Thinking about your next business venture? How about setting up an online store?
With the ecommerce industry topping over the $300 billion mark this year, it’s safe to say that now’s the prime time to join the winning team of online retailers.
Apart from an actual product to sell, you need a platform you’re going to sell it from. Finding a safe and reliable website builder isn’t easy, which is why we’ve decided to do most of the heavy lifting for you. After combing through the internet back and forth, we’ve managed to find a platform that’s instantly become our favorite – SITE123. An amazing free website builder, SITE123’s main advantages are its easy setup process, responsive design and uncomplicated features. With dozens of pre made layouts, and specific types of websites to choose from, this platform is built with a small business owner in mind.
Creating a website with SITE123 is a piece of cake, and the entire setup process takes less than a minute to complete. After you’ve created a website, add an online store to it, upload your products, and you’re good to go, right?
Not so fast. Before you start selling and seeing any revenue pouring back into your company, you need to implement a sound marketing strategy for the upcoming year. A marketer’s year doesn’t really have to be in line with the regular calendar year, so don’t let this deter you if you started your company in the middle of the summer.
We realize that a strategy sounds like a pretty hard and complicated term, especially for a newbie retailer like yourself. However, we’re here to debunk this misconception and offer you a comprehensive, beginner’s email marketing checklist to make this process a lot easier.
You don’t have to religiously abide by these rules – use them as a guide to steer you in the right direction while you get creative on your own.
1.Define your goal
Start by defining what you want your company to accomplish. Do you want to grow your customer base, or is your main ambition to increase profits? Knowing exactly what your goals are will make creating, optimizing and implementing your marketing strategy a lot easier.
2.Invest in good content
Good content is the base of every successful marketing campaign, especially when it comes to ecommerce. What good are your products if your website’s copy is scarce and poorly written, and your menu bar lacks any useful pages?
Filling your pages with interesting and witty copy, as well as adorning your products with detailed and keyword-rich descriptions will create a fantastic base for all your future content marketing efforts, as well as aid your organic ranking.
3.SEO everything
While we’re on the topic of ranking, your search engine optimization efforts shouldn’t stop at your main website. Your online store needs to be optimized as well, because a huge percentage of its visitors will come from casual browsers that landed on your page through organic results.
4.Optimize it for mobile
A smooth shopping experience is the best marketing you can get, so always make sure your online store works perfectly on all devices.
If you’ve built it with SITE123, your website will automatically be optimized for mobile devices. However, it won’t hurt to double check everything to make sure the experience is as smooth as it can be and that all of the minor elements like images and titles are in line.
5.Get on social media
Everybody and their grandma’s on social media now, so it’d be wise to go along with the trends and get your company on all the relevant social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
Creating profiles and posting on all of these social networks is free and doesn’t take up a lot of your time, and acts as a jumping board for all your future marketing endeavors. Promoting your online store on Instagram and running Facebook ads for your products will significantly boost your revenue, and should be a standard addition to your long term marketing strategy.
6.Add video
If your brand caters to a slightly younger audience, adding video to your marketing strategy might be a good idea.
According to a last year study done by YouTube and Comscore, more than a third of millennials prefer watching YouTube over traditional television, and almost 75% of them enjoy watching videos uploaded by brands or companies. This is too big of a number to ignore, so recording and uploading videos should be one of the first things in your newly created ecommerce marketing strategy.
Wrap
We hope these latest ecommerce marketing practices prove useful and help you create a winning strategy of your own. Running a successful online store has never been harder, but with a few bits of inside info, it will hopefully become less of a daunting task for an up and coming entrepreneur like yourself.
Ready to start promoting your ecommerce store? Before you start putting a long term strategy in place, start by creating an amazing website and adding a beautiful and responsive store to it.
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