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The eCommerce market is growing like crazy and looks like there’s no pause for its growth.
Imagine that you started off with an idea to create an eCommerce brand around sustainable living and to launch you started out with T-shirts, you started off well, got your prototype build tested, and now it’s time to grow.
Now growth happens when you reach your target audience at the right time in the right place.
As you now have to move away from the manual process of selling your products online (which you did before making it open your online store to a bigger audience) towards building a scalable and repeatable marketing channel that can give consistent results for your brands.
Typically new e-commerce brands struggle at this point as they know that their product is good enough for people as they have got the validation from a set of customers but now they don’t know how to grow from here and which marketing channel they need to focus more on.
Questions like:
“ Where should I put more focus on”
“This brand in our segment is doing this so I should also do the same”
Always tickles their mind and makes them confused as there’s a lot of advice out there in the market and all these sounds interesting but confusing at the same time.
Now there’s no one size fits for every eCommerce brand, as every brand and its products are different so are their customer's intent in different channels.
To answer questions like this which I had also personally encountered while I was working with many upcoming and growing eCommerce brands.
In this blog, I have shared the top 9 channels which every D2C brand must use to grow and also the suggestion for budget allocation.
Now as I have said in that there’s no one channel fits all startups so it’s highly suggestible that you should evaluate all these channels
Before we know what channels to use we should know where these channels fit according to a customer journey.
Customer Journey of an eCommerce brand
A customer journey is nothing but a series of steps the customer takes from an unknown person to becoming a loyal customer of your brand.
Now there are multiple ways and routes where customers might touch you, for example, someone might see your social media post and will visit your website from there and some might hear from an internet publication about your products.
Every customer behaves differently so it’s best to presume the best possible steps a typical customer would take.
Here’s how I think of customer journeys with a Dating to marriage analogy.
Just if you want to build a relationship with someone you first attract them tried to have a small conversation and get them to connect with them on social media, WhatsApp, etc then once you have built that trust then you typically ask out for a date and if that date goes well you continue to nurture and then finally ask for the marriage.
7 popular Marketing channels for eCommerce brands
1. Organic Social
These are your typical social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc but without the paying, for advertising that means with social media you need to create content and keep posting stuff about your brand, your products how they solve the problem of a customer and so on to make the customer aware of your brand get attracted and can make them customers
As this is a FREE form of marketing so there’s very little barrier to entry you just need to stay at the top of the trend and optimise your social media accounts or pages accordingly.
Pro Tip: Try to add the link to your website on your social handles + add keywords related to your products
2. Paid Social
Paid social is a medium to promote your brand and products on social media channels like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, etc by paying them to advertise your products on them.
Typically for every eCommerce brand this is the best channel to start out with.
As organic social takes a lot of time to get some results with paid social advertising you can easily jump this slow growth process and test your products by advertising your products on social media rather than depending on organic social
Popular channels underpaid social remains Facebook ads which also adds other apps that belong to the Meta app family (Instagram, Whatsapp, messenger, etc )
Pro Tip: Start with setting up organic social but put extra focus and budget on paid social. Don’t get me wrong you need an organic social media presence also because as social media sites their main focus is to build engagement with Amazon their user base so if you maintain your organic social post and content flow these platforms favor you in advertising + customers when they see add from your brand they tend to check your social profile.
3. Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimization or popularly called SEO is the way of promoting your brand and products on the search engines organically whenever a customer is searching for your product or similar products like yours.
It’s again a free medium where you don’t have to pay the platform any advertising fees to get started and build a brand.To make your website or products rank on the top of search results whenever a customer searches for your product or similar products like yours you need to create valuable content based on different keywords and optimise your rankings on social media With Typof you can do that with ease using our automated SEO optimizer that is inbuilt with Typof and optimise the SEO performance of your online store.Top SEO channels are Google and Bing which captures more than 90% of the search market space.
Pro Tip: Try to also optimize the images of your product page with an alt tag. Typof does it in automation so you don’t have to scratch your head for that.
4. Search engine marketing:
Search engine marketing is the paid for getting in the top of the beach results for your targeted keywords when a customer is searching for your product or a similar product like yours.For that, you need to sign up for an advertising account with a search engine like Google - Google Ads.With this, you get access to the entire search property of google and can display your products based on the keywords you wanna appear for.This requires you to set keywords, optimize your landing page, and a lot of other factors.
5. Affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is a way of promoting your products via 3rd party. It can be through specific websites like cashkaro.com, coupon bazaar etc or via individuals these could be bloggers or influencers. Unlike Organic social and SEO this medium is not free you have to pay the 3rd party based on different monetary models which they have agreed upon.
6. Influence marketing:
Influencer marketing is a marketing channel that lets a brand promote its product to its target user through some key influencers that share their experience of the product with their audience.Typically Influencer marketing is used by all levels of companies whether it be new brands or established corporations.
It’s the best way to build trust among your desired target audience. Influencer marketing again can be a free method and paid too. Brands typically use the barter method to work with influencers for FREE or use the affiliate model where they share a percentage of the revenue of each successful customer that buys products from them.
Pro Tip: Attributing sales is often tricky when you do influencer marketing campaigns so try to use software that manages or uses UTM that can track a specific user that get referred by the influencer.
7. Email
Email might not sound really interesting against other marketing channels like social media or Advertising but it is really one of the strongest channels when it comes to maximising profits at the best Return on investment (ROI).
According to Hubspot, every dollar that is invested in Email gets back 32 dollars on return. That’s amazing, it's something that no other channel can give you for sure.
Now that you know these marketing channels it’s time to implement and take a test ride of these platforms by exploring and finding which one gives you the maximum result and which one doesn’t.
FAQ
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