You’ve launched your website. Your product descriptions are on-point. Your sales pages are topnotch. You have great offers, competitive shipping, and a 3rd party logistics company in position to start filling your orders.
You are only missing one thing. Customers.
No matter where you are in the life-cycle of your ecommerce store, attracting more customers is always a top priority.
Here are a few tips you can follow to help you bring in more customers.
Know Your Customers
It’s important to understand your target market. Who needs what you offer? Who likes what you offer? Are you selling to millennials? To seniors? Men? Women?
If you can sit down and describe your ideal customer, this will help you to identify the best advertising channels to reach them. If senior citizens are your target market, running ads on TikTok is probably not the best customer acquisition strategy for you.
Leverage Social Media
No matter what demographics you want to market to, there is a good chance your customers are on some form of social media regularly. As mentioned above, maybe TikTok is not the right place to reach an older customer base, but seniors are certainly on Facebook and Instagram.
The great thing about social media platforms is once you get someone following you it gives you the opportunity to market to them over and over again. Social media today is what email marketing was 10 years ago.
One of the keys to growing a social media following, whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever the next hot new platform may be, is to create great content that grabs attention. Sometimes that might be a funny meme or joke. It could also be some sort of comment or joke about current events that grabs attention. You want to publish content that people are likely to share with their connections. In that way, you can grow your following organically.
Once you have them, you can tell them about all the great features and benefits of your products. You can show them testimonials from happy customers. You can get customers to provide content you can share on social channels.
There are a lot of ways to grab them and then turn them into loyal customers.
Utilize Social Proof
People are more likely to trust and buy from you if they see proof that others have already done so. You are going to trust an online retailer more when you see lots of reviews from customers than one that has no reviews.
Collect reviews, testimonials, images, and videos from customers that are willing to post them. These are not just great for your website. They are great content for the social channels we mentioned above.
Make Use of SEO
There is no doubt as the internet grows and more and more businesses set up shop online, the difficulty of getting your site found in search engines has gone up dramatically. However, ranking highly for targeted and relevant keywords can also bring tons of visitors to your website on a consistent basis.
I will not try to teach you how to rank your website here. That would be a much longer article (or group of articles), but suffice it to say it is important for you to understand what kind of searches people are doing where your products or services match their needs.
If you can do that, you can see a flood of traffic to your website.
Learn How to Use Paid Online Ads or Hire Someone to Manage Them
Whether you are using a platform like Google Ads or Facebook Ads and whether you are running search ads, video ads, display ads, or remarketing campaigns, there is no doubt that paid ads online is one of the best and fastest ways to see a return on your marketing dollars.
The biggest advantage that paid ads offer is the immediate feedback (and often ROI) they can provide. If you decide to run ads in a magazine or newspaper, it can take a week or sometimes longer until the ad is live and in front of people. Same thing with mailers. Even social media and SEO campaigns can take some time to really get going.
However, with a paid advertising campaign, in as little as a few hours you can be driving customers to your website.
There is certainly a learning curve when it comes to paid ads. Even for someone experienced in running ads there will be some initial challenges in getting a new campaign to provide a positive return. You have to figure out the right targeting for your products. There will be testing of different ad creatives, text, and headlines. You will need to experiment with landing pages to find the right layout and content that converts into sales or leads for your store.
Conclusion
By knowing your customers, leveraging social media, utilizing social proof, making use of SEO, and running paid online ad campaigns, you can drive customers to your ecommerce store.
