Tips & Guides — 09 May 2023
Marketing Plan for eCommerce
Online shopping is one of the world’s most popular online activities, with sales of $4.28 trillion generated in 2020, and these looking to grow to $5.4 trillion by 2022.
These are serious numbers. Numbers that your ecommerce business can contribute to if your digital marketing plan is up to scratch.
To get started on your journey and acquire a large piece of the ecommerce pie, you need to create a top-notch marketing plan and execute this.
In this post, we’ll cover all the essential steps and tips to help you build an effective digital marketing plan for your ecommerce business:
First and foremost…
A marketing plan provides a blueprint for how a company should carry out its marketing strategies to promote its brand, acquire new customers, communicate with and retain existing ones, and achieve any other designated goals.
It’s written for use over a specific period and provides a current situation analysis of your business and, tailored to your industry, target audience, and chosen strategies builds a bridge between this and your future goals.
Some examples of elements that make up a marketing plan include buyer personas and a mission statement.
Your marketing plan doesn’t have to be war and peace. But it does require careful consideration. Composing a detailed plan with all the necessary information to carry out your campaign in one place will help you stay on track and measure the success of your strategies and where you are in achieving your goals.
Both plans are integral to helping businesses organize their operations and benchmark their successes and failures. However, a marketing plan is a much more specialized and comprehensive document and makes up just an element of a business plan.
The purpose of a marketing plan is to set out exactly how to promote your business’s products or services to your target audience. Your plan should establish the marketing strategies you’re going to utilize, pinpoint your buyer personas, identify the best marketing channels, and show an awareness of the competition to achieve your short-term goals.
A business plan looks at the business as a whole – covering financial plans and statements, sales, operations, your products or services, and how these elements all relate to each other. It sets out your company’s future objectives and strategies for achieving them in the medium and long term.
Business plans are typically only shared with key executives, potential investors, and financial advisors, while the audience for marketing plans tends only to encompass only the employees responsible for marketing, sales, and advertising.
A marketing strategy is your approach to achieving and maintaining a competitive advantage. It’s shaped by and should reflect and support your business goals.
Driven by your marketing strategy, your marketing plan details the activities you must execute to achieve your marketing goals over a set period. A marketing plan typically explains what you’re going to do, when, where, who your target audience is, and how you’ll track the progress toward your goals.
Marketing strategies have longer lifespans than marketing plans because they contain value propositions and other critical facets of your brand, which tend to remain constant in the long term.
In short, your marketing strategy is your big-picture messaging, and your marketing plan breaks down the operational details behind this and specific campaigns.
Your marketing strategy and marketing plan work together to promote and grow your business.
54% of all ad expenditure in 2020 was attributed to online marketing activities. It makes sense, therefore, to plan well for this major portion of your marketing spend.
Creating a marketing plan helps you to gain a clear vision of your ideal customer base and use this to drive you toward your goals. After all, the success of ad campaigns hinges on ensuring your ads reach the right audience. Your plan should therefore detail how you’ll do this.
Adopting a platform for ecommerce like Affise can help you establish a successful marketing plan by enabling you to identify your target audience and broaden this. Affise equips you with smart targeting tools, allowing you to perform accurate geotargeting and build better customer profiles.
Ad agency AppricotAds enjoyed a 58% increase in ROI after they started using Affise’s platform with access to its valuable IP intelligence tech.
In today’s market, an all-encompassing digital customer experience definition includes completely personalized, bespoke experiences for every customer. Your marketing plan should help you deliver these, detailing how to tailor messaging to your target demographic and reach this on their preferred platforms.
It can also help to inform your strategy. With a thorough overview of your current marketing activities, metrics, and competitors, you’ll be able to identify your weaknesses and how you can address these.
If, for example, you notice that your website hasn’t been updated for a while, your traffic is low, your bounce rates are high, and competitors’ sites are more modern and appear higher up on SERPs, you’ll be able to recognize the need to invest in web development and content marketing.
Your plan will also help you track your progress towards achieving your goals. By setting timeframes and picking out KPIs to monitor, you’ll be able to assess the success of your efforts throughout your campaign to make sure you’re headed down the right path. A platform like Affise can also provide you with a detailed view of your performance metrics.
There’s a lot to a marketing plan. But don’t fret. We’re going to talk you through the stages step by step, with plenty of business marketing plan examples.
