What exactly is e-commerce marketing?

E-commerce marketing is a network marketing method to promote sales and improve brand awareness. This guide shows you how to use e-commerce marketing to develop your e-commerce business. In this guide, you will learn what e-commerce marketing and e-commerce marketing strategies are. Definition of e-commerce marketing What is e-commerce marketing? E-commerce marketing is a kind of network marketing, which is a process of completing a series of marketing links and achieving marketing goals with the help of the Internet. This type of marketing can be carried out in various digital marketing channels, including search engines, social media platforms, websites and paid advertisements. Why is e-commerce marketing important? E-commerce marketing is very important, because it will show your business to your target audience and bring traffic to your website. Without marketing, even if people are interested in your products, you can't bring your products to them. E-commerce marketing can help people find your enterprise and/or products and establish a clear and unique brand identity. As people become more and more familiar with your brand, e-commerce marketing can convey the value of your business and/or products, and then finally convince them to become your customers. But it didn't end after someone placed the first order. E-commerce marketing can provide a good post-purchase experience. Doing so can improve customer loyalty and increase repeat customers. E-commerce marketing strategy The e-commerce marketing strategy to increase the sales of your e-commerce store is: seo paid advertising content marketing video marketing social media marketing alliance marketing social proof marketing e-commerce analysis 1. SEO Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that allows your website and products to appear in search results. Search engine is one of the most common ways for people to find new products, so making your e-commerce website rank high in search results can bring many visitors and customers to your website. For e-commerce websites, your content may appear in multiple places in the search results. The first search result is in the traditional Baidu search. These results can include simple titles and descriptions, or some product pictures. This usually happens on the product category page, as shown below. Baidu Pictures If the search engine has crawled and indexed the pictures on your product page, then they will have a chance to appear in the picture library for related search. Selling your e-commerce products on the whole network can also appear in the results of selling labels on the whole network. These lists look like traditional e-commerce category pages, with featured pictures, product names and prices. The best-selling search on the whole network is different from Baidu pictures. The content displayed in the former is obtained when you crawl your website. The latter requires you to access some e-commerce platforms, such as JD.COM and Taobao. To optimize the SEO of your e-commerce website, please follow the following steps: Step 1: Conduct keyword search. The first step of e-commerce search engine optimization is keyword research. Knowing the exact keywords used by customers will help you optimize your website accordingly. When you are looking for a good keyword target, it is important to consider competition and search volume. Commonly used words with the highest search volume are often the most competitive. For example, keywords like "server". You may sell the server and make it a relevant keyword, but it will be difficult to surpass such big enterprises as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud and Huawei Cloud. Effective methods are still targeted. Related keywords are long tail keywords. For example, "Hong Kong filing-free cloud server". These words are very specific and usually not very competitive. They also indicate a higher intention, which means that searchers are more likely to make a purchase after clicking on your website. Once you have your target keywords, you need to add them to your website. There are also several important SEO elements to optimize these. Step 2: Add alternate text to all pictures. Alternate text is an HTML text label applied to an image. They give a short written description of the image content. These tags help search engines understand your pictures and websites, making them an important SEO factor. There are many pictures on the e-commerce website. You need to add the most relevant keywords to every product picture and banner on the website. Step 3: Improve the page speed. A fast website is very important for your store's ranking ability. Slow pages lead to poor user experience, so Google punishes them for low ranking. Ensuring that your page loads quickly will bring better search performance and more visitors' participation and sales. Step 4: Optimize the website architecture. Website architecture (hierarchical structure of website pages) is an important search engine optimization factor, because it helps search engines and users find information and understand your website. For an e-commerce website, you should make sure that your products are clearly classified. Your home page should link to all major classified pages, and no page should be clicked more than three times. 2. paid advertising paid advertising is a key part of any e-commerce marketing strategy. Through advertising, you can show your business and products to your target audience at every stage of the buyer's journey. Let's take a look at some effective advertising e-commerce stores. Baidu commodity advertisement Baidu commodity advertisement allows you to display your products and/or stores at the top of Baidu search results. These advertisements can also appear at the top of Baidu search results of some queries. Similar to the natural shopping list, you need to set up a product catalog in Baidu marketing to run Baidu product promotion activities. You can also directly promote your store. For example: Jimuyu opened a shop, Baidu Health Mall, Taobao (including Tmall), JD.COM, Pinduoduo and Suning. 3. Content marketing is the process of creating articles, infographics and other contents, and then sharing these contents with the target audience. With content, potential buyers will know your brand, and regular readers will establish a strong relationship with your enterprise. When they complete the purchase, they will be more likely to consider your brand. Content marketing has an additional advantage, it can improve your search engine optimization, because you can use your content to achieve various keyword rankings. So what kind of content should you create? One way is to write articles about the products you sell. For example, those who sell "pet food" can write articles about "dog food and cat food". You can also write more business terms, such as "What brand of cat food is the best". Another e-commerce content marketing strategy is to publish content on other websites. By using this method, you can reach more potential customers. The more people read your article, the more people will want to know about your business, and then the more people will click to enter your website. 