There are many tactics available in order to generate visitors to your website. Each of these tactics represents a marketing channel and for your business to grow effectively, prioritising your investment(s) is important, especially if you are on a tight budget.
The hardest part is working out what works for you, it’s not practical for most ecommerce sites to operate on all channels so it’s about finding the balance which gives you the best return. Working with your marketing team will allow you to implement a cohesive strategy so you can reap the rewards of marketing online.
Not everyone is a marketing geek like us, so we thought we’d make a handy guide to help you when it comes to marketing jargon. Everything here is a possibility for your organisation working with Eventure Internet.
Paid Channels
Adwords
Google Adwords is the system Google have developed to assist customers in marketing their products or services in the Google Search Engine and affiliated websites via the use of a placed text ads that appear when people search for phrases related to your offering. Google charge a varying sum of money for each click generated via their Adwords system depending on how much you are willing to spend on a click and how relevant your advert/ product offering is to the search term.
Bing
Bing Ads (formerly Microsoft adCenter and MSN adCenter) is a service very similar to Google Adwords used specifically on both Bing and Yahoo Search Engines and affiliated websites. They provide a pay per click advertising system for customers to promote their products and services.
Social PPC
Social PPC is the name given to any marketing activities that involve placing adverts via social networks such as Twitter or Facebook on a CPC (Cost per click) or CPM (Cost per thousand) basis where clicks/ visits are counted individually with a price assigned on a per-click basis.
Landing Pages
A landing page is the page of a website accessed by clicking a hyperlink on another web page, typically the websites home page, a search engine or an advertisement. Landing Pages are useful as they allow the creator to customise the page for a specific point, often designed to raise the conversion of a specific marketing campaign or product.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a feature that lets a business reach people who have previously visited their site, and relevant ads across the web or when they search on Google. For example, when a customer leaves your website without purchasing, remarketing will help you re-connect with that customer to try and push for a conversion.
Display
Display advertising is a type of advertising that typically contains text, logos, photographs or other Images, location maps, and similar items as well as a call to action and generally take the form of a banner. Display adverts
Video Advertising
This term encompasses online display advertisements such as MPUs that have video within them. However, it’s generally accepted that it also refers to advertising that occurs on internet television such as Youtube or Twitch.tv. The adverts are served before, during and/or after a video or video stream. These adverts are like the traditional spot advertising you see on television although they are generally cut-down to be a shorter version than their TV counterparts.
SEO
Link Acquisition
Links remain a vital part of google search algorithm. We recommend a content based approach to “earn links” rather than “old school” linkbuilding which doesn’t work post Penguin. Effectiveness increases if you have great content – but getting that content out to the types of people that will provide that backlink also takes time. Relevant quality industry directories, Local directories. Bloggers.
Link building
Building and obtaining hyperlinks from other websites back to yours, this process works hand in hand with search engine optimisation (SEO).
Authorship Markup
Authorship markup allows you to link your Google+ social media account with the work you have created online. Once set up and verified, your new content will appear in the search engine results with your by-line and how many people are in your Google+ circles.
Adv E-Com SEO
Best practice of how to build a website changes. On page relevancy best practice remains mainly static, but Google in particular has made changes that affect how a website should work – particularly in terms of how webmaster should approach pagination, site structure and the problem of thin content. On older websites, the best option is to rebuild – but when that’s not possible, we can put in place the essentials to keep up to date with best practice. Full audit of issues, briefing developers on changes and implementing those changes.
Product Feeds
Amazon
By uploading a product feed to Amazon Marketplace you can greatly increase the visibility and reach your products have by ensuring they are searchable on Amazon. This opens your products up to be purchased by the millions of customers Amazon has whilst boosting your brand.
eBay
Similar to Amazon, uploading your products to eBay offers you the opportunity to market your products to a much larger potential customer base. This opens your products up to be purchased by the millions of customers eBay has whilst boosting your brand.
Cassini Upgrade
Cassini changed the way eBay operated. Updating your eBay product listings so they adhere to best practice is a simple way of increasing your exposure on this platform. Read our best practice guide blog.
Affiliates
Affiliates
Affiliate marketing provides incentives, generally in the form of a percentage based commission for websites around the internet to promote your products to their customer/viewer base. It can be a very good tool at extending the reach a particular product or offer has whilst having the luxury of only ever paying out if you make a sale.
Behaviour Remarketing
In a Big Brother esque world of internet tracking technology, it is possible to deliver adverts to individuals based upon their previous internet behaviour. So if you sell cricket bats, it’s likely that someone spending time on the Wisden and/or the Derbyshire CCC site is likely to be also relatively interested in your products. Usually that’s done through the use of third parties which charge a fee based on successful transaction.
Outreach
Reaching out to affiliates to work with in order to promote your products/services. They’ll receive an incentive in order to promote your business, this is usually in the form of a percentage based commission.
Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to capture customer information so you can target customers accordingly. Send out product updates, notifications and interesting deals to the people who have provided their email address and have showed an interest in your business.
