Digital Marketing and Ecommerce
Ecommerce websites allow your customers to purchase goods (and sometimes services) via your website. It can open up a whole new market for businesses and turn a local enterprise into a nationwide one. But it’s not as easy as setting up a website and waiting for the orders to flood in.
The initial web design and development needs a lot of thought, for ecommerce you are incorporating a large number of different elements into one place. You have to think about navigation, different product categories, data protection, taking online payments, which ecommerce platform to use as well as the day to day management of the website.
From a marketing point of view it is vital to ensure that when people are looking, they find you and not your competitors. Then when they do find you, how do you differentiate yourself? Are you selling unique products, if they are the same products as the competition then why should people buy from you? Are your prices keen, do you offer great discounts? Is your site content of value and can you build up some brand loyalty? There are many questions to answer in deciding the right strategy for your business.
Designing and Building an Ecommerce Website?
We would always recommend that you approach the build of your ecommerce site with SEO in mind. What are your potential customers looking for? What phrases are they using and how specific are they about the things they are searching for? How price sensitive are they and are you able to compete?
Once you are happy that you have answered those questions, you can create the sitemap. This is basically a plan to show the structure of pages and products on your website. The design of your ecommerce website should be planned around this structure and NOT the other way around.
From a more technical point of view, when deciding upon your ecommerce platform it’s important to plan for the longer term and work with something that can be altered to suit your business’ needs. It will also need to comply in terms of data protection to ensure your customers information stays secure. You will also need a method of processing payments online, if you already take card payments then you may wish to use your existing supplier. One that integrates into your ecommerce platform is obviously critical.
Ecommerce is definitely an investment and going for the cheap option very rarely leads to a successful outcome. There’s a lot to consider and that’s why working with a Digital Agency that has a lot of experience and expertise in this area can end up saving you money over the longer term.
- Research
- Product categories and filters
- Ecommerce Design
- Product descriptions, images and prices
- Going live
- Ongoing maintenance
Digital Marketing for Ecommerce
The level of difficulty in achieving sales through your ecommerce website will depend enormously on the market you are in and the products that you want to sell online. To give an example, if you sell a mass market range of products such as toothpaste, then the likelihood of you ranking highly for ‘toothpaste’ is going to be small and paying for adverts is unlikely to bring a good return on investment. However, if you sell a particular toothpaste that has specific benefits, you could focus on finding related phrases that you could rank organically for.
It will also depend on what type of buying cycle is associated with your products. Usually for lower value consumable items the buying cycle is very short and in this case you could get people searching, finding your website and making a purchase straight away. On the other end of the scale, if you are a company selling top of the range televisions then your customers are likely going to spend a long time considering different options before making a decision to buy. The way you manage these different scenarios from a marketing point of view will of course be very different.
This is why devising an initial strategy is vital for ecommerce, one that can be amended to reflect market changes, changes in consumer behaviour, seasons, pricing etc. and that’s also why it’s important to work with a digital agency on an ongoing basis, you can’t ‘do’ ecommerce marketing and walk away, it’s a continuous process.
Ecommerce Pitfalls to Avoid?
In the same way that there are things you absolutely should do when selling online, there are also things to avoid. Here’s our list of most common mistakes that we see across ecommerce websites:
- It not being blatantly obvious from the homepage that you sell online.
- Not having a competitive pricing policy.
- Making it difficult to navigate around the website, products need to be categorised have the ability to be filtered and a search bar is an absolute must.
- Using supplier text for product descriptions. You don’t want to say what everyone else does, make your website stand out by offering unique content.
- Make sure you keep minimum stock levels, visiting a website only to find out most of the products are out of stock will soon turn people away.
- Making it difficult for people to contact you.
- Not having a clear delivery policy including pricing.
- Using a platform that takes people away from your website, this may be a cheaper option in the beginning but it will be very difficult to rank organically.
- Spending a fortune on PPC for products that are low in value, UNLESS they attract people to buy multiple items each visit.
Why Work With TU Marketing?
Our purpose is to work with our clients in helping them to achieve their goals. We become almost like another department of the company working together every step of the way, using our experience and expertise to advise and guide our clients where Digital Marketing and Ecommerce is concerned.
Because we work on an going basis we can continually adjust, amend and improve efforts and with our clients input, ensure that their website is performing at its best, achieving a good healthy level of sales.
The other benefit is that because we look after all of our clients digital marketing requirements, we don’t see ecommerce as a stand-alone piece of work. This means that your website will be technically sound, fast and high performing which aids any marketing efforts, it means that there is consistency across all of your digital marketing activity and we will be able to adjust efforts depending on the current priority.
Everything we do is aimed at achieving results and that is why we offer bespoke services, tailor made to each individual set of requirements and circumstances. We don’t offer a package for you to choose from, we come up with the activities that we think will help to gain you the very best success for your business!
If you want to discuss your ecommerce requirements or digital marketing in general, please get in touch today!
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