Your online store should be built on a solid marketing strategy. It should take precedence over anything else.
For the time being, disregard anything else.
This is the one step that will determine whether or not your online store succeeds. You must decide on a marketing plan. It’s not a difficult decision, but it should be made carefully and in preparation.
The majority of online retailers employ one of three marketing strategies:
- Paid Marketing
- search engine optimization
- Marketing on a platform
Let’s take a look at each one.
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Online Stores and SEO
This marketing method is straightforward: discover keywords for the things you want to sell, then get your website to rank for those keywords in Google.
For the search phrase “bookcase,” IKEA, Target, and Amazon, for example, rank very well organically (below the carousel and advertisements) SEO. That implies that when hundreds of people search for “bookcase” every day, they will be directed to their websites, where they can buy one.
You can generate a lot of money with your online store if you put this method to work for you.
There are a few advantages to SEO that are beneficial to a business:
- The traffic streams are fairly consistent, which equals consistent revenue for your company.
- Search traffic often generates the most traffic of any traffic source.
- Search traffic may be quite valuable even at scale.
dependable, profitable, and large volume It has everything you could ever desire.
There is one significant disadvantage: SEO requires a significant amount of time and work. It can take 3–6 months for your site to appear on the first or second page of search results for a term, even if you’re chasing a product category with no competitors.
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Until you get your page into the top 1–3 results for a term, the visitor volume will be minimal. It can take years of effort to reach that stage if your industry is even moderately competitive.
If you choose SEO as your online store’s marketing strategy, you’ll concentrate on three things:
- Use product keywords to optimize your product pages.
Creating interesting and valuable content for non-product keywords in your category. This improves the ranking of your product pages. - Make your content so good that it becomes a resource for others.
When it comes to SEO, just two factors are important: content and links. As a result, you’ll be spending the majority of your time there.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising for Online Stores
Paid marketing works incredibly effectively for some internet firms. This includes paid Instagram and Facebook posts, as well as paid Google search results. Paid marketing entails purchasing ad space.
Is sponsored promotion, however, appropriate for your company?
My general rule of thumb is that if your product is the type that may be shown in a mall, paid marketing is a terrific alternative.
Online Store Platform Marketing
This is an entirely different approach from the previous two ways.
Instead of setting up your own store and relying on marketing to drive visitors, you’ll choose one of the most popular e-commerce platforms:
- Amazon
- Etsy
- eBay
It is certainly feasible to succeed in any of these three areas. The majority of people should go after Amazon. Amazon’s audience is far greater, which provides you more potential, and Amazon currently has a presence in almost every product sector.
The only exception is if you’re running a craft company, such as creating and selling your own bookends. Etsy is a better fit in this scenario because the audience expects more craft-oriented products.
If you’re doing a lot of buying and selling, eBay is still a good option. However, if you constantly produce the same types of things, your Amazon potential is considerably greater.
You can use whichever platform you want as a marketing channel. You’ll start by creating a store on that platform and listing all of your products. Second, you’ll do everything you can to optimize your store so that the platform wants to highlight your products.
Typically, optimizing your store entails concentrating on two areas:
- Use precise terms searched for within the platform to target your product pages
- Obtaining as many 5-star reviews as possible for your products.
More people will find your products on that platform as your search phrases and reviews increase, resulting in more sales for you.