Birthday Emails
Capturing birthday dates of your customers when they sign up to receive emails so they can receive a special email with a promotion for their birthday encouraging them to interact further with your website.
Re-engagement
Re-engagement e-mails aim to get the best value out of your existing customer base. The idea is to send incentives to customers who have not purchased over a period of time to encourage them to re-engage with your website.
Automation
Automation is used to automatically perform a procedure that would otherwise have taken time and resource from an employee to complete. It can be extremely useful at taking laborious tasks off your hands. It does, however, need to be looked over now and again to ensure it’s performing the task as required.
Contact Generation
Capturing and simulating email addresses who are interested in a service or product for purposes of developing a sales pipeline.
Gifts & Deals
Site Gift Cards
Creating unique voucher codes for customers who wish to purchase gift cards to use on your website.
Offline Gift Cards
Making online customers have the ability to purchase gift cards online so they can use them offline within stores.
Content Marketing
Blog
A blog is the perfect place to engage your customers with interesting and shareable content advertising your expertise and knowledge. Create, update and write engaging content on a regular basis to be uploaded on to your websites blog.
Lead Generation
Lead generation generally takes the form of online questionnaires designed to find the perfect customer for your website. They will ask a series of questions and if the correct answers are picked, that customer will be added to your e-mail database. It is a good way of obtaining a large volume of e-mail address in a short time period.
Site content
Your website will essentially be a collection of text presented in specific manner to back up your services and/or products to enhance the experience of the user. A website requires a lot of text which needs to be original and appealing and if necessary needs to be updated on a regular basis.
Click Bait
Click bait content provides the opportunity to gain new customers, reinforce and build brand loyalty, and inform your audience. It’s the process of creating a piece of content interesting enough to catch people’s attention to get clicks.
Virals
Essentially content which has gained the attention of many online users. Whether it be a video, or a blog post if you produce something which you know your customers will love it has the potential of going viral. From a marketing perspective this isn’t something which happens overnight, this requires market research as well as producing something clever.
Outreach
Outreach is the method of reaching out to bloggers or site owners who reach the same audience as your market sector and partnering up with them to promote your business. By providing a blogger with content they want to share, a product to review or working together to produce a piece of engaging content you can make their audience aware of your business.
Social Media- Standard
Facebook is a popular free social networking site where you can create a profile to connect with other users. But why does this benefit an ecommerce site? It’s another opportunity to engage current and potential customers to keep them updated about your business. You can also create a range of adverts to target users.
Twitter is another social networking/micro blogging website allowing you to make updates of 140 characters long. Good for marketing because you can reach and engage customers as well as provide a quick customer service online.
Google +
Another social media platform to update and share information and content. Engage with people who follow you to share with them your company information and social updates.
Linked In
Creating a LinkedIn Company Page is perfecting for raising brand awareness, promoting career opportunities, and educating potential customers on your products and services.
Social Media – Media
YouTube
YouTube allows you to create a profile in order to upload videos. This is ideal for you to upload videos which may outline instructions, behind the scene exclusives, product information and viral videos.
An online mobile photo, video and social networking service which allows you to add filters to the media you produce and share them on your other social networking sites. This is perfect for taking pictures of your day to day business, products and snapshots that will benefit your business.
Is a free website where you create a profile and upload, save and prioritise images. It allows others to connect with you visually by sharing your imagery, ideal for generating links for a company which is imaged focus.
Flickr
Flickr allows you to upload images and videos this means that other users can view and share the media that you upload.
Other Activities
Paid Placements
Paid search marketing is a means of allowing advertisers to pay in order to be listed within search engine results pages specific keywords and phrases. These paid placements can be bought from a portal or search network.
Competitions
Competitions are designed to extend the reach of your website by offering a prize for engaging with the site in some way. They can be designed to promote specific web pages, products or the brand itself.
Banner Advertising
Banner adverts are used to promote either specific products or specific offers on a website. They offer additional visibility for said offers on your website and can be pushed to other channels to increase reach.
Strategic Partnership
Working closely with other businesses, can often provide a step change to generating new revenues. Finding a mutually beneficial relationship that helps boost sales or brand exposure off two separate businesses it an excellent way of achieving goals that otherwise may not be possible in the short term on your own.
Conversion Rates
Abandoned Baskets
Abandoned Baskets are used to re-engage people who have put a product in the shopping cart of your website but not made a purchase. They work by e-mailing the customer who has abandoned multiple times over the following week offering advice, reminders and potentially discount codes.
UX Testing
User testing is a technique used to evaluate a product by testing it on its target demographic. It gives direct input on what users think of the website or products which can be used to improve the service.
Checkout Optimisation
Optimising the checkout experience to help increase sales to encourage more visitors to complete the checkout process to a purchase.
Reviews
Creating the option for customers to leave feedback on products/services they’ve purchased/used. This is a great way for potential customers to gather more information about your products.