Entrepreneurs who have taken the leap into starting an ecommerce business with their own website will quickly learn that ecommerce digital marketing will make or break their success. As a business owner, you can have the best products and price them at the most competitive price points but if no one finds your website, it won’t matter. Sadly, your ecommerce business will slowly die regardless of how nice your site looks, how great your products are and how competitive your pricing is. What solves this? Ecommerce digital marketing is the skill you will want to learn. Ecommerce digital marketing is learning how to drive traffic and awareness to your website once it is published and without traffic to your website, you will not have leads to convert to paying customers. So what makes up ecommerce digital marketing?
There are many different ways that a ecommerce website can drive traffic to their website. Some of these ways require time and effort, some require capital to be spent and others require relationship building. The key to success is to not invest in only one of the ecommerce digital marketing approaches but all of them to be really successful. So let’s get specific.
Organic Traffic: A key part of your ecommerce digital marketing strategy has to be to drive organic traffic to your website. What does organic traffic mean? This would be any time someone goes to a search engine like Google and searches for a value your website results on page 1 and they click over to your website. Alternatively driving traffic from social media platforms, forums or blogs to get traffic to your site. Organic traffic to your ecommerce website requires a lot of time as you will not rank quickly in search engines and you need to deliver quality content on your website by using a blog or product pages, you need to gain backlinks by working with other website owners to link back to you and you need to invest energy into social media platforms to create and grow your presence.
While the cost of organic traffic is low, the time commitment is high as you need to constantly work on all of the areas involved to drive your search engine rank to be found as well as committing to a long term social media presence to gain and establish a real brand. Organic traffic as part of your ecommerce digital marketing strategy in the long run will be the cheapest and longest lasting way to grow your business and you should start on this right away as it does take a while to really gain the benefits.
Paid Traffic: While organic traffic takes time to build your website a solid page rank on search engines and be found on social media platforms, paid traffic is an immediate win as you are paying for banners to show with your brand in visible places and paying when someone clicks through your banner to your website. You will see abbreviations of PPC which means pay per click which is what you are doing on social media platforms like Facebook or search engines like Google where you can setup an account, identify keywords that when someone is searching for these keywords you can show your brands advertisement. If someone clicks on your advertisement you pay per click based on the cost associated for the specific keyword you chose when setting up your account.
The benefits of paid traffic is that you get an immediate win on your website. You can quickly get traffic and be found so that you can get off of the ground. The negative is that you are paying for this traffic so you need to plan on that with your overall business model to ensure you are still being profitable on the sales of your website when you are spending money to get the traffic, it should be included in your overall cost of goods sold so you can really ensure you are being profitable. Paid traffic helps you especially when you are getting started as organic traffic takes a while to get off of the ground, the paid traffic can give you the win you need until you established the organic traffic. Using this approach is a great way to manage your ecommerce digital marketing as you can immediately be found with paid but with a plan to ramp down your spend on advertisement once your organic traffic kicks in.
Always remember putting an ecommerce website out with products and hoping for the best will not really work. You really need to learn how to become an ecommerce digital marketing expert if you want to be successful with your own website so that you can then drive traffic and awareness to your ecommerce website and convert your site into sales. This requires learning a good deal about SEO or search engine optimization as well as managing a PPC budget across multiple search engines and social media outlets to ensure your success.