Based on your goals, you need to determine if you’re going to take a broad or specific approach to your plan. Do you want to focus on overall improvement, or does achieving your goals necessitate a narrower focus?
Say that your business develops testing software, and, using an agile approach, your team has made efficiencies to the way exploratory tests are generated within this, revolutionizing the effectiveness of this type of testing and making you stand out from competitors.
If your goal is to make prospects aware of the benefits of your product, a broad approach would work on boosting your marketing efforts as a whole, promoting your message across channels, from social media to paid marketing, using a combination of tactics.
A more specific approach would instead see you zero in on certain channels and tactics. You might direct your attention to SEO (Search engine optimization) to optimize your website for keywords relevant to “exploratory testing” so that it appears higher in the search results when prospects search for these terms. A content marketing approach might tie into this to lend your brand and site authority and credibility in your area of expertise – both boosting your SEO efforts and building your reputation in the eyes of your audience as a key figure in your industry.
A specific approach will also allow you to monitor key metrics in detail instead of more generic KPIs. As per the above example, your detailed metrics to track might include keyword rankings, organic traffic, organic click-through rate, blog post visits, and bounce rate. But following a more generalized approach, your metrics could consist of sales growth, leads, and conversions.
Prospects can find and interact with you across a huge variety of channels, so it’s crucial to understand which of these are your primary drivers of business, traffic, and conversions. Auditing each platform you operate on and producing a report that encompasses metrics like site traffic, your average number of posts, or click-through rate over the last year will help you assess this.
Core marketing channels include:
You should then rank these channels in order of effectiveness to determine which to prioritize.
To identify your objectives, think about the “what”, “how”, and “when” of your campaign. Specifically, what you want to achieve, how you’re going to achieve it, and “when it must be achieved.”
Think SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
Let’s break it down:
Specific
Keep your objectives precise and quantifiable. Ask yourself why each goal is important and which of your teams are required to help you carry these out.
Measurable
Make sure your progress toward your goals can be monitored easily. Have a plan and equip yourself with the tools to track key KPIs like your number of conversions, impressions, clicks, etc. This will help you stay motivated on the path towards your goals and allow you to check your progress and tick off tasks to meet deadlines.
Attainable
Analyze if meeting your objectives is realistic at this current time. Consider if there are any constraints to you achieving these.
Relevant
Why is it essential right now to execute these aims? Do these objectives align with your other business goals?
Time-bound
Set out a realistic time scale within which you aim to reach your objectives.
“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” – Bill Copeland
SWOT analysis is a framework that allows you to identify your business’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats to gain a better understanding of your business’s position in the market and in comparison to competitors. It assesses internal and external factors and your current position and future potential to help you develop your strategic planning.
Take advantage of the SWOT analysis technique to assess four crucial aspects of your business:
Strengths – These describe what your company excels at: What’s your unique selling proposition (USP)? How can you use this to out-maneuver your competition? What are some of the key resources, processes, and capabilities that your company has? Which products are performing well?
Examples: a loyal customer base, robust supply chain, strong, recognizable brand, advanced proprietary tech
Weaknesses – These identify the areas in which your business needs to grow to stay competitive: What is your company lacking compared to your competitors? Which products are underperforming?
Examples: poor cash flow, a lack of capital, high customer turnover, inadequate supply chain, low employee retention
Opportunities – These refer to external factors that could give your business a competitive advantage. What are the biggest trends in the market that could give your company an edge? Are there any new markets you could explore? Could you use new tech to make efficiencies to your operation?
Examples: tariffs on particular goods might be decreased in a new market, providing you with the opportunity to grow your market share and sales. You might have the chance to switch to a new supplier or collaborate with a powerful influencer in your industry.
Threats – These describe factors that could potentially have a negative impact on your business. What consumer trends could threaten your business performance and success? Are there any new regulations coming into play that will affect operations? Are any competitors impinging on your USP?
Example: increased cost of materials, competition, droughts, changing tariffs, regulations
Here is a real-life SWOT analysis using Amazon as an example:
As you can see, this analysis must be realistic, fact-based, and data-driven to provide a completely objective view of where the problems lie and how to solve them.
Check your SWOT analysis to see if your business strengths align with potential opportunities. Ask yourself: if you address relevant weaknesses, would that uncover more opportunities for business growth?
A SWOT analysis is a valuable business tool. Executed correctly, it can inspire your team to think outside the box and discover valuable new opportunities to include in your plan.
