Learn how you can take advantage of dynamic product ads, SEO and content marketing, partnerships and influencers and cart abandonments to improve your marketing strategy.

With these tips, you will increase sales, increase brand awareness and reduce your costs.

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When you’re a startup eCommerce business, your digital marketing strategy will be slightly different from a non-eCommerce business because of the nature of how you do business.

That’s why you need to put further thought into what your marketing strategy is going to be because the rules you play by are different from those of other businesses.

Even though eCommerce is growing, they still only make up 13.2% of retail sales worldwide.

And the industry is cut-throat because chances are, if you are selling something online, Amazon is selling the same product or a product similar. They can price their products lower than anyone and they have the marketing power to sink any ship.

You need to be spending time on marketing activities that are specific to your niche, will pay-off in both the short-term (unless you have money to burn) and long-term.

Not every marketing strategy is planned to be profitable in the short-term by the way; some companies can get away with “wasting” money to get their name out there, but this article is for those eCommerce business owners who can’t and need to make every penny stretch.

Dynamic Product Ads

You’ve got to be using dynamic product ads as an eCommerce business because they’re specifically built for eCommerce.

They have no other purpose.

For example, 9FIVE saw a 3.8x return on ad spend and a 40% lower cost per acquisition using dynamic product ads.

What is a dynamic product ad?

They are ads that are super-specific and target people who have just viewed or purchased a particular product.

They’re perfect for cross-selling and up-selling too because as soon as a customer has purchased from you, you can retarget them using dynamic product ads with a product that they might be interested in.

SEO and Content Marketing

We wanted to combine the two because if you don’t combine SEO and content marketing then you’re not giving it your 100% on either one.

Without an SEO strategy, your content will not rank as high as it could and without a content marketing strategy, your SEO isn’t going to be maximized.

And these two strategies are completely FREE.

What do all these tasks have in common:

• Backlink outreach
• Keyword research
• Writing a blog post
• Optimizing on-site SEO

They’re all FREE also.

So, how do you create a content and SEO marketing strategy for your eCommerce startup?

Start with learning who your customers are, what problems they have and what questions they want to be answered.

Become your customer.

Learn what makes them tick, what annoys them, what makes them happy and how they behave.

Become their best friend.

Take note of what they’re talking about, what they seem to be avoiding and where they want to go.

Become their ally.

Without this approach, you are not going to fully grasp who your customer is and they’ll spot it because your marketing will feel inauthentic.

Spend A LOT of time researching your audience because this work will pay off and prevent you from going down the wrong ally further down the road.

After this, you need to get your keywords and base at least 80% of your content marketing around those particular keywords.

Use SEMrush and their free 14-day trial because you won’t need to do too much more with regards to keyword research in the early stages once you have done it the first time.

Partnerships and Influencers

Again, we thought we’d combine two sections that go hand-in-hand.

This is where eCommerce businesses can excel because of partnerships and making good connections with influencers is a great strategy for eCommerce.

Your brand can get its name out there overnight with the right contacts.

If your business compliments a business in the same or different industry and it’s in the other businesses’ interest to partner with you then reach out to them and see if you can add value to their business somehow.

This is the same for influencers – if you can create long-lasting relationships with people who have built up an audience via their profiles then you are getting VIP access to their larger network.

You should have a good idea of who are the key players in the industry you are in and if you don’t then we recommend you go back to the research stage before spending any more money.

Reduce Cart Abandonments

Ever heard the saying:

“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”?

This quote can be applied to cart abandonments.

Don’t go looking for more customers when the ones who originally want to buy from you are pulling out from the sale last minute.

Find out why they are abandoning the cart because it could be you’re asking for too much unnecessary info, your payment process is arduous or there’s a fault in the checkout.

Set up an email sequence where people are sent an email if they exit the checkout before ordering and watch your number of orders increase.

This is a gold-mine for most businesses and when they find out how many people are abandoning their carts because of one slight error, they’re kicking themselves thinking:

“How many people must we have missed before we spotted this error?”

Don’t let that be you.

Do some quality-control with your checkout process before launching and try to find any faults that may come beforehand.

Conclusion

As you can see from our suggestions, there are a lot of avenues you can go down and sometimes it’s better for articles like this to just suggest one avenue.

We wanted to do this for those of you who can’t make their minds up and pick the marketing strategy that we have seen works best for an eCommerce startup…

Dynamic Product Ads.

Give those a try first because they are likely going to pay off the most in the short-term which is make or break for the majority of eCommerce businesses and you will use them anyhow in the long-term.