Jumping into e-commerce meaning you have to deal with all the digital and tech stuffs, this includes the way you’re going to market the e-commerce business.
But getting your e-commerce website sales flowing can be bit a hard nowadays since the competition are just downright crazy, and it becomes harder when you have no idea what to do. You might even end up hurting the e-commerce website sales.
The first thing to do is to create content that will attract traffic to your e-commerce website and retaining them.
A great content not only engaging but allows customers to feel they’re connected with your business. Content on your website plays an important role on determining the number of sales and traffic you can get.
With Great Content, Comes Great Sales
An e-commerce website without great content makes for a poor e-commerce website, i mean, yeah you’re selling products and stuffs but those products, promotions etc. can only do so much to boost the sales, this is where content comes in.
Instead of posting advertisements of your products all the time, why don’t you create content that does not only talk about what you’re selling but updates, tips, and news–something that will get everyone talking and sharing. When people know there is more than just products, people will visit your website more often and tempted into buying your products, two birds with one stone, eh?
If you do not want too many things to clutter your e-commerce website you can always create a social media page like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to upload your posts. Just put a widget link of the social media that full of content related to your main e-commerce website.
But! You can’t just blindly create content, the content created must suit with the targeted audience–something that visitors can relate to and make them feel connected with your business.
This can be a review, testimony, or news which will grab the attention of visiting customers, thus giving off the effect of lingering awareness, and when you put up huge promotion banner or some sort of offer on the main page. They will think and consider on it, they might even think about it in their sleep.
There are steps to be follow first before you can gain the attention and trust from visitors of your e-commerce website. Well in marketing world, there is this thing called marketing funnel strategy and this applies to content marketing. The steps in marketing funnel strategy are like this:
- Create awareness- content that will make people aware about the existence your e-commerce website like blog articles, guides, news etc (i did mentioned it somewhere above or didn’t i?)
- Consider– in the content, include tempting offers for visitors to consider on your. Simply put, make them consider (hey, this is not manipulating people, okay…well maybe just a bit.)
- Decision- this is where you truly market your brand through content. At this point visitors have made lots of research, so make sure the content you put talk about benefits, pricing etc.
As you can see in each stages, the content is marketed and pitched differently. Oh, and when you create a content, it must suit with the target visitors. I cannot stress this any better.
Like i mentioned earlier, don’t just talk about how your products plainly. Throw in some spice into the content to give a bit more flair and gets everyone jump into the bandwagon. For example, like the ‘crispy rendang‘ debacle that stirred half of the world and quickly became a viral and trending issues.
Major brands like IKEA and KFC quickly stepped in and use this issue as an advantage to market their content.
KFC Malaysia uploaded this photo on their Instagram.
IKEA tweeted this on their Twitter account.
This caught the crowd the attention and got their product and brand on everyone’s lips. This what i meant when you should add more spice into your content marketing. Incorporate trending and viral issues into your content, just be mindful of the sensitivity, you don’t want to turn out like the well-known apparel brand GAP.
This kind of content will engaged visitors and make them feel connected more to the product. In a way this also somehow convince visitors that your e-commerce website can be trusted and customers friendly.
Visitors will share the content, and this will make more people become aware of your e-commerce website. And this equals to more traffic which might result in more sales.
It is known fact that two third of new customers won’t visit the same website again, unless you’re able to make a pitch that is convincing enough. Though on average visitors will visit five times before committing to a purchase (this is not fixed, based on the average). This is the stage where visitors start considering and comparing.
They will compare the quality of services and the price range on your website with other websites, so if you make a good enough offer with your product offer and there is interesting content to back your site up. Put up interesting offer and benefits if they decide to make a purchase from your e-commerce website.
The Humming Little Birdie
Another thing to be mindful of is content types on your website, focus and narrow it down to one single topic, type, and subject as this will tell people what your website is all about and lets Google detect, rank, and index the website and it’s content easily.
This is thanks to Google new algorithm update code named “Hummingbird” which was introduced back in 2013. It focuses more on the context of different words together rather than focuses on few words, this resulted in better pages matching.
An e-commerce website content should have little problem in narrowing down content type, i mean, you are selling products or services that are belonged in same category.
Great Contents And All But Don’t Forget Your Dose Of SEO
Yeayyy! Now you have content, great one no less! Don’t be trigger happy just yet, you maybe busier and receiving more traffics than you used to but it seems like that your e-commerce website is not going places…yet.
Hey, just leaving your pretty little looking content and the website containing it to float around on it’s own just not going to work. What you need to do is give it the magic touch of SEO.
SEO a.k.a Search Engine Optimiser what makes contents, blogs, websites and other sorts go places and discovered by people.
Lookup for the right using various keywords tools, then see which has the best chance of scoring traffics to your website. Don’t forget to put in those keywords in your website meta titles and descriptions, and within the contents littered on your websites.
For a more coherent and tad bit more detail explanation, check out the video above by Neil Patel, a persona and a face that is no stranger in SEO world.
Learn The Trade
Not all of us are born a genius–okay fine, Neil Patel is kind of a genius, but if you read his life’s story, even he needed to climb the mountain before he was able get to where he is now, this means you can make a breakthrough or becomes successful with whatever business you’re doing, if you’re willing to put enough effort into it. It is daunting, and hard to the learn the digital trade but whether you just want to make money on the side, or become the new digital tycoon, it all well worth the efforts.
Though~ the tips provided here are effective but it won’t guarantee a 100% success and you won’t see the result immediately, i mean, the good’ol usual business world is already unpredictable, what’s more the digital business world, eh? It is just full of surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant things.
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