What Kind of Digital Marketing Services Are Right For Your Store?

If you operate an eCommerce business, you are likely in need of some kind of marketing in order to get more traffic to your website and eyes on your products.

Professional digital marketing services are necessary in order to help your business grow by attracting a steady stream of new customers and bolstering your brand image. However, there are a multitude of different kinds of marketing services and strategies that you can employ, which can make it difficult to know which path is right for your store.

Social media marketing, paid advertising, email marketing, influencer marketing, there’s a ton of different tactics you can use and trends you can follow in order to promote your products. The only thing is that it’s all too easy to choose a marketing option that doesn’t fit your business or that is executed poorly, which can result in a massive amount of wasted time and money. Digital marketing in general has an amazing ROI if done correctly, but at the same time, it can act as a black hole for budgets, eating tons of money that seemingly goes nowhere.

This guide will discuss which eCommerce digital marketing methods are going to be the most effective for your specific kind of store, and why it’s important not to try and handle your marketing in-house. When it comes to the competitive nature of eCommerce and how user expectations continue to rise, you can’t underestimate the importance of professional skills and years of experience when it comes to actually getting the kind of results you are looking for.

Analyzing The Needs of Your eCommerce Business

The first thing you want to do before you start talking to marketing agencies is to figure out what it is that your business actually needs. What unique challenges does your online store face and how can they be made better through an expertly-crafted marketing strategy?

Once you cut past all of the fluff and trends in the world of digital marketing, you will realize that there are only two main avenues you want to focus on: SEO and PPC. While options such as social media marketing do exist and can potentially help build your brand, they don’t have the same kind of ROI and aren’t as consistent.

Not every eCommerce business needs both SEO and PPC at the same time. Some industries are completely restricted when it comes to PPC, making SEO the only option. In other cases, immediate revenue is necessary and advertising makes a lot more sense in the short-term. Knowing which option works best for your business will not only save you a ton of time and hassle, you will also use your marketing budget more effectively as well. Nothing wastes money quicker than a mishandled marketing campaign.

Why You Need SEO Services

Most businesses, whether they are in eCommerce or not, can benefit from SEO. The key point you want to keep in mind with SEO services is that they don’t often produce immediate results. This is the digital marketing avenue you want to pursue if you want to build a strong foundation for your business and slowly bring in more organic traffic.

SEO has additional benefits to, such as helping to strengthen your brand presence and understand the needs and habits of your potential customers. As far as eCommerce digital marketing services are concerned, you could say that SEO is the all-around best option that has the highest ROI as well as the best potential for strengthening your business and helping you to gain more customers overall.

Another benefit of SEO is that any industry or business can make use of it. Due to the advertising restrictions that Facebook, Google, and other platforms place on certain products, such as herbal supplements for instance, SEO is the only viable option that remains. While Google doesn’t allow direct advertising for some products, these same restrictions do not apply in organic search results. This means that if you optimize your gun shop website with SEO, you can potentially rank in the top spots for your important keywords and not even have to worry about advertising restrictions. In other words, SEO is literally the only form of digital marketing if your business sells restricted products.

Why You Need PPC Services

Alternatively, PPC could be the ideal solution for your eCommerce business if you need a faster turnaround time