You must make yourself aware of your competition and the competitive landscape in your industry. Research your key competitors and create profiles on these to determine their marketing strategies, how they’re executing these, and on which channels their efforts are centered.
Conduct a thorough analysis of competitors’ target audiences, their websites, their content. You want to know it all.
Then consider strategies to counter those of your competitors and gain more business.
Another benefit of performing competitor analysis is that it will help you predict future market trends and development opportunities, allowing you to adjust your marketing strategies as quickly as possible.
Buyer personas should be a reflection of your business’s existing customers and those you aim to attract. Generating profiles for your customers gives you a great insight into who is actually purchasing from you. These personas can include customers’ age, sex, location, family size, job title, and more.
To build realistic buyer personas, put your customers’ hats on. See what they see and understand their problems. Only then can you attempt to solve them with your business’s solutions.
We’ll now uncover the key aspects of a digital marketing plan in more detail.
No pressure, but this bit is really important. What you write here has a considerable influence on your overall plan.
Your executive summary should include a high-level, succinct overview of your brand objectives, marketing tactics, and activities. Shoot for this to make up between 5-10% of your entire plan.
This intro to your plan lets readers understand where your business is heading and how it’ll get there.
Just because the executive summary acts as an intro to your plan doesn’t mean you should start with it. Aim to write this when you’ve finished planning and established all your necessary marketing actions.
Elements to include:
From reading your executive summary, it should be possible to gain a strong understanding of your marketing goals. Remember to keep it up-to-date to reflect any global changes.
Pro tip: Use engaging language to spark and maintain interest. Relaying your brand’s story and journey compellingly will help persuade readers to stay focused until the end of the marketing plan.
The big WHY.
Why did you decide on this business model? What’s your solution to your customers’ problems?
There are typically the three core elements to a great business mission statement:
Think concise, strong, and to the point, with personality. 100 words are plenty.
Want us to break it down more for you? Go on then.
The business’s overall vision
Your vision for the business encompasses the overarching goal of the company and the actions that you’ll take to attain this.
For example:
“To connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.” – LinkedIn
The business’s core values
The principles that support the business’s culture and overall vision.
Aims and objectives
Your business goals and the time frames within which you aim to achieve these.
Pro tip: Ask your marketing team for their input into your business’s mission statement, as their opinions must align with the business’s goals. Ensure everyone is on the same page in terms of their aspirations.
Delving into your SWOT analysis a little deeper, we’ll now explore some examples of business strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and how to address these. This will help to develop your messaging and position in the market.
Consider your capabilities and how these help you stand out in your industry and discover how you can make the most of these.
Business example: Walmart’s business strengths include highly-efficient global supply chains. This means they are resilient to smaller supply chain threats.
SWOT recommendation: Implement strategic changes to prepare the business for long-term developments of a globalized and increasingly ecommerce-based business market.
Identify what might be missing in your business model that your competitors excel at so that you can make improvements quickly.
Business example: Tech giant Apple are aware of their weakness in pricing. Their prices are high, so their products don’t appeal to the whole market. They also have a limited distribution network.
SWOT recommendation: Continue the rapid innovation of products and establish partnerships with more distributors to improve market reach.
How can you capitalize on external factors to give you a competitive advantage?
Business example: Samsung enjoys an exclusive partnership with Spotify, facilitating business growth and great benefits to their consumers.
SWOT recommendation: Take advantage of partnerships like Spotify to seek new opportunities and continue to offer great value services to the target market.
Threats include market changes affecting business success and overall performance. Threats are external factors out of your control, but being aware of them helps you prepare to handle them.
Business example: PepsiCo recognize a huge threat in their major rival, Coca-Cola. Competition is fierce, and they also suffer backlash from healthy lifestyle influencers.
SWOT recommendation: Seek to improve their product’s image to gain more consumers.
This should enable a reader to understand your competition and what the competitive landscape looks like within your industry or niche.
Firstly, find out more about companies in your industry. Start noting down the following information about these:
Next, discover who your competitors’ target audience is. This gives you an insight into potential demographics your business might not currently reach or target.
To stay competitive across all platforms, you should maintain an awareness of your competitor’s content strategy. Examine their content to determine who their potential customers are, how engaged they are, and whether their demographics overlap with yours.
Look at things like:
Their website is a treasure trove of information. What your competitors include on their websites can influence your own approach. It’s great news if your competitors are missing obvious tricks on their websites; not so great if they’ve captured a sought-after market. Whether good or bad, you need to know it all to improve your business’s offering.
