Stephanie Shapiro
When reviewing your marketing strategy, it’s important to keep in mind the ultimate goal: to bring awareness to your brand, drive traffic to your website, and convert sales. With so many ways to market your products and website, how do you know where to best spend your time and resources? Unfortunately, there is no easy button or 1, 2, 3 method that every business can adopt, but there are proven methods for the e-commerce world.
Send Those Emails
Some may argue that emails get lost in a sea of overwhelmed inboxes, but email marketing is still the leader in ROI. The average return on investment is $36 for every dollar spent, which is higher than any other e-commerce marketing tool. Emails can be sent to promote products and specials, encourage purchasing through redirect/follow-up, and to foster customer loyalty. Your email should not only have a catchy subject line (which you can play with using methods such as A/B testing), but its content needs to be worthy of that open. A great opener can only keep a person’s attention for so long, and with email, you’re playing a long game to keep unsubscribes down and new subscribers up.
Building your list takes time, and purchasing a list can seem enticing, but you run the risk of turning off potential buyers when you add them to your marketing channels without permission. Depending on which systems you use, your email service provider may require you to attest that you were given explicit permission to have and contact those individuals. Receiving too many spam alerts can shut your account down, even if the majority of your contacts were acquired organically and ethically, so beware of trying to take the quick route to followers. New data privacy laws will also further mold this practice, so stay tuned to our blog as we delve deeper into that this year.
Keep up with Social Media
It’s here to stay, friends. Which sites you use and how you advertise on them is dependent upon your target market. Pew Research Center has taken the guessing out of the equation with their 2024 social media fact sheet. This article includes data analysis broken down by age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, community, and political affiliation. Knowing key facts about your audience and where to find them is paramount to your strategy.
While your use of brand colors, fonts, and themes should stay consistent across channels, it would be a waste of your efforts to simply duplicate imagery and video for every site. You have to tailor your content, even if it’s just small tweaks. One thing to keep in mind is that your imagery must capture the attention of your target audience. You can do this through bold coloring, key words, recognizable faces or places, and nostalgia, to name a few.
Of course you want website visits, but if you can make a sale on social media without needing to redirect, take the sale. An example of this is creating shoppable content on apps such as Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest. By using tools built into the business account centers of these platforms, you remove any barriers to an easy transaction for the customer. They are already viewing your content and like what they see, so making your products clickable increases your chances of conversion.
Analyze Your Search Engine Optimization
Take the time to research. Consult a professional and reassess regularly. SEO is how people will find you/your business in an ocean of never-ending results pages. Properly coding and filling your website improves its visibility and drives traffic. This is the tool that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Optimizing your website means creating quality content, building keyword-heavy category and product pages, using meta tags, and inserting quality backlinks.
An easy place to start would be to perform keyword research and include those keywords in your website’s content and page titles.
Study Consumer Psychology
If you are a marketer by trade, you know that psychology plays a huge role in marketing. Advertisements that evoke emotion, contain certain colors, and tap into the consumer’s social identity all contribute to purchasing decisions. But even those without the best ads can still convert customers by mere exposure. This phenomenon links repetitive exposure to an eventual positive association with the product in question.
You must also consider culture when marketing to certain groups or subgroups. Culture isn’t about the individual, but instead what a group has deemed “normal” or acceptable. It has a strong effect on individuals, even if subconsciously, and influences nearly every element of human psychology.
Maryville University released an easy to read infographic on consumer behavior basics. There, they explore 10 tactics for understanding the purchasing habits of consumers. This includes the stages of a consumer’s decision making process, how to take advantage of impulse purchases, using sensory stimulation, the right language to build trust, and employing new technology such as augmented reality.
Create Content (and then create some more)
In simple terms, content creation is the generation of written or visual media. What you create depends on what would appeal to your audience.
- Video marketing is one way to quickly capture the attention of your viewers. There is a reason YouTube is consistently at the top of all social media platforms and other sites have integrated video into their offerings as well.
- Blogs are also a great way to add content to your website and provide value to your consumers. They can be informational, conversational, or personal. There are no hard and fast rules.
- Infographics allow you to quickly captivate your audience with the information you want to share. It’s also a great segue into more in-depth content such as white papers and case studies.
- Podcasts provide an avenue to push fresh, current voices for your brand straight into the palms of your followers.
These are just a few examples of the types of content you may want to consider as they relate to your business. Being authentic and making your content shareable will allow your art to go further than your own organic reach.
Partner with Influencers
We dove into this topic a couple of months ago, and shared about its potential as well as its risks or considerations. Influencer marketing is a powerful tool that even small businesses can leverage. The accessibility and affordability of today’s biggest stars may not be available to everyone, but using well-known local faces can work just as well as you start to build on this. Even someone with 1,000 followers can bring brand awareness and convert sales. It’s all about the strategy you employ.
Conclusion
We want to know what methods you’re currently employing for your brand. What’s working? What do you need help with? Is there anything you’d like us to focus on or elaborate further for you? Send us an inquiry and let’s discuss your company needs. Until then, keep an eye on us here at Virid. Even bigger things are coming.