Partner Article

Top eCommerce Marketing Opportunities for 2013

It’s now time for anyone running an eCommerce business to switch their focus from Christmas and the January Sales, and instead look at their bigger plans for successful online selling in 2013.

There are three types of marketing that, if you get them right, are really going to fast-track your business success in 2013.

Content Marketing, Social Media Sharing, and Remarketing are three areas that can increase your sales and where you can still be the first in your marketplace to get it right. That will give you great power over your competition.

Great Content Marketing is going to sit at the centre of successful sustainable marketing activity in 2013. That’s because without great content you’re not going to get good traffic from the search engines, and there’s little for customers to discuss about you on social media (which also affects your search traffic). Plus, good content builds customers warmth towards you – it defines your brand and keeps them coming back again and again.

So what is Content? It might be a blog, it might be a video, or pictures of your latest photo-shoot, or even an infographic. Essentially content is anything people can consume online – written, visual, or audio.

If you really want to take it to top-of-the-class content – get your customers to create it for you! Ask them to write blog posts for you, review your products, or post videos of them using them.

Creating content isn’t easy, but this next tip for 2013 is.

Social Media Sharing Buttons. These are the little buttons you find on a blog or product page that invite the visitor to share the page on Twitter or Facebook etc. Once you’ve added them to your page templates, that’s it, the job is done.

So why should you add them? Well, if you want to win in the search engine rankings war in 2013 you need people talking about your site and your products on social media. That means you need to make it easy for them to do so. Visitors are more likely to talk about you and your products online if there’s a button on that product page telling them to.

Both the above tips are about driving more traffic to your website, the third top marketing tactic for 2013 is all about improving your conversion rate. Remarketing enables you to show ads to people who’ve already visited your website – reminding them to come back and buy from you.

You simply need to add a piece of code to all the pages of your website, and then create the targeting rules and the ads. To do all this you can use Google Adwords, and you pay for the advertising on a cost per click basis.

A few things to be careful of – with your targeting make sure you exclude those people who did buy, limit how long after their last visit they’ll see your ads, and set a maximum number of times they see your ad each day.

And finally, a little bonus tip – test out selling your products on Amazon and eBay. That’s where many consumers are spending their online shopping time – so if you’re not there, you’re probably missing out!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Chloë Thomas .