How eCommerce Digital Marketing Can Elevate Your Brand

As the digital world expands, competition within the eCommerce landscape grows as well. To help your business stand out, a digital strategy is more essential than ever before.

Digital marketing has become a critical component for businesses seeking to elevate their brands. By harnessing the power of various channels such as PPC, SEO, social media, and email, eCommerce businesses can boost their online presence, attract more customers, and ultimately drive those all-important sales. The question is: how can your brand maximise its eCommerce marketing efforts in such a competitive online environment?

In this blog post, we’ll delve into the importance of digital marketing for eCommerce businesses and provide channel-specific tips, along with guidance on aligning these channels into a cohesive digital marketing strategy.

Crafting Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

Before we dig into some channel-specific insights, let’s start with the importance of aligning your strategy across your digital channels.

To cast the net as wide as possible – and ensure said net doesn’t have any holes – it’s crucial that you align your channels from the ground up. Whether you’re leveraging all possible channels already or have just a couple in focus, everyone needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak.

1. What are your goals?

Every great digital strategy begins with that timeless marketing question: what are your goals and objectives?

Whether you’re focusing solely on driving conversions or you’re looking to turn users into lifetime customers, this is the best place to start. You might find that each channel has its own goal; for example, your PPC campaigns might be where you get people through the door, but social media is where you want to nurture your audience and turn them into a loyal customer base. Establish your goals, channel by channel, and look at how you can get them working together for the best results.

2. Ensure that your data is tracked

Cross-channel tracking and attribution are vital to keep tabs on where your website traffic is coming from. Google Analytics is still the king of cross-channel tracking and insights on the user journey. Use advanced tracking methods like UTM parameters, pixel tracking, or multi-channel attribution models to understand your customers better and identify gaps you can fill. With your digital channels, creativity often begins with solid data insights.

3. Audit & analyse, always

Digital marketing is never “one and done”. It requires constant tweaking to ensure your efforts are always aimed where they need to be. So, regularly review and analyse data from each channel to identify areas of improvement and reallocate resources accordingly – this is one area where your tracking will come in useful. 

Use analytics tools like Google Ads, Google Analytics and Ahrefs to gain insights into customer behaviour, campaign performance, and return on investment (ROI).

4. Consistency is key

Work to maintain a consistent brand identity across all channels, including your website, social media profiles, and email templates. This goes for your branding as well as your copy; a consistent tone of voice in your messaging will help your users feel at home wherever they find you.

Channel-Specific Tips for eCommerce Marketing

Next, we’ll go through four of the most popular digital channels – PPC, SEO, social media and email marketing – to shine a light on how you can use them to best effect for your eCommerce business.

PPC Advertising

PPC advertising offers an immediate and targeted way to increase brand visibility and drive conversions. To make the most of your PPC campaigns, consider the following tips:

1. Conduct thorough keyword research: This is crucial for both PPC and SEO, allowing you to identify relevant and high-converting keywords using tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner, SEMrush or Ahrefs. Targeting the right keywords will ensure your ads reach the right audience.

2. Optimise campaign landing pages: Align your landing page content with the keywords and ad copy associated with them to enhance relevancy and improve conversion rates. There’s no use sending users to an irrelevant landing page that doesn’t match up with your ad copy! From here, use a clear call to action (CTA) that directs visitors towards making a purchase or taking the desired action.

3. Leverage ad extensions: Take advantage of the handy ad extensions provided by platforms like Google Ads, such as site links, call extensions or structured snippets. These extensions provide additional information and increase the visibility of your ads, in turn attracting more clicks.

4. Regularly monitor and optimise campaigns: Always be on the lookout for opportunities to improve your ads, even if they’ve been running successfully for a while. Continuously analyse campaign performance, including click-through rates, conversion rates and cost per conversion. Adjust your bidding strategies, ad placements, and targeting parameters to maximise ROAS, and don’t be shy to experiment to find what works best.

Read more: Why is Offline Conversion Tracking Important for Your PPC Campaigns?