Takes notes on:
This is a crucial step. You need to know how your competitors fare against Google and its ever-changing algorithms. You can also discover the keywords your competitors rank for to add these to your target list for search engine optimization.
To assess their SEO strategy’s success, search relevant industry keywords to see where they appear in search results. Check different search engines, such as Bing, to find out where they appear on SERPs. By identifying the terms competitors rank for, you’ll uncover potential gaps to exploit.
Do your competitors currently display featured snippets as search results? This is a gold star from Google, demonstrating their content is extremely valuable and worthy of display.
Check out your competitors’ social media profiles to gain an insight into their content marketing strategies:
Social platforms are great for finding out what their customers think of their brand and if they experience successful referral trade.
For example, they may be publishing great Facebook posts, but the responses from their audience might reflect that their customer service is poor. This would make for a perfect opportunity to showcase your own superior customer service.
Head to review sites such as Trustpilot for customer insights. Once you’ve identified competitor weaknesses, you can ensure your business’s offering is better.
Your competition’s marketing goals may not align with your own, but it makes sense to gain as much knowledge as possible about them to build an all-encompassing plan.
Your USP is what converts site visitors into new customers, and you should promote it at every online opportunity. Your USP is your differentiator for consumers. When faced with similar products or services, they’ll need help understanding which product is best for them and why.
To determine your business’s USP, consider and make clear who your business exists to serve and the problems you want to solve.
Business example:
Stripe is an online payment processing provider. Their main competition is PayPal. To differentiate themselves, their USP reflects their desire to align with developers:
“Millions of businesses of all sizes – from startups to large enterprises – use Stripe’s software and APIs to accept payments, send payouts, and manage their business online.”
The message is clear – Stripe offers businesses complete control of payment processes.
USP’s are typically placed in one of three categories:
You should plan to draw prospects’ attention to your key differentiators using a range of techniques:
The next step is to gain a strong understanding of your target demographic and create buyer personas to reflect this.
Taking the time to identify buyer persona traits, goals, and habits makes it simpler to cater your marketing strategies to them.
Let’s look at some methods to identify your target market.
Google Analytics is a great dashboard for establishing who is searching for what on your website. One step further is to investigate Google Ads for retargeting purposes and customized customer data.
Create your different buyer personas and bring your target audience to life. To reach new customers, you need to visualize them and understand what they want and need.
Start by drafting some questions to create the first buyer persona. This person should be a representation of your ideal customer.
These are some key questions:
The following is an example of a real estate development company’s ideal customer.
Painting such a detailed picture of your customers will allow you to understand them well and target them more effectively.
From his profile, we’ve learned that to win Mr. Seasoned Investor’s custom, a real estate business should: be honest and transparent with him throughout the customer journey, make clear the prospects of yielding a good return, and assure him of the longevity of this opportunity.
Your business’s KPIs underpin your marketing plan. We’ll explore some marketing strategies and the KPIs that correspond best with these, and how you should select KPIs based on your own specific goals.
The KPIs you select will depend on the marketing strategies you plan to execute.
The success of an email marketing strategy is typically defined by open and click-through rates (CTR).
But the outcome of a content marketing strategy is assessed by page visits, bounce rate, organic traffic, and conversions.
These metrics can be tracked by Affise’s Analytics and Business Intelligence tools. Monitor marketing performance through an intuitive dashboard, and create meaningful reports from data to share with your marketing team.
This analytics solution integrates data from other analytical tools such Google Ads, Facebook for Business, and TikTok for Business.
Referral marketing KPIs refer to the percentage of referrals converted into new customers. And social media KPIs are all about generating lead and customer conversions driven from your social media platforms.
Remember our SMART business goals from the beginning? They’re back in play.
The metrics you choose must align with your business goals.
To select appropriate KPIs, ask yourself:
For example, let’s say you set a business goal to improve your website to boost the customer experience and drive traffic.
In this example, relevant KPIs to track are:
This is where you lay out the plans for your intended promotional and distribution channels.
What kind of marketing content will you be distributing? On which channels? How often?
Your digital content is written to communicate your brand. This should include:
Consider the creation and distribution of your digital content. All content must be well structured, offer value to your target audience, and improve the overall user experience.
Ah, social media. It’s a love/hate relationship, isn’t it?
