The world of digital marketing can be quite complex. It’s ever changing. From one day to the next, an algorithm can change and have a great impact on your business. Having a 360 digital marketing strategy and looking at digital marketing holistically is what can help sustain and truly scale an e-commerce business.
Let’s look at these 8 must have digital marketing strategies:
#1: CONTENT STRATEGY
I put this one first because I think it’s the golden nugget that helps tie everything together. Your content strategy can very well determine how successful and scalable a business can be. Being in the industry for over 20 years, I can tell you that I have seen what a great piece of content can do for a marketing campaign and how it can really change the game. This is where you want to put the most focus on. Creating a sound content strategy that consist of finding the right angles for products, educational, and more. Understanding everything from what should be in your product pages to how landing pages should look and feel.
#2: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)
SEO IS NOT DEAD. Of course it’s not. The people that say SEO is dead are those who don’t have it because they can’t find the right strategy or how to get results from the work they do. SEO always wins on the very basic fundamentals: CONTENT & LINK BUILDING. The latter works best when it mostly happens organically. For that reason, that why I put content strategy at #1, because winning pieces of content create winning channels all around – everything ultimately feeds of the content that is being produced. Think of these channels as distribution and funnel sources.
#3: PAY-PER-CLICK (PPC)
Pay-per-click is not easy because it’s an expensive proposition. Bid against what are the most likely the biggest competitors in your space for keywords to see how you can rank, albeit you’re in a very niche space. However, PPC has been a winning strategy and a must-do to be honest. Google has been the dominant channel for this strategy, as it has been for SEO as well, although now we may be able to make a case for Amazon SEO, right? Like SEO, PPC is another channel that it’s about finding the right strategy to get the right clicks to your ads where it becomes sustainable for your business. Bidding on your own brand name, competitor names, etc can all lead to small winning gains to end up with a solid and sound PPC strategy.
#4: E-MAIL MARKETING
Did someone say, ROI? Yes. E-mail marketing is essential to your digital marketing strategy. I strongly recommend these two articles:
- 6 Reasons E-Mail Marketing Is Still King in Driving Revenue for E-Commerce
- E-Mail Marketing Stats to Note for 2021
If you understand funnels, than email (along with SMS,) are king in this process. Your email marketing strategy will tie many of these channels together by collecting data to help segment messaging, offers, etc.
#5: SOCIA MEDIA MARKETING
Social media can be broken down into a few different channels that serve different purposes. All the way from prospecting top of the funnel customers to customer service. There has been NOTHING more powerful in the last few years than Facebook / Instagram paid marketing. Yes, your organic social strategy is important, but your paid social media strategy is what drives real growth at scale. It can literally change a business overnight. This comes back to point #1 on content. Without the right content, you will go nowhere. Having said that, within this bucket, throw in optimization of audiences, ad copy, image assets, to truly win in paid search.
#6: SMS MARKETING
May be the most powerful strategy in the last 2-3 years in a big way. Like social, this plays on prospecting, funneling, and support channel. In speaking with many e-commerce retailers, I’m always surprised to find how many leave this channel out of their strategy, but I also find it the most opportunistic. I have seen thousands of dollars being made from 1 sms message to a customer base. I recommend this article: SMS is the strongest marketing tool – 98% Open Rate
#7: VIDEO MARKETING
This plays into #1 as content strategy. However, two powerful platforms where video content is heavily distributed for prospecting and retention is Youtube and Facebook/Instagram. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world, if you have a product and not creating video around your product such as reviews and educational content that helps consumers with questions, concerns, etc, they may have about your product, you’re losing to your competitors who can be anyone in a room just speaking to a product linking to an Amazon product as an affiliate. Get in there, it’s worth it.
#8: VOICE MARKETING
You can’t ignore voice. With the rise of Siri and Alexa, mass adoption of voice is on the rise. See this article: Comparing standard search vs. voice search in Google Start learning more and understand the works and algorithm of voice SEO and how standard search differs from voice search.
5 ways to improve on voice seo.
- Optimize for Rich Answers.
- Re-Imagine and Restructure Your Content.
- Use Conversational Language for Content.
- Target Long-Tail Keyword Phrases.
- Improve Loading Time of Your Website.