SEO

A robust SEO strategy is crucial for long-term success in eCommerce – to stand the best chance of success, SEO should always be played as a long game. 

Here are some tips to optimise your eCommerce site for search engines:

1. Conduct keyword research: While your PPC campaigns might be more geared towards short-tail, high-volume keywords, SEO keyword research gives you a bit more license to go after some niche queries related to your business. Identify relevant keywords for each product page and optimise their on-page elements such as titles, meta descriptions, headers, and content for the keywords you’ve identified. User intent is pivotal here: for an eCommerce site, keywords with purchase intent are your best friend.

2. Optimise product descriptions: Craft unique, informative, and keyword-rich product descriptions that entice both search engines and potential customers. Again, there’s room for experimentation here, although the timeframe for experimenting with SEO is more drawn out than the instantly affected ad campaigns you may be running. If in doubt, have a gander at what your competitors are doing on their websites – this is a great way to align your content with your audience’s expectations as well as what search engines tend to rank highly.

3. Enhance site speed and user experience: Site speed is a critical ranking factor for SEO. You can improve site speed by optimising images (ensuring they’re formatted in .webp and aren’t overly large), minimising code bloat, and leveraging caching techniques. Ensure your website is mobile-responsive and provides a seamless browsing experience across devices as again, mobile usability is an SEO ranking factor.

4. Earn high-quality backlinks: There’s some debate over the validity of pursuing backlinks for SEO, but it’s undeniable that the best-ranked pages on search engines often have the most referring domains. So, it’s worth spending some time on implementing a robust content marketing strategy to attract organic backlinks from reputable websites. Create valuable content, engage in influencer outreach, and consider guest blogging to build domain authority and improve search rankings. This is one of those areas where your social media and email marketing can support your efforts as well.

Read more: Top Tips for Optimising Your Amazon Store’s SEO

Social Media

Social media platforms offer an excellent opportunity to engage with your target audience, build brand awareness, and drive traffic to your eCommerce website.

1. Create engaging content: Wherever you focus your social media efforts, spend time developing visually appealing images, videos, and infographics aligned with best practice on each channel. Encourage user-generated content by running contests or showcasing customer experiences to foster brand advocacy. This can in turn result in some handy backlinks for your site!

2. Run social ads: Leverage social media advertising options on platforms like Instagram or TikTok to promote your products when they need an extra boost. You can utilise advanced targeting options based on demographics, interests, or behaviours to refine your audiences and align them with your customer personas.

3. Engage with your followers: Community management has some huge potential for brands that get it right. Respond promptly to comments, messages, and reviews to nurture positive relationships with your audience. Encourage conversations, address queries, and show appreciation for customer feedback to build trust and loyalty.

Read more: The Key Principles for Better Social Media Design

Email Marketing

Email marketing remains a powerful tool for eCommerce businesses to nurture leads, build customer loyalty, and drive repeat sales, making it an excellent option for converting users directly from their inboxes.

1. Personalise your emails: Utilise customer data to personalise your emails based on their preferences, behaviour and purchase history. Where possible, segment your audience and automate personalised templates with tools like Klaviyo to give your users a tailored experience.

2. Craft compelling subject lines and email copy: Grab the reader’s attention with compelling subject lines and use persuasive copy that entices them to open the email and take action. Focus on benefits, exclusivity, or urgency to drive conversions. Seasonal sales are a great way to give users urgency during relevant times of the year.

3. Measure and optimise: We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again – always be on the lookout for opportunities to improve your email marketing performance. Monitor open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates to gauge campaign performance, and split test different email elements like subject lines, CTAs, and content formats to see what works best for your brand and your audience.

Read more: Superpower Your eCommerce Email Marketing with These 8 Tips

Looking for eCommerce Marketing Support?

If this sounds like a lot of moving parts, don’t worry – with reliable digital marketing support, even startup eCommerce brands can establish themselves online and build loyal customer relationships.

To begin building your eCommerce digital marketing strategy, get in touch with our experts today.