Your social media marketing strategy is critical, and while the overarching goal for each of your many channels might be consistent- to increase engagement, and therefore, conversions, your approach to each of these should be unique. Different platforms require different messaging. The content should be different, and the posting times different, too.
But which platforms are best for your business message and ethos?
Facebook is for your business if your:
Facebook’s largest age group is 25-34 year-olds, spending on average 33 minutes per day browsing this social platform.
Facebook ads and videos are the strongest performing strategies on this social platform.
Twitter is worth using if your:
Primarily, 30-49 year-olds are the main age group using Twitter for an average of 31 minutes per day.
Interactive content, such as engaging images and videos, is ideal for Twitter. Users love immersive video content. Use relevant links and jump in with up-to-the-minute memes and GIFs for maximum traction.
Instagram is great for content if your:
Instagram’s main audience is also 25-34 year-olds, scrolling their feeds for an average of 29 minutes per day.
Partnership marketing is a valuable tool on this platform. Connecting with industry-relevant influencers is a natural fit and a high-yield strategy on Instagram.
Affise automates the management of ecommerce partnerships, analyzes performance, and optimizes campaign settings to make finding great partnerships, communicating with partners, and maximizing the productivity of your programs effortless.
The content most engaged with on Instagram includes carousels with high-res images, reels, Instagram Lives, and Stories.
Instagram Stories are perfect for bringing your brand to life. Some great examples of content to include in this format include:
LinkedIn is perfect for your business if your:
LinkedIn‘s largest age group is 46-55 year-olds utilizing the platform for powerful lead generation connections.
To engage with LinkedIn users, short-form, relatable content is your best bet. Focus on encouraging discussions and helping other LinkedIn users.
Don’t limit yourself to the social networks above. TikTok, Snapchat, and Pinterest are up there with the big boys. If your target audience is firmly in the Gen Z camp, TikTok is ideal for targeting influencers.
On to the queen of inspirational content – Pinterest. It’s fantastic if your ecommerce store products contribute to beautiful lifestyle images. In addition, even better if your target audience falls into Pinterest’s key demographic of 50-64 year-olds.
The most popular sections on Pinterest are home decor, food and drinks, design, and DIY. Shoot for 2:3 aspect ratio images with a minimum width of 600 pixels.
Be sure to include targeted and researched keywords on each pin, as they are searchable and indexed by Google. Bonus SEO points!
Your business’s personality comes to life with Snapchat. Experiment with crazy filters and snaps showing behind-the-scenes business activities. With 306 million global daily active users, Snapchat could be just the place for your business to shine.
Of course, you can repurpose your digital content for different social channels with a little effort. Ensure you use relevant platform hashtags and abide by best timings (that’s coming right up!).
Email remains a fundamental part of daily online life. The number of email users in 2020 stood at 4 billion. This figure is predicted to rise to 4.6 billion by 2025.
That’s a lot of opportunities to get your email marketing message out to your target audience.
Suggestions for consumer email communications include:
Don’t forget to monitor your email marketing efforts continuously with ecommerce analytics, to ensure what you’re sending is viable.
Relevant email KPIs to cover with analytics include:
Play around with: different types of email content to see which sparks the most engagement, engaging email subject lines (include emojis if relevant to your audience) to encourage opens, personalized subject lines are great to tempt your recipients into opening your campaign emails.
Combined with partner marketing, emails are an effective digital marketing strategy. Reach out to your marketing partners to collaborate on an email marketing strategy. Ensure the offering is lucrative for both your partners and your business to drive maximum engagement. Your partners will spend more time creating engaging campaigns when there’s a lucrative offer on the table!
For the most successful partner marketing strategies, the offers must be relevant to subscribers’ interests. Consider incorporating evergreen content to minimize the requirement of altering email communication sequences.
Communication shouldn’t stop at the sale.
Automate emails to:
Pro tip: Evergreen content is effective at generating steady streams of new customers – without the need to change email templates constantly.
Getting seen in newsfeeds requires planning. Timing is everything.
The optimal times for posting on social platforms are as follows:
With 2.89 billion monthly active users, Facebook provides a huge audience to engage and gather data from. One post per day is plenty for Facebook.
Fun fact: 98.3% of Facebook users engage from mobile devices.
Twitter remains the consumers’ choice for up-to-date news. Bear in mind that Twitter offers the most direct line of engagement from consumer to business.
Try and aim for at least three tweets per day to keep up with this rapid-fire social media platform. Engage as much as possible with tweets and retweets to continually show up in newsfeeds.
