For small business entrepreneurs and ecommerce store owners, digital marketing is a must-have nowadays. This is because it has the potential to deliver significantly higher ROI at far cheaper costs. This, in essence, is the core of digital marketing.
To understand it though, having a grip on the essentials is very important. This will provide you with the big picture and help you create a functional marketing framework where you can integrate all the elements for a robust and complete marketing campaign.
Digital Marketing Essentials
Website Usability
This includes website design, site navigation, site architecture and action-based copy. This is the core of your digital marketing campaign. If you have an excellent marketing campaign but have a landing page that is difficult to navigate, or one where people can’t find what they want when they want it, you are basically wasting your time and money.
People are impatient and may try to hang around for a 10-20 seconds. After that, you’ll lose them as a customer. So, your website or ecommerce store must have excellent designs and more importantly, a user-friendly interface. If you’ll be outsourcing your checkout process, you want to make sure you use a platform that integrates well with your site and doesn’t create a jarring change that could set off red flags for the user. Something like fastspring.com is an excellent example of this.
Email Marketing
The success of every business largely lies in its ability to build a list of prospects, leads, buyers and customers. Without this, you’ll keep spending money on advertising. As the owner of an ecommerce store, nothing is more important than this.
Your goal should be to reduce the amount of money you are spending on paid advertising while still maintaining and even growing your sales volume and revenue. This will translate into even more profits for your store.
Do you know what one of the biggest advantages of social media is? It is the ability to get some feedback, engage your audience, and analyze people’s sentiments. It is how you connect directly with prospects or your target demography cheaply or at no cost at all.
This is powerful when you think hard about its implications. Admittedly, your activities there may not directly translate into direct sales and revenue in all cases, but it can help you tap into the pulse of your market and find out what you really need to grow and make your ecommerce store more profitable.
For example, instead of just rolling out the new super effective supplements for weight loss, you can “consult” with your audience first to see if it is something they might be interested in. This way, you do not get to spend a ton of money on products that won’t move as quickly or sell.
Paid Search Advertising
An ecommerce store without a paid search advertising budget is taking an even bigger risk by depending solely on organic search engine traffic. Not just that, organic traffic is not the best for almost instantaneous sales in ecommerce.
If you are willing to wait 3-6 months before seeing your first few sales, you may ignore paid search traffic. However, the reality is that no serious ecommerce store owner will want to wait that long. So, your best bet would be to go the route of paid search advertising in the forms of PPC ads, display ads or contextual ads.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is an amazing traffic generation technique. However, it takes time and doesn’t have the instant sales capability that paid traffic does.
That said, you can use this to your advantage. Start the paid while seriously working on your SEO. In a few months, you will find that you can drastically reduce your paid ads expenses while ramping up your SEO efforts without experiencing any drop in traffic, sales or revenue.
Web Analytics and Metrics
All of the above are nothing if you cannot track where your sales are coming from, sales volumes per month, increased leads and all the clientele. Web analytics tools like Google Analytics help you measure your ROI, track your progress and evaluate your results. This is how you know if you’re making progress or just doing a lot of activity.
About the author:
The writer of this article, Oscar King, is an experienced internet marketer who has worked in the industry for a number of years. If you wish to learn more about Oscar you can visit on Google+.
