working for others.



Content Marketing

One of the most popular marketing strategies right now is content marketing. It is the process of creating online material like blogs, gifs, videos, infographics, photos, or any other form of content that suits your target audience, with the aim of increasing visitors to your website. It can also educate your customers so that they can improve their performance within the niche. The more of your content someone sees, the more familiar the potential customer becomes with your brand.

Social Media Marketing

If you run a small online business and you are not on social media, there is a tendency to ask, where are you? If you are on social media and you are using it right, it can have a big impact on your sales figures within a very short while. It is also one of the quickest and easiest ways to create brand awareness. You can easily create an account on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest then test and find out what works best for your type of business. Your marketing strategy gets worked out from the information you gather and your business prospers as a result.

Email Marketing

There has been talk that email marketing is waning in popularity. Well, that is neither here nor there at the moment. For many e-commerce business owners, email marketing still drives the fastest immediate results in terms of webpage traffic and sales. It may take awhile to build your email list but it just has to be done if you hope to make any success out of email marketing. Here is how, according to experts. You can build your email list in one of two ways or both. Firstly, by asking customers to opt into your newsletter when they check in/out and secondly you can choose to add an opt-in form to your homepage or other popular pages of your website.

Guest Blogging

If you are a good blogger, guest-blogging by publishing blogs on other sites can be a great way to connect with a whole new audience as well as establishing yourself as an authority in your industry. The bottomline is traffic to your own linked site if readers find your material interesting and rewarding. That is why you must not restrict yourself to publishing blogs only on your own site if you want quick results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO
 
SEO techniques are a bit too technical for a newbie in e-commerce marketing. You can get expert help if necessary to get your site ranking high in search engine results. Very significantly, your website has no significance if a user cannot find it on the most popular search engines particularly Google. SEO makes your website organically visible on search engines. With a proper mix of the right keywords in your content both on-page and off-page, the site can be optimized to make it search engine friendly. That helps to attract the much needed traffic to your website making it a good e-business strategy.


 

Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Needs

The first major challenge everyone faces as a small business owner is competition. That gets stiffer by the day. So, if you want your own business to survive, you must always have your thinking cap on. Resolve to think strategically at all times. These here strategies are not one-size-fits-all strategies. You must look at yourself and your business very well to decide what will work for you and what won’t. Here are some of the best marketing strategies that can help you get your business in the right direction now and the years ahead.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have deployed one, two or more of these here strategies to promote your small business in the past. Exact same strategies that have proven useful to many others around the world! Here's a list of a few proven strategies that are right now helping businesses across the world:

Building an email marketing funnel
Speaking at, sponsoring and or hosting events/seminars/webinars
Offering free business consultations
Traditional media advertising
Advertising on social media, particularly Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Adding your business profiles on directories such as Google My Business
Investing in content marketing
Writing a column/articles factually, consistently and continuously

More hands-on strategies:

Write about your products/services: You may not know how to write a blog but not to worry. At least you are literate enough to write something. You may not need to worry about blog writing skills if you are literate enough to write something readable. Just write stories and articles about your products and or services and how they help your customers. Even if your platform is social media, so long as you are consistent and factual, you can build a reputation for your brand online and patronage naturally follows.

Create online visibility for your business: What that means is to be sure your business is visible and accessible online 24/7. To be able to do so, you must create your profiles across all available social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others. You must keep your contact details updated there so that people can drop a message anytime of the day. That is one great way to generate very valuable leads.

Maintain email contact with your customers: You can build a reliable email list from your online visibility. Thereafter, you can regularly send emails to your existing customers and also to potential customers you are targeting. This is one very useful way to promote your content, improve sales and nurture existing leads for the future.

Using word of mouth promo: A satisfied customer is a very big asset to your business. You should encourage your customers to speak about your business to others. You must therefore strive more to satisfy customers than turning a profit. Businesses that enjoy good customer satisfaction not only benefit from good customer retention, they also benefit from good word of mouth promos and customer testimonials on your website and even on social media platforms. The better and more the reviews your business gets, the more customers it continues to attract.  

Why Everyone Needs Courage

“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” ~ John Wayne

For us all as human beings, it is not the size, age and strength that count the most when it comes to courage. What really counts is the WILL. Everyone fears something somewhat but those who’ve got the will to carry on always get the prize. That you may fail is not news. Even at that, so what! Show me anyone who has never failed and I will show you someone who has never tried to do anything worth doing. Just do something, anything you’ve decided to do despite your fears. That is courage, raw courage and that is all you need to succeed in that new business venture you have been planning on. Just start something and continue to do something. Success will be yours no matter how long it takes to come along.

Get busy right now because….“No pains, no gains. To get the prize, you must pay the price.”