Fun fact: 52% of Twitter users in the US access the social media platform on a daily basis.
Instagram is an ideal platform for social listening. Ensure your business is keeping up with the latest trends in this highly immersive social media space. Think high-quality images (one per day) to boost brand awareness, and explore Instagram Live to connect with your audience. Stories on Instagram can be posted up to 10 times per day.
Fun fact: Instagram influencers in excess of 90,000 followers garner partner marketing revenue of $1,221 per post.
This professional platform is predominantly active during the working week. Initially the go-to platform for recruiting, LinkedIn has established its place for quality content. Encourage your marketing team to appear on LinkedIn, as it’s a perfect fit for employee advocacy.
Fun fact: As of July 2021, LinkedIn had nearly 31.2 million profiles.
*Posting times are recorded in US Central Time.
Now that we have all the relevant information in one place, it’s time to pin down your marketing strategies.
Incorporate timelines with milestone tasks to make it easy for your marketing team to see which tasks need actioning and when.
Co-create your strategies with the rest of your team. This can take the form of brainstorming sessions, informal chats (remember the watercooler?), feedback, and classic question and answer scenarios.
Your marketing budget should center around the estimated cost of your marketing campaigns and activities that will navigate you towards your business objectives.
To set a realistic budget, firstly audit your results from previous marketing efforts. For example, did your Facebook campaigns generate your past goal of driving 20% more traffic to your website?
Some tactics to explore when setting your budget:
Let’s look over some of the key steps to creating your ecommerce marketing strategy.
You can’t achieve objectives without a solid strategy in place. Nail them down. Then write them down.
Objectives should be achievable but not so super simple that they require no effort.
Something along the lines of:
Things to bear in mind when assembling your marketing plan objectives:
Your USP strengthens your business’s brand and persuades potential customers to commit and become customers.
Apply this template to your business. For our example, let’s revisit our meerkat nose ring company. You should identify:
This format quickly explains the business’s USP, placing the emphasis firmly on the customer.
Your business’s brand encompasses so much more than that logo you spend weeks agreeing on. The logo is the cherry on top of what is the whole customer experience with your business.
To solidify your brand’s identity, think long-term about its purpose and how you’ll connect with your audience. Consistent positive customer interactions increase brand awareness overall and reinforce a solid connection between your audience and your brand.
Consider these points when solidifying your brand’s identity:
Who are your products for? Consider your target audience’s buying behaviors, lifestyles, and habits.
How are you different from your competition? Research the rest of your industry – the good, the bad, and the ugly!
Why is it that you do what you do? It’s imperative to understand your why.
This is all about the tone your brand uses to connect with your consumers. Maintain the same voice, style, and personality across every business communication to send out consistent messages across all digital channels.
What makes your business great? Pinpoint the qualities of your company – these can include your team, skills, and processes.
How will you communicate with your audience? Engaging consistently promotes brand trustworthiness and recognition.
Where is your brand positioned compared to the rest of your industry’s market? Find out which of your business values your customers resonate with. You can learn a lot from discovering why your customers think you stand out from the crowd.
Make sure your website provides a top-notch customer experience. The purchasing journey must be enjoyable and effortless. Prospects must be able to find what they’re looking for without wading through a load of unnecessary content.
Your primary contact with users is through your website. It’s the 24/7 showroom for your business, available worldwide on many devices. It puts a face to your business name and brand.
Website visitors are fickle creatures – those first five seconds are crucial (if you’re lucky!) to keep their attention.
Top tips:
Inbound marketing is driven by content. Content is what brings your prospects to your website in the first place, and the content on your website is what converts them into new customers.
Search engines use the keywords entered by users to navigate visitors to your site. What you do with these visitors next determines if they bounce or stay.
We know Google values quality, relevant content. But why?
Content that answers browsers’ questions, alleviates their problems, and provides value is what Google wants to promote. Your website will receive thousands of visitors if you give Google what it wants (that isn’t intended to be as sinister as it sounds).
If Google knows your website provides solutions and quality information people want, they are directed to your website, and everyone is happy. Google has done its job.
Free, informative material speaks volumes on your website. You become the go-to source of information for potential buyers. Your business credibility soars. And when they’re ready to buy – guess who they are going to buy from?
Up next are the different types of digital content strategies, along with when and where to unleash them for maximum effect (conversions).
