Stay Ahead of Your Competitors Using These 5 eCommerce Marketing Tips [Contributed Blog]

August 19, 2019 - 11 minutes read - Contributed Posts, Marketing Your Business Online, Mod Marketing

With how fierce the competition has become in the eCommerce landscape, you can’t afford to be passive in your marketing efforts. You need to employ tried and tested eCommerce marketing strategies that can make your store shine like a digital peacock. By doing so, you’ll be in a better position to dominate your niche.

To help you do just that, here are five eCommerce marketing tips to help you win against your competitors:

1. Integrate personalization.

Personalization is an effective marketing strategy for small businesses on a budget, and big companies alike.

From a psychological perspective, it can be the same way as effectively getting the other person’s attention when you use their name in your conversation.

After all, what’s more personal than using your customer’s name (without sounding creepy), right?

Coca Cola used this personalization strategy in their “Share a Coke” campaign.

To reach younger audiences, they printed the most popular names of teens and young adults of the generation on their soft drink bottles.

It’s a creative and personalized marketing approach that their target audience can relate with and it helped shoot up their brand visibility since no other brand has done it before.

Sure, Coca Cola is a big company with deep pockets, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do your own version of this marketing approach.

You can send your customers discount coupons on their birthdays, integrate software to your eCommerce website that offers them products based on their purchase history, and more.

The key to creating a successful personalized marketing campaign is to understand your target audiences, such as their needs and pain points. 

That being said, understanding your target audience can help you craft the right message and come up with a personalized marketing approach that stands out from your competitors.    

2. Use Videos to Build Connections With Your Customers

Videos are great channels to promote your products because you can engage your potential customers with creative and interactive content.

Publishing videos can also be a great way to show your target audience your brand’s personality, and why you’re different from your competitors. 

For example, if you are running a drop-shipping store, posting “How-to” videos on your YouTube channel allows you to present your product, its features, and benefits to your potential customers.

Let’s say you’re selling light fixtures on your drop-shipping store.

Your potential customers might not know how to install your product properly, so posting a tutorial video on how to do it can solve their problem.

Pretty cool, right?

Videos allow you to be as creative, interactive and engaging with your content, which you can use to connect with your target audience.

In a way, your videos can “put a face” to your brand, allowing your target audience to feel like they’re connecting with an actual person. 

Videos are just one of the best platforms you can use, of course.

There are other tried and tested marketing methods that are ideal for those running a drop-shipping business.

With the help of comprehensive digital marketing guides, drop-shippers can learn new marketing strategies and principles that they can use to grow their eCommerce business.

3. Make Your FAQ Pages Creative

Your FAQ page is mainly for answering your potential customers questions, but it doesn’t mean you can’t be creative with it.

Sure, you can stick with the typical FAQ formats that some of your competitors are using.

However, if you have the opportunity to show your site visitors a bit of your brand’s personality and answer their questions at the same time, wouldn’t you do that instead?

The music sharing and audio distribution platform SoundCloud uses website menu icons that leans towards the “creative” and “cool” side, as shown in the screenshot below.  

Since SoundCloud is a platform that fosters creativity by letting users upload and share their original music, they show creativity throughout their website, including their FAQ page.

Their use of “First Aid“ and the medical plaster as a menu icon shows their creativity and cool side.

In this instance, it’s a creative way of telling their visitors of the questions that users commonly ask when starting, such as signing in and creating your account.

This can show you a bit of the brand’s personality while getting the information that you need at the same time.

Remember that your brand’s personality is crucial to help you stand out from your competitors and building relationships with your website visitors.

Thus, being creative with your FAQ pages can be an excellent place in your eCommerce site to be creative, let your brand’s personality shine, and catch their attention. 

4. Spy on Your Competitors Strategies

One of the best ways to beat your competitors is to know what marketing strategies they’re using that are giving them the best results.

You can do this by identifying the marketing techniques that work best for your competitors and check how you can apply them effectively to your eCommerce business.

To help you “spy” on your competitors marketing strategies, you can use a tool like SEOptimer.

You can type in your competitors URL in the search box, and the tool will provide you with an analysis of their website.

Through the analysis, you can gain insights on which of your competitors site elements are performing well.

You can also see what needs to be improved in terms of their sub-pages, SEO, usability, security, and more.   

For instance, SEOptimer can tell you what SEO practices your competitors are doing well, such as having a good level of textual content for ranking and the word count. 

By spying on your competitors marketing strategies, you’ll learn their best practices and apply them to your eCommerce website. 

5. Automate Your Social Posts

Social posts geared towards your product and brand promotion are brilliant because they rarely cost anything to test them out.

For instance, social networks like Facebook lets you share as many posts as possible on your business page.

Once you have your posts up and running, you can then gauge how interested your potential customers are based on the number of comments and likes your post receives.

After identifying your successful posts, you can spend a bit of money and use them as ads.

However, keeping a regular posting schedule throughout your multiple social media accounts can be challenging.

This is where social marketing automation tools come in handy.

With social media automation tools like Around.io, you can schedule your social posts using a daily or weekly planner instead of posting them manually.

This can save you hours spent on posting to each of your social accounts and not miss out on opportunities to engage your target audience if you forget to post on schedule.

Being constantly active on your social accounts is a great way to be a step ahead of your competitors.

By always keeping your followers up to date on your new product releases or special offers and discounts, you’ll have more chances of engaging your target audience.

Aside from brand promotion, there are also other strategies you can use to get the most out of your social accounts, such as using your social data for Machine Learning.

Still, there can be emerging fears regarding Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence taking the work of humans, and leaving lesser job opportunities.

However, Machine Learning can offer tremendous value by allowing you to delegate your repetitive tasks.

With automation and AI, you’ll have more time to focus on other aspects of your eCommerce business that can require more advanced analytical skills that only humans can provide.

What’s Next? 

The competition in eCommerce is fierce, but with the right strategies, you can be ahead of your competitors in the race to success. Give these eCommerce marketing tips a try and see how they can help you stand out from your competitors and move your business forward.

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Tags: eCommerce, know your competitors, Marketing Strategy, marketing tips, Seo