4. Video Marketing Video marketing is a marketing strategy. You use different forms of videos to promote your brand and products. Videos are more likely to attract viewers' attention, and they usually convey information better than text or images. You can create your own brand of video columns and publish videos that highlight your products. This is also a good tutorial and explanation tool to teach your audience how to use your product. Product reviews are also effective in video formats. Many people will go to the video platform to understand and compare products. By creating this kind of video, you can appear in front of potential buyers more quickly and guide them back to your website. 5. Social media marketing Social media network is an integral part of e-commerce marketing strategy. Popular platforms have a huge audience, and many people use them to study brands and products. Although most platforms can conduct e-commerce marketing, where the marketing focus should be depends on your business and its unique needs. Here are some tips for using social media for e-commerce marketing: publish content regularly. In order to improve your social media influence, you need to let your audience put you first. You can achieve this goal by regularly publishing content on your favorite channels. If you have enough content, you can post it every day (preferably at least once every few days). ), in order to really get your audience involved. Contact with influential people. There are a lot of influential people on social media, and they are one of the best ways to market your business. People trust the advice of the influencers they care about. If they find your products from influential people, many people will flock to them. E-commerce brands can establish contact with influencers through endorsements of sponsors. Influential people will share your products to get paid, and you will enjoy the benefits of sales and brand awareness. Holding activities is a good way to attract and give back to the audience. Everyone likes free prizes, so they usually have a strong reaction to the trial activities. A common social media content is "like and share". You can get a free gift by guiding users to pay attention to your page, like and share a specific post. Pay attention to the content produced by users. User-produced content is content created by followers, including your brand. The most common form of user-generated content is to publish usage or pictures of customers and products. Brands can be marked so that others can participate. The content produced by users can win sales very effectively. 6. Alliance marketing Alliance marketing means that other people and companies promote your products for you. When they lead to sales, they earn commissions. Alliance marketing is very important for e-commerce companies. This is because you can use other people's efforts to reach your audience, and you don't have to pay the money cost before they bring you sales revenue. They have their own established audience and let your brand be displayed in front of more people. The key to the success of alliance marketing plan is high-quality partners. In order to attract high-quality partners, you need to establish an excellent commission structure. A well-paid alliance marketing plan will make more partners willing to promote your products. For example, the commission rate of Taobao Alliance is usually between 3% and 50%. The amount of commission you provide should depend on the profitability of your industry and products and the value of your partners. If someone brings a lot of sales, you can give them more commissions or other exclusive offers. 7. Society proves that marketing trust is the engine to promote sales. It takes a long time for your customers to trust you, but there are some techniques to improve your credibility. Social proof is one of the simple but very effective strategies used by big brands and small businesses. It is based on a psychological assumption that people tend to obey other people's behaviors because they think these behaviors reflect the expected correct behavior. Social proof is widely used in marketing, and you can easily use it without spending a penny. You can do better by sharing customer recommendations, subscribers and other relevant statistics that may impress your target audience. 8. E-commerce analysis The key to the success of any e-commerce marketing strategy is to monitor the performance of your marketing activities at all times. You need to know what is effective and what is not, so that you can know where to pay more attention and where to adjust. Key performance indicators (KPI) are used to track and measure the success of e-commerce marketing. Next, let's take a look at the KPI that needs to be tracked most in e-commerce: the conversion rate refers to the percentage of users who perform specific operations on your website. This operation can be to place an order or register an email message. The following is the calculation method of conversion rate. Suppose you have 100 visitors, and 5 of them place an order, then your conversion rate is 5%. Conversion rate is one of the most important indicators of e-commerce because it is a clear indicator. Improving your conversion rate also improves almost all other KPIs. Average order value The average order value is the average amount spent by customers in each transaction. This is an important KPI to track because it shows how you sell a variety of products and how to perform cross-selling and up-selling activities. Customer Lifetime Value Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) measures the average consumption of buyers in their lifetime. This indicator is very important because it shows your ability to retain customers and promote repeat purchases. Gross merchandise (GMV) is the total value of products sold in a period of time. The obvious reason why GMV is important is that it shows how much sales revenue you bring. Return on Advertising Expenditure (ROAS) measures the income generated by every dollar you spend on advertising. For example, if you spend 5,000 yuan on advertising activities and the advertising activities generate 20,000 yuan in revenue, your ROAS is (400%). This means that every consumption of 1 yuan will generate 4 yuan's return. ROAS is important because it shows the effectiveness of your marketing activities. Customer acquisition cost Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the average amount you need to spend to acquire new customers. For example, if you spend 1 0,000 yuan on marketing and get 100 new customers, then the customer acquisition cost is 10 yuan. CAC is very important because it can help you understand the overall profitability. This is also one of the most important key performance indicators that you need to measure at the beginning of your business. In the meantime, you will rely more on paid marketing to promote sales. To sum up, effective marketing is an important part of e-commerce business. By implementing this marketing strategy, your enterprise can reach more audiences you need, attract them, improve their popularity and sell more products.