11 Essential Digital Marketing Tips

In today's digital world, companies of all sizes and sectors have an online presence. That makes the competition for shoppers' attention fierce. Out of the 2.1 million ecommerce businesses in the US, only a fraction of them will be able to attract enough customers and grow online sales.

As an ecommerce merchant, you've probably figured out that digital marketing is critical for the long-term success of your online store. But what exactly is digital marketing, and how do you do it? Let's find out.

What Is Digital Marketing?

In pre-Internet days, businesses could promote themselves through billboards, television spots, direct mail, or store window displays. But with commerce and consumers (and, let's face it, most of our attention) moving to the online world, marketing and advertising have moved online, too. Marketers can now reach their target audience via digital channels such as social media, search engines, websites, text messages, and email, and these comprise what we think of as digital marketing or online marketing.

Why You Need Digital Marketing

Though the traditional channels are still in play, the digital marketing world offers several advantages.

• With online marketing you can reach global audiences. 
• Personalization allows you to target and segment more effectively.
• Efficiency and automation let you do more with less marketing budget, even with a small marketing team.
• Your brand can attain greater visibility across digital channels.
• Software makes adopting digital marketing strategies faster and easier.
• You can communicate with customers more rapidly and frequently.
• Data collection and analysis enables your business to make better decisions.

Types of Digital Marketing

To capitalize on opportunities and stand out from your competition in this digital landscape, you need a successful digital marketing strategy. That means embracing a range of digital marketing activities. For example, software review site G2 has found that marketers using three or more channels in their campaigns see a purchase and engagement that's rate 250% higher than marketers using single channels.⁽¹⁾

Your digital marketing strategy might include popular inbound marketing tactics like social media, paid advertising, email marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing, SEO strategy, Google Adwords, affiliate marketing, and conversion rate optimization.

And if your digital strategy doesn't yet include text marketing, it should. That's because text marketing consistently yields higher conversion rates than email and paid ads. G2 says text marketing “continues to be a best-kept secret ... 61% of marketers still don’t use it.”⁽²⁾

11 Top Digital Marketing Tips

Emotive helps ecommerce businesses harness the power of texting as a key component of a successful digital marketing strategy. But we know there's more to it than just texting, so we're sharing our best digital marketing tips with you.

1. Understand Your Customer

Understanding your target audience is an essential step in ecommerce marketing. Who are they? What are their interests, needs, and desires? Where do they spend their time? To identify and understand your customers, you may want to conduct market research: this can be as simple as surveying some of your existing customers. You'll use this data to develop various buyer personas and a customer journey, which maps the steps a prospective customer takes on the path from anonymous shopper to loyal purchaser. You'll want to define customer segments, based on factors like age, gender, occupation, income, location, and interests.

With a clear picture of your target customer, you can begin to create targeted marketing campaigns that speak to their interests. And don't forget customer feedback: this is a great source of data you can use to improve your offerings and your brand's customer experience.

2. Create Compelling Content

One of the most important aspects of digital marketing is creating compelling and relevant content that draws people to visit your website. Clickbait content might get shoppers' attention, but if it doesn't provide value to your target audience, they'll likely leave before making a purchase.

Valuable content can be in the form of blog posts, videos, infographics, or social media posts. Following are some marketing tips for effective content creation:

• Post content regularly.
• Create content that's entertaining, informative, and empathetic. 
• Ensure your content is original and reflects your brand values.
• Make use of infographics and video. 
• Customize content for different digital platforms.
• Consider asking customers to create user-generated content, featuring your products.
• Don't skimp on photography or design: aesthetics matter.
• Don't just promote your products: your content should speak to customers' needs and desires.
• Maintain consistent branding so shoppers can more easily identify you.

3. Regularly Optimize Your Website for SEO and Conversions 

Your website is the gateway to revenue, so it's important to optimize it for conversions. This means making sure it's easy to navigate, has a clear call-to-action, loads quickly, and offers frictionless checkout. Optimizing your website for conversions can yield a significant increase in online sales.

Your site can also help you collect valuable customer data, such as top purchases, browsing history, click pathways, and more. By analyzing this data and identifying patterns, you'll discover opportunities for future optimizations and can target and segment customers more effectively. 

Your website and published content should also include top search keywords: the words and phrases that customers type into search engines when looking for products, services, and websites like yours. Google, most ecommerce platform providers, website builders, and other companies offer free tools that can help you research keywords and optimize your content accordingly.

4. Build a Presence on Social Media Platforms

Most of your current and prospective customers spend a large part of their days scrolling their social media accounts, or hanging out in online communities at Reddit and Discord. Here are some social media marketing tips to help you take advantage of these ubiquitous platforms.

• Identify the platforms and communities where your customers spend time. Monitor what kinds of things they share about your business and industry, and their feelings about it. 
• Publish content that entertains, educates, or informs your target audience: not just about your brand and products, but about your audience's needs and desires. 
• Engage with your followers regularly by listening and responding to them on the social media platform or online community where they hang out. 
• Employ high-quality images and video, as these are the most popular content forms. 

5. Create Mobile-friendly Content

Did you know that the Top 1000 North American-based online retailers receive 65% of their traffic from mobile devices?⁽³⁾ If your website isn't optimized for mobile, you're likely losing new customers (and maybe even some loyal ones as well.) Make sure that your website looks good, loads quickly, and is easy-to-use on all devices. Optimize your site so that it's responsive on all digital devices like mobiles, tablets, and laptops. Measure your page speed as this is a critical factor to hook customers to your website. If the web pages load at a slow speed, chances are that your customers would leave the website. When framing mobile-friendly content: