Looking for the right digital marketing channels for e-commerce? You’ve come to the right place!
Not all digital channels will fit each of your business objectives. Some are more suitable for select audiences, while others are set up differently depending on what they’re capable of.
To make the best use of them, you must work out which would be the most effective digital marketing channels for your business needs and then implement the best practices to achieve a goal.
Factors to consider when choosing a digital marketing channel for your business are:
Goals & Objectives
The channel you select will depend on your campaign goals. What is the objective? Is it brand awareness, conversion, thought leadership, lead generation/nurturing, or ROI?
Budget
Some channels offer free tools, while others require payment. If you are considering using paid services, start with a small budget. You can always scale things up as you see a steady flow of positive results.
Target Audience
The best way to target your ideal customers is to understand which channels they’re most active or engaged on.
In this article, we will highlight the top six digital marketing channels we believe have the greatest potential to address your business’s digital marketing needs.
1. Email Marketing
Although not the newest technology, email can help you build relationships with an audience who has expressed interest in your brand by signing up for your email list.
Via email, you can share news about your business, special offers, blog posts from your website, and various other kinds of content to help build relationships and encourage conversions.
Aside from newsletters, email messages can also be part of:
- Promotional email campaigns (discounted offers, seasonal sales, etc.)
- Triggered email campaigns (shopping cart abandonment emails)
- Transactional email campaigns (confirmation for purchases or events)
- To drive traffic from email, you will need to grow your email list to gain more customers.
If you have the budget to invest in a good email marketing tool, you can use these to create more personalised email content, set up automated emails, and collect and review user data.
Email best practices for e-commerce businesses
- Craft time-sensitive subject lines – This encourages your contacts to take advantage of promotional offerings before they end.
- Personalise your email marketing campaigns- Whenever someone takes a specific action, such as visiting your product pages or signing up for a free trial, send them automated emails containing the right message based on where they are in the buying cycle.
Of course, to send out emails, you need to build a solid database first!
There is no easy way of growing an email database – it takes patience and a clear understanding of your ideal customer to build one.
Read our blog on easy ways to building an effective email database to learn a few of our tried-and-tested strategies for building a quality database.
2. Social Media Advertising
Social media channels are an important part of any effective digital marketing strategy. But as a business owner, just sharing organic content on your page won’t cut it anymore. To see results in 2022, you need to start social media advertising.
This is because social media algorithms are constantly changing, and businesses won’t get the necessary reach or engagement through organic posts alone.
With social media marketing campaigns, you can expand your reach even further and target specific groups of users in the top, middle, and bottom of the buying funnel to generate high-quality leads.
Leverage remarketing tools like custom audiences and look-a-like audiences. This will increase your reach to pages/people with similar characteristics to your current fan base and email list.
Running social media ads is a full-time job because of the complexity of ad setup, design, copy, and continuous review and optimisation on a daily/weekly basis.
We recommend working with a social media advertising company to stay on top of your channels.
3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Big businesses and marketers invest heavily in SEO to increase the visibility of their websites in search result pages, and with good reason.
After all, more than 63,000 searches are made every second on Google. That’s a lot of untapped potential!
An effective SEO strategy incorporates several methods and processes, including (but not limited to) keyword research, content, backlinking, website optimisation, and more.
There’s even a specific subset called local SEO, which focuses on marketing small businesses to local communities. Let’s take a look at the two most common attributes of SEO.
On-Page SEO
When potential customers search for products or services online, they tend to go with whoever ranks higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
Standing out from the competition at this stage means that your website will capture new opportunities, which will drive a steady flow of leads down your sales funnel.
The object of on-page SEO is to ensure your website is search engine friendly enough to rank high when anyone searches for keywords related to your products or services.
This practice ensures your website has an organised structure that includes title tags, image alt-texts, and internal links; and is secure, and fast-loading. All things necessary for a search engine to find and understand your web pages to rank them well.
Additionally, having a content strategy that focuses on optimising keywords related to your business, creates more visibility by making it easier for search engines to find and match you with relevant search queries.
As long as you adopt modern SEO best practices—keyword research, content optimisation, and linkable content—your ranking will improve.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is about creating backlinks, an indicator of a website’s authority over search engines.
These are external links that link back to your website. The more high-value backlinks your website has, the more relevant it is.
However, off-page SEO can also include other methods not related to backlinks. It largely relies on human behaviour, and can be improved through social media, linked and unlinked mentions, and influencer marketing.
