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.


 

Changing Trends of Guest Blogging

Expert bloggers always insist that guest posting is one great technique that can help promote your blog virally. Experience has shown that this is largely true. It works some wonders at times.  The real reason many bloggers now want to keep abreast of any new trends in guest posting. Here now are some of the ways that guest posting has changed over the years in digital marketing.

 

Bloggers Have Become Much More Choosier

Unlike years past, what goes into your content and what sites it is linked to are becoming of paramount importance. The real reasons bloggers have become much more careful in choosing what goes into their content and where the links point to. Many Bloggers now make a living off of their sites so they have become more protective and choosy of what they put on them and what is linked to them. Pointing links to prohibited sites and writing about prohibited materials are now off limits for most bloggers.

Increasing Importance on Engagement

SEO techniques have proved conclusively that engagement on a website can impact the ranking of the website. Similar results show with more interaction with their content on social media. That is why websites and brands which are able to use social media effectively can easily become household names with unlimited popularity.

Content Quality Has Increased

As bloggers become more knowledgeable, content quality is impacted and search engines never fail to take note. Poor grammar, punctuation and poor presentations now impact negatively on guest posts. Some sites now routinely reject poor posts even before search engines get to discover them. The real reason good quality content is now most desirable on guest posts.

Tracking Tools Have Become Smarter and More Accurate

With increasing sophistication and smartness of tracking tools, it is now fairly easy to identify content that is capable of bringing in good traffic. That “intelligence” is garnered from data that is collected from social shares, visits from guest posts and leads generated from them. There is less guess work and “shooting in the dark” now because the tracking tools readily come up with smart data which can be turned into actionable content marketing plan. This is why the guest posting niche of marketing continues to change and evolve to keep up with smart tracking tools.

Blackhat Techniques Are Reducing

Because Search Engines are getting smarter and more accurate, Blackhat techniques have started losing grounds. Some guest bloggers sometimes hide codes in an infographic to hoodwink search engines. This is one typical example of blackhat technique of many guest bloggers which is very difficult to get away with right now. These days, search engines routinely penalize companies and websites utilizing such techniques. The real reason many guest bloggers are now not very comfortable using blackhat techniques.