Attention phase
Information, information, information. Whatever is relevant and correct to your target audience, write it and publish it:
Deliberation phase
Now it’s time to deliver reassurance:
Conversion phase
You’re nearly there now. Reel them in with:
Going back to our target audience and buyer personas- you should tailor your content to suit these and place it strategically where these will find it most accessible.
Your content strategy and SEO drive your website traffic. Continuously assess all digital content, including email marketing content with fresh eyes to see what you can improve.
Partner marketing, when done right, is a no-brainer for expanding your business’s reach across multiple digital channels. Marketing partnerships in ecommerce businesses can increase brand awareness and boost sales. If marketing partnerships are part of your business model, they need to be in your digital marketing plan, too.
Data transfer and connections technology make collaboration with marketing partners simple. If your business handles large volumes of partner marketing offers, they can be time-consuming processes, particularly if they’re carried out manually. CPAPI is the market-leading data transfer platform for partner marketing offers, enabling a fully automated process for transferring and synchronizing data.
The ability to connect seamlessly with advertisers and generate business intelligence easily empowers businesses to harness more than 200 integrated offers sources.
Of course, the success of your partner marketing campaign is down to finding a great partner. For the best results, check out Affise’s partner marketing solution. This platform connects brands with a wide variety of partners to leverage target audiences effectively.
If offers and promo codes make up a large part of your partnership programs, consider adopting Affise’s offer management feature. This allows you to increase brand awareness by creating memorable, product-associated promo codes for partners. Unique promo codes supercharge customer acquisitions and work well both in digital content and social media marketing strategies. Affise’s promo codes tracking feature then enables you to track the success of these with ease.
Specialist performance marketing agency AppMarket Media knew they needed a reliable technology partner to manage their ad campaigns. And thanks to the partnership with Affise, AppMarket Media now have a complete insight into best-performing and live offers. The affiliate link checker features enabled AppMarket Media to stop losing revenue on dead offers and increase their CR.
Include testing and measuring as an integral strategy in your digital marketing plan. Your KPIs are back in play. Attach meaningful KPIs to each campaign, test performance, and learn which strategy is most beneficial.
Consider your industry’s current market conditions when comparing your own business’s performance success. Aim to review your marketing plan every quarter. This is much more often than a business plan, as you need to review your marketing goals frequently. Regular digital marketing plan reviews will allow you to identify patterns, track success, and any failings easily.
Just as the first step in a marketing strategy involves knowing your audience’s online behavior, the last step will always be to measure results and correct possible flaws. But anyone that thinks this process should only be carried out once or twice is wrong. This is a recurring and constant action.
Start tracking as soon as your ecommerce marketing plan comes to life. Test all elements as you go, and make sure your marketing efforts are in the right places. Evaluate possible barriers in your customer’s digital journey, test, and improve. Rinse and repeat.
Investigate negative friction that’s stopping leads from converting into customers and monitor different content types to see if video or blogs are best for conversions.
Monitor on an ongoing basis and continually research your market to develop your marketing plan into a customer-converting machine.
Always keep the key question in mind: “Why do you want to test this metric?”
Whether the overall marketing goal is to increase engagement, CTRs, or revenue, answer the question specifically. This will define how you carry out your analysis and the value of the data you learn.
There’s a lot of information to absorb here. Take your time to digest it and work through each stage methodically.
Your ecommerce digital marketing plan is so much more than a generic business document. Done right, it offers your business a gold mine of valuable information. The process of creating the marketing plan is an eye-opening one. Be honest with the objectives and your business’s weaknesses to improve.
A marketing plan is a document designed to evolve due to knowledge gained throughout the process. Incorporate ecommerce analytics as part of your process to understand user behavior and boost your conversion rate and retention.
Remember – you must create every single piece of marketing content with this thought in mind: “How is my target audience going to get from here to the checkout?”.
Your goal is not to convert every single customer in the world. It’s to create and nurture your relationships with your target customers.
To achieve true ecommerce success and your ultimate dreams, you have to plan for it- target precise goals for business growth and detail how you’ll achieve these.
Hold yourself accountable to the targets set, and success is yours for the taking!
Written by
Jo is the Head of Strategic Marketing at PureClarity— a fast-growing AI-based ecommerce personalisation SaaS solution driving revenue and conversions through personalised shopping experience. She is an expert with over 20 years experience in Marketing, Ecommerce, and Project Management. Jo dedicated her career to empower online retailers and propel their ecommerce growth.
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