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Do you want to launch a business on the Internet? This is quite a good idea, as:
- it is not expensive;
- has incredible potentials for growth and development;
- gives opportunities to work 24/7 from any geographical location.
So, if you decided to open an eCommerce store, there is a bunch of things you should know about eCommerce sites and eCommerce marketing.
The success of any project consists of little bricks like a branding style, website, design, product catalog, product descriptions, texts, and of course, digital marketing (SEO, PPC, SMM, email marketing, content marketing, Google advertising, influencers marketing), etc. In this article, we have tried to gather the main tips you may need to know to start, develop, and promote an eCommerce business from scratch. Let’s get started!!!
How to Launch eCommerce Businesses in 10 Steps?
1. Determine Your Niche and Business Idea
Before your move to the stages of creating your website and thinking about how to promote it on the space of the Internet, you must exactly know what you are planning and to whom. It means that you should choose the product/products/services you will offer to your target audience – potential customers. This is a basic stage that will help you build a further well-thought and thorough web platform for your business project and promotional marketing campaigns.
2. Investigate the Product
There are three basic types of products you can be selling online. Each of them has its benefits and cons, and each type will have a direct impact on the choice of eCommerce marketing strategy.
- Physical Goods
Everything is simple here. Any product that you can see and touch belongs to this category. One of the basic requirements for the promotion of physical goods is their visual description on the website, so when you must take into account that your site will contain a lot of visual content such as photos and videos. Whether you decide to create an online store on your own or use the help of professional developers, you should put great effort into making your website user-friendly and well-optimized.
- Digital Downloads
One more thing you can be selling online is digital products such as e-books, audio files, video files, and so on and so forth, literally everything that can be downloaded to the electronic device. It is easier to develop a platform for selling such products as they do not require any specific visualization, and a website in the form of a catalog is more than enough. The point here is to create comfortable and understandable navigation as mainly such stores may contain tones of various products, so you must make sure the customer has no difficulties when looking for the product he/she wants to purchase.
- Services
Services are actually abstract products difficult to describe, as here you are selling your time. The accent for the websites that are selling services should be made on the texts what imply content marketing. You should thoroughly develop the structure of the site so that it still catches and attracts the visitors’ attention.
3. Conduct Market Research
Researching the market will help you to find out what your target audience wants, what it needs, and what it lacks.
Marketing research is a crucial step towards starting your own online business. It helps determine the depth, competitiveness, and profitability of the chosen business vertical. Because the last thing you want to do is make an offer that no one wants to buy. In addition, market research helps validate your product idea, prices, and demand.
4. Check out the Search Results
Find keyword variations for your product/service and analyze search engine result pages (SERPs) for them. What type of content is currently ranked first on the first page? Which companies pay to advertise on top of regular search results?
This will help you evaluate your competitors ahead of time. Plus, get insights for a preliminary SEO and digital marketing tactic based on the content your potential customers prefer.
5. Research Your Competitors
You also want to take a closer look at your main competitors (besides the SERPs). What are the largest business projects in your niche? How much money do they make? What are their strengths and weaknesses?
By placing other players under the microscope, you can figure out what could give you an edge over them.
6. Track High Performing Keywords
Analyze how the demand for different products in your niche is changing and which content ranks best by tracking keywords that are relevant to the niche.
Good tools for this purpose:
- Google Trends (free);
- Google Keyword Planner (Free);
- Ahrefs (paid).
7. Determine the Target Audience
To achieve sales and then scale your business, you need to have a clear understanding of who your potential buyers are. Research both demographic and psychographic data to learn about their needs and preferences.
- Demography
Demographic data includes basic socioeconomic characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, income, job title, etc.
- Psychography
Psychographic data includes various psychological characteristics such as values, beliefs, interests, opinions, etc.
Together, these insights help you better understand your ideal needs, preferences, and factors that influence your customers’ shopping experience. Many of the insights you gain when doing the research of your potential buyers may have an impact even on the design of the site and the branding style of your company.
8. Assess the Viability of the Product
You want to comprehensively assess the viability of your product before purchasing or manufacturing a large order. To do this, ask the following questions:
Is there already a successful online business selling similar products?
Is the demand for this product sustainable? Or is it temporary?
Does the math behind this product make sense? Can you sell this for a profit?
Remember, it doesn’t matter how cool the product seems. The important thing is that it is business viable!
9. Define your Brand and Business Style
A brand is the overall “atmosphere” of your company. You want everything from your company name to your web design and text to convey a consistent visual identity and ideas. The same applies to your external presence – on social media, email newsletters, and even packaging.
When working on your brand identity, pay attention to:
- Logo;
- Color scheme;
- Page layouts;
- Typography.
- Graphics and photos.
Your brand image should be the result of all of these elements working together.
10. Develop and Promote Your Project
Once everything is set up, it’s time to start driving traffic to your internet platform. Prioritize the following channels:
- Paid advertising. Allocate an ad budget for PPC (pay-per-click) ads on social media and Google. This is the fastest way to build brand awareness for a new start-up project.
