Ecommerce Marketing: 3 Essentials for Driving Growth in 2020
Every brand has different ecommerce marketing initiatives that they must prioritize for growth.
Whether that’s driving awareness, acquiring new customers, or driving retention from old ones — your brand ultimately needs to engage your audience across multiple digital mediums.
Today’s most successful brands aren’t just engaging customers on a one-off basis — they build compelling experiences customers can interact with regardless of which shopping channel they’re on.
Here are three tried and true ecommerce marketing principles that can be used to guide your brand performance into 2020.
“In today’s world, consumers, their behavior, and the way the retail ecosystem is evolving require this connectivity that we never had to have before because of the cause and effect that is out there.”
—Molly Schonthal, Salsify VP of Retail Strategy
1. Optimize Your Organic Listings to Increase Rankings and Conversion Rates
Amazon is a prime example of a marketplace that has evolved with customer behaviors.
Amazon’s search results and product rankings can display millions of different products from thousands of different brands that are relevant to the consumer.
Before investing any budget into paid advertising, you must optimize your entire catalog to create the best customer experience possible, or what Amazon likes to call being “retail ready.”
Know the factors that influence rank and conversion rate on whichever marketplace you are selling and optimize your listings accordingly.
For Amazon, there are a number of other indirect factors that can impact your sales velocity, such as:
- Fulfillment methods
- Reviews
- Images
- EBC/A+ content
- Advertising
- Promotion
2. Use Creative Content Tools to Build a Compelling Brand Experience
No one remembers a boring product detail page.
If you want your customers actually to receive and internalize a message, then your ecommerce marketing needs to get creative and start storytelling.
“Increased volume of direct brands has led to increased audience overlap and competition. This calls for a renewed focus on leveraging creative as a strategic differentiator. Brands need to design with conversions in mind if they want to stand out from millions of creative agencies and competitors.”
-Jon Gregoire, Director of Demand Generation at Tinuiti
This is why brands need to shift away from product detail pages toward building product experience pages that focus on the consumer’s needs.
This mindset of putting the customer first and foremost is one that Amazon has built into its marketplace. Brands that offer the best customer experience when browsing products are going to succeed against those that don’t.
Amazon’s native content tools offer the ability to use images and on-page content to not only sell a product but to tell a story as well.
Amazon currently offers a multitude of branding features including:
Showing use-cases of the products, setting up FAQs, and telling your brand story are all ways to connect with consumers on Amazon.
3. Leverage Paid Media to Activate Customers Throughout the Journey
If you want to accelerate your sales growth, then your ecommerce marketing needs to position your brand in front of more shoppers.
The rising competition in ecommerce means that organic space has become harder to win, especially as sponsored ad space continues to expand across the organic search results page.
“Paid advertising continues to grow in prevalence, importance, and complexity for brands on Amazon. Look at the evolution of Amazon’s search results pages to see how paid placements have assumed the dominant positions in front of shoppers.”
– Pat Petriello, Head of Marketplace Strategy at Tinuiti
If you want to acquire and retain customers, then you need to deliver relevant messaging that cuts through the rest of the noise. The best way to accomplish this on marketplaces like Amazon is with paid advertising campaigns.
The good news is that it’s easier than ever to create compelling ad campaigns with sophisticated targeting options on Amazon.
If you want to learn more about paid advertising campaigns, then check out our guides to the following campaign types:
Final Takeaway
Ecommerce is booming and it’s set to keep growing. This also means competition for clicks and conversions will rise, which is why brands need to get more sophisticated with their ecommerce marketing.
If you walk away from this article with one thing, it should be the need to leverage all tools available to engage your audience across the entire journey.
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