When it comes to transforming prospects into paying customers, there’s no way we can underestimate the significance of your marketing team. After all, this is where the difference lies between a quality product that crashes and burns to one that becomes a household name as well as an industry standard.
From spreading awareness of your product, to persuading consumers that the value your company brings is worthy of their attention and money, marketing tackles it all one step at a time. So incorporating the newest innovations in retail marketing strategies into your business is an absolute must.
Cutting Edge Retail Marketing Strategies
Here are a few key concepts that should absolutely be part of your ecommerce marketing game plan going forward, if they aren’t already.
Automated Marketing Analytics
We’ve previously praised the advantages of automation to optimize multiple aspects of your business (such as pricing) and save you time in the process. However, when you use automation in concert with your market analysis, you can also gather intelligence that will drive other business decisions. With each passing year, more and more companies are incorporating automated analytics into their future plans. Roughly half are already onboard, and it’s about time your business does the same, lest you fall behind industry trends. The power that can be harnessed by automation is truly something that can elevate the performance and precision of what your business is already doing and make it exceedingly easy to take it to the next step.
The Customer Experience
First and foremost, your marketing campaign should cater to your target audience, but taking this philosophy a bit further might sweeten the appeal of your product enough to boost engagement. Design with the customer experience in mind, including everything from personalized messages to incentive programs and special offers to help prospects blossom into long-term customer relationships. Moreover, employ an omnichannel approach to your marketing that incorporates mobile apps, desktop websites and other forms of media, encouraging loyal customers to get involved in all sides of your business.
Content to Win
If you’re still unconvinced of the pertinence of content marketing in boosting business, allow us to put an end to your uncertainty right now. The past few years have incontrovertibly proven thedifference that regular content generation can make in getting the word out about your business. In fact, over one third of all traffic to shopping sites comes from search engines! Blogs, ebooks and whitepapers are among the most popular forms of free content that you can use to help prospects find you over search engines and/or entice them to sign up for your mailing list. However, what works for your specific niche may differ. Perhaps new media marketing like podcasts or a YouTube channel will suit you better. Regardless, you’re missing out if you’re not releasing some kind of content on a regular basis.
Introducing Proximity Marketing
Thanks to the location tracking capabilities now made mainstream via mobile devices, proximity marketing is a major part of many successful companies’ current strategies. With the localized data you receive, you can adjust your advertising content accordingly, speaking particularly to the physical location of your customer. Perhaps you might pitch them a relevant offer based on their shopping habits or attempt to sway them to check out a new offer on your website instead of visiting a the brick-and-mortar location of one of your competitors.
Research to Develop
In order to keep your company’s evolution running strong, be sure to devote a significant segment of your resources to market research. Whether these duties are assigned to a dedicated team or scattered among your business, it’s invaluable to gauge customer response — through surveys, direct messages or other means — as well as stay up-to-date on what companies both in your industry and beyond are doing to connect to their prospects. Oftentimes, this can be as simple as setting up alerts or connecting to relevant companies, publications and websites on social media and other networks for the latest news to be delivered to you directly.
Go Forth and Strategize
To remain competitive in the retail space (but particularly in the technology-centric world of eCommerce) is essentially impossible without remaining closely in tune with the latest and greatest approaches to spreading your company’s message.
The above techniques will help to make your marketing team that much stronger, but these alone aren’t enough to keep you on top for long. Marketing means never settling for the status quo, and so constant evaluation, testing, and implementation should always be in place to ensure that you’re providing the best service to your customers and doing justice to your products. The long-term life of your business may ultimately depend on it.
For more invaluable insights into how you should approach marketing your eCommerce business, check out our eBook, “Key Automated Marketing Strategies for eCommerce Store Success.”