- Influencer marketing. Collaborate with social media influencers to promote your products. This is another quick way to grab the attention of your potential customers.
- Media Marketing. Supplement your paid campaigns with organic traffic to grow your Instagram and Facebook audience.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Make sure all pages on your site are SEO-friendly. Then, create an active marketing strategy for your blog.
- Advertising mailing. Create an email list by writing down the email addresses of people who visit your online store. Then you can promote your products to your subscribers via email.
ECommerce Marketing: How to Create and Promote a Successful eCommerce Website?
How to Create a Successful Online Store?
Of course, for the beginning, you need to create a site, an online store, where you will sell your products/services, and which will become an essential part of your digital marketing plan. To start with, you should think carefully about whether you want to do this on your own or involve a professional team of designers, developers, and eCommerce marketers. If you decide you want to try your powers in web design and development, in our blog we have a whole article dedicated to creating a website on WordPress, one of the most popular, simple, and powerful constructors.
How to Promote eCommerce Website?
1. Boost Your Organic Social Presence
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and others are potential marketing channels for promoting any kind of businesses. And even if you do not plan to sell your services or products via social media marketing, it will increase brand awareness and drag the interest to your company and the things you are doing. Of course, to achieve your marketing goals, you will have to work on interesting content, appealing images, and short videos for your profile.
If you either do not have time, do not want to waste your time on learning the tricks of designing and programming, a team of professionals in IntlTech is always at your service.
2. Optimize Your Site for SEO
An effective SEO strategy is without exaggeration the main and the most effective way to drag organic traffic and increase site visitors. Being still not one of the fastest marketing tactics, search engine optimization is worth all marketing efforts. When you manage to get your site to the top ten results in Google, your conversion rate will greatly improve. Of course, SEO does not mean to sell, but if people can find you, there are greater chances they will buy sooner or later.
3. Generate Useful and Interesting Content
Content marketing is an essential part of SEO marketing strategies as it helps to boost the ranking of definite keywords relevant to your site/products/services and make them rank higher in search engines. A nice point is that it brings website visitors that can become your potential clients as they are already interested in the things they are looking for online. Moreover, professional and interesting blog posts may establish you as one of the expertise in the industry.
4. Try out Google Ads
Unlike SEO, Google display ads belong to fast results-oriented digital marketing tactics. Displayed among the query-related results in search engines, these kinds of ads get mainly clicks from people interested in the products/services you offer. You do not pay for displaying the ad but just for clicks. Of course, this eCommerce marketing strategy has definitely pitfalls as you should win a special auction, work on the ad text so it directly hits the potential customers and does not gather unnecessary clicks, is attractive, and engaging. In any way, Google ads can bring you immediate online sales if you need results here and now!
5. Advertise on Social Media Platforms
Instagram and Facebook are good eCommerce marketing channels not just in terms of content marketing but advertising as well. These platforms have pretty good settings for ads that allow choosing a specific narrow niche and target just the audience that may be potentially interested in your products/services. Of course, to help the users make a purchase, you should know your target market very well, but social media advertising is one more of the fast ways to bring more visitors to your store and gain product reviews.
6. Partner with Complementary Brands
It can be mutually beneficial for both brands. Find a partner that works in a similar segment to yours but is not your direct competitor. For example, if you own an eCommerce store that sells clothes and shoes, you can cooperate with the accessory brand or beauty salon. If you specialize in plants and seeds, you could work together with a company that sells garden tools or fertilizers. There are millions of possible variants, the trick is that the audience of your partner gets to know about your product/services. It’s a kind of referral marketing. And it really works.
7. Consider Using Influencer MArketing
Influencers, in other words, famous people like bloggers, singers, writers, and so on with massive audiences can become one of the effective eCommerce marketing tactics for your shopping campaigns. Having thousands of subscribers and some kind of respect and trust of their fans, they can reach the audience just with a single post on Facebook or a story on Instagram. The trick here is to choose an influencer whose audience may be really interested in the products/services you offer. Thus, one of the successful examples is the recent cooperation of Jennifer Lopez and the Vitamins/Supplements brand Goli Nutrition. Think about someone whose activity or lifestyle attracts your potential customers and make influencer marketing a part of your digital eCommerce marketing plan.
E-Commerce Marketing and Promotion: To Sum Up
Is it challenging to start a business online? Is it difficult to create a user-friendly selling website and promote it with modern digital marketing tips? The answer is no. But you must possess a considerable amount of knowledge and skills in web design, development, and eCommerce digital marketing. It may be time-consuming. That is why many business owners prefer delegating responsibilities of web development and marketing to professionals as it saves you lots of time and money, allowing focusing your energy and power on the things you know how to do the best.
If you need any help with creating or promoting your eCommerce businesses, IntlTech designers, developers, and marketing team know the most modern and effective ways of how to create a online store website and how to market it.
