Digital Ecommerce marketing is not just online marketing for your online store. There are different ways to market a website online effectively, and your digital ecommerce marketing strategy defines how to get the most out of these methods. The pillars of digital ecommerce marketing are:
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Content Marketing
- Native Advertising
- Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
A digital ecommerce marketing strategy is a plan you create for your business to accomplish individual digital goals using thoroughly selected online marketing channels such as paid, earned, and owned media.
Steps to Create an Effective Digital Ecommerce Marketing Strategy
1. Create a customer persona
The first step of marketing is to identify who your target audience is. For a digital Ecommerce marketing strategy to delivers its optimum results, you need to create detailed buyer personas.
Buyer personas are a depiction of your ideal customer(s). This is built by researching, surveying, and interviewing your target audience. You should always use real data to create buyer personas. If you create them by making assumptions about the target audience, your entire marketing strategy can go wrong.
Essential information to be involved in buyer personas: location, age, income, job title, hobbies, challenges, and priorities.
2. Recognise your goals and the digital marketing tools you’ll need
Your marketing goals need to always comply with your business’ goals.
Before working on your strategy, you need to define goals and set a timeline for the same. When that is decided, you need to finalise the right digital marketing tools you will use to measure how your strategy has been performing.
3. Assess your present digital channels and assets
For this exercise to be productive, using your owned, earned, and paid media framework, group the digital channels that you are currently using. Also, check on which ones are suitable for your strategy.
Owned media: Digital assets owned by your company include the website, social media profiles, and blog content, among others.
Earned media: It is the exposure your brand gets through word-of-mouth marketing.
Paid media: These are the channels on which you spend money to attract your buyer personas, such as paid social media posts and Google Adwords.
4. Examine and plan your owned media campaigns
- Go through your existing content
- Find out gaps in your existing content
- Develop a content creation plan
5. Examine and plan your earned media campaigns
Go through your previous earned media and check if your current goals can be reached by it. Assess from where you are getting traffic and leads, and create a list of the most effective to the least useful earned media sources.
6. Examine and plan your paid media campaigns
Like previous steps, go through your existing paid media across all platforms and examine which ones are helping you achieve your current goals. With this, you would know if you need to continue using specific platforms, add or remove them.
7. Create your digital ecommerce marketing campaigns
Once you have thoroughly followed the above steps, you will have a clear understanding of components that you need to consider for creating robust digital ecommerce marketing campaigns such as blog promotion, Twitter campaigns, or launching an ebook. These campaigns are stepping stones to achieve your strategy’s ultimate goal.
Digital ecommerce marketing strategies are based on the individuality of businesses, so it is necessary to customise them according to your business needs. What has worked for a brand might not necessarily work for you.
