Every small eCommerce business has dreams of being bigger. Having these big dreams is all well and good until you realize that you might not have the appropriate funding and customer base for the big marketing techniques to work.
Therefore, you need to make sure that you are experimenting with alternate ways of eCommerce marketing to bring in your audience before you tackle any of these bigger challenges. With that in mind, here is how your small business with big dreams for the future can begin to market for its perfect audience.
1. Use Amazon PPC agencies
You no doubt carry out part of your business on Amazon, and you might be tempted by the idea of using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as a powerful tool to boost sales. However, there is a lot to learn and it can be a bit of a headache to wrap your head around.
Of course, it is likely to be well worth the time, money, and energy you put into mastering this type of marketing technique; but you will find that it takes up a lot of your time and it could be a learning curve that can lead to a lot of time and money wasted.
By looking into and reading about the best and most-trusted Amazon PPC agency review to date, you might find that you can find a group that will help your business begin to make strides with PPC marketing techniques.
2. Look to improve your website
As well as selling on Amazon you should have your own website. This will be under your control but you need to get traffic to it and convert it when it gets there.
This can take quite a bit of time to perfect, but it is a process that you can reap a lot of rewards from—by creating a better customer experience, better security, and a higher chance of people looking at your website for longer, which can positively impact your sales. Consider the following:
Use chatbots
Using chatbots can build a more customer-centric eCommerce website, which can be great for getting customers to stay for longer periods of time. When it comes to prompting conversation it can also help you to have a FAQ section on your website that is a little more interactive. Chatbots can also be used as a guide around websites, as well as help you to potentially sell more at the checkout—by offering items that are usually bought together, or products that might complete a deal if you have a sale on.
Work on your website layout and maintenance
Thinking about the layout of your website is important. However, you might feel that it is worth your time to outsource a web designer to help you to build a clean and well-put-together website.
They can help you with loading speeds, cutting down on unnecessary waffle, and giving your website just the general tender love and care that it needs in order to operate well on a day-to-day basis. This can take a lot of constant upkeep off of your job list, and by hiring out a professional to do it for you, you are investing in speed and quality too.
Use customer rewards
Customer rewards can be a great feature to implement into your business website, especially as an eCommerce store. They can encourage your customers to come back more regularly, and can help you to provide a better shopping experience for them. You might also find that rewards entice your customers to purchase more when they do buy from you. Customer rewards can also help people to react better when it comes to sales, as they are more likely to make the most of their relationship with your business if they know they are going to get a little back.
3. Use social media to your advantage
Your business’s social media output can be a great way to bring in new customers, to keep in contact with old customers, to work on your marketing, and to get a lot of information out to a lot of people very quickly. Also, many social media sites are still free for businesses to use to promote their products, so they can be a relatively cheap source of followers and potential customers.
It can also be an excellent resource when it comes to building a brand identity and a stronger connection with customers that match the target demographic. Here are some ways in which you can use social media to your advantage:
Targeted campaigns
Using campaigns can be a great way to build a lot of hype around a product launch, or to simply get the word out about your business.
This can be a great marketing technique—for example, if you sell pet products, by hosting a “cutest pet” contest of followers posing their pets next to your brand’s products, and having them tag your business in the comments to enter for the chance of winning a hamper, you will find that word spreads about your business, and it gives you a bit of fun publicity too.
Social media influencer marketing
On a similar note, social media influencer marketing can be a great way to build and share an audience with someone who already creates content for your target audience. Collaboration with them can be a great way to market your products to your potential customers.
This uses the trust that an influencer already has with their audience to recommend a new item. It’s a bit like buying a product because your friend recommended it, as you know that they wouldn’t lie to you about the quality of it.
Use tags effectively
Using tags can hone your business posts to focus on a certain market. As another example, if you have a dog grooming business, you can post pictures and videos under the “cute” tag, or, you could even put them under a “satisfying” tag if you are getting out a lot of knots or cleaning a particularly dirty dog.
You might even be able to put your posts under the “wholesome” tag if you give out free dog cleaning services to those that can’t afford them. This is an extremely powerful tool, as it can bring in those who are in your secondary and tertiary audiences, such as dog lovers and people who like to watch cleaning products being used.
4. Use powerful software
Using powerful software, such as business intelligence, can be a great way to bridge the gap between your business and your target audience. It can help you to view your business as data and numbers, which can be important when you need to see directly when your business is doing well when it isn’t doing so well; and when marketing campaigns do and don’t work.
This can be vital for your business when planning marketing schemes ahead of time.
5. Learn how to improve customer loyalty
This is crucial to your eCommerce business as there are plenty of benefits to building customer loyalty. One of them is that you get to learn about your customers, so you can personalize your services to them a lot more. You will also find that you are less reliant on bringing in new customers all the time, so you can work with the ones that you have. There are some easy ways in which you can improve this customer loyalty:
Customer service training
This can be beneficial to your employees as well as your business’s reputation. Customer service training can help your employees to deal with stressful situations such as an abusive customer via email live chat or on the phone. It will also help your customers to have the best experience possible when it comes to investing their time into your business.
The better their experience is with a company, the more likely the customer is to return. This can be beneficial to keeping your audience in contact with you, responding to emails, and bringing more business to your company.
Ensure you are using the right service model
Working with a particular customer service model can be a great way to structure your business around the interests of your customers. Depending on whether you have a transactional or a relational service model for your business, you will encourage buyers from different demographics to purchase your goods.
Transactional structures are good for earning a lot of money per customer, in a no-fuss way; and relational structures are good for building a relationship with your customer and getting them to come back, so you earn more money from them over time.
Final thoughts
Marketing in a small and ambitious eCommerce business can be a very draining process, especially if it is just you at the helm. You have all of these amazing big ideas, but you only have a very limited budget, and the skills of both yourself and your employees might be very small and limited.
This can be a frustrating situation, so you need to find multiple ways, to help you get to your goals faster and preferably for a relatively low cost. It can be greatly beneficial to invest in several different marketing techniques and weed out the ones that aren’t helping your business—rather than stick to the same three that might just get average results.