Creating and implementing an SEO strategy takes a substantial amount of resources. There are no quick fixes here, especially since the algorithms Google uses for ranking get updated constantly.
A good SEO strategy can take several months of continuous work before you can see any tangible results.
Look for search engine optimisation services in Australia to find an SEO consultant to help you get the best out of this marketing channel.
4. Google Advertising (PPC)
Google pay-per-click ads allow you to position your business above organic search results, even if that’s not where your website would organically show up. However, this digital marketing channel is not for novices.
Several business owners have told us that after having shelled out between $1,000 – $5,000 per month to advertise, their frustration of not getting results has been massive.
Few people have the expertise to get the right results regarding Google Ads.
Make sure you work with someone who has the right Google ads manager experience to avoid unnecessary spending with no results to show for it.
Best practices for Google Ad setup
- Choose the right keywords for your business – Analyze the search trends over time with frequency. Use Google Keyword Planner to determine search volume and price per click amount for each keyword. Most importantly, the keywords should connect to the campaign objective.
- Selecting campaign types – Select the suitable campaign type from Search, Shopping, Display, Video, and Universal App campaigns (UAC) depending on your business goals.
- Structuring the ad setup – Google ad setup is the key to achieving the maximum return on ad spend (ROAS). The efficiency of the advertising campaign is based on a pertinent arrangement for ad groups and ads, otherwise your business would end up wasting money on irrelevant impressions and clicks.
- Continues monitoring and optimisation of campaigns – It is very important to analyse results and make adjustments based on recommendations to improve ad optimisation. Evaluate the performing and non-performing keywords and ad groups to make decisions to fine-tune your ROI. Google Ads provides a Performance Planner to forecast campaign results and identify new opportunities.
Google offers a wide range of campaign options from text-based ads, to display (images), video, and remarketing. To learn more about the different advertising options Google offers businesses, click here.
5. Social Media – Organic Engagement
Regularly posting (combined with ads) can help you build brand awareness and engage with your audience.
Create a wide range of content that people want to engage with including videos, blogs, infographics etc., and share it on your social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.
New potential customers may also notice your brand simply by seeing your content shared by a friend.
This is an enormous benefit since users don’t have to follow your business page to learn about you.
You can take that one step further and increase engagement by:
- Staying original –This applies to the topics you tackle and the approach you employ in creating your content. Remember, most social users have short attention spans so keep your content simple but creative.
- Include hashtags – Word spreads fast when you use the # tag, allowing people to see and jump into the conversation.
- Incorporating holidays and/or trends – These provide your brand with the perfect opportunity to emotionally connect with your audience and boost brand awareness.
- Analyse social media metrics – This helps you understand how people consume and engage with content through likes, shares, comments, reactions, clicks, and more. The data will help you continuously refine and improve your strategy.
When you are guided by data, you waste less time on guesswork and spend more time generating content that people will enjoy.
Social sites are also great digital marketing channels for engaging with your audiences by asking questions.
It’s crucial that you promptly answer questions or reply to comments immediately.
6. Video Marketing
The value YouTube holds in marketing a business is unquestionable. When people are tired of their daily routine, they turn to video as a means of entertainment and the educational advantages that come with it.
As a result, there is no denying the necessity of incorporating videos into your digital marketing strategies.
With video marketing, you can promote your business, provide product reviews, increase traffic to your site, and even go viral.
There are several types of videos you can develop:
- Demo videos to showcase your product.
- Educational videos to provide information about new services, or instruct on a particular product.
- Event videos can highlight interesting parts of your event whether it’s a conference, meeting, seminar, or party.
- Interviews allow you to get insight from industry experts. Not only will this educate your customers, but it also builds credibility.
- Testimonial videos provide social proof to viewers why your business is the best choice. Hearing from other satisfied consumers and seeing actual results can go a long way in converting new ones.
Promote your videos on your social media platforms, to increase social sharing. Social videos that tend to get the most engagement and shares are short, to the point, and provide great content that’s easy to digest.
Another way to effectively use video and increase conversions is to host them on your website. This allows you to convey your personality in quick, entertaining clips to website visitors who don’t have time to read through all the content.
The various digital marketing channels work differently from one another and will give you different results.
Additionally, what works for one business might not work for you, or might not even be needed. The ideal scenario is to test different channels and strategies to see what combination suits you best.
Take time to measure key metrics and analyse any results you might be getting to help you optimise your marketing.
Otherwise, don’t hesitate to contact one of Netstripes’ digital specialists who can help you create the ideal digital marketing channel strategy for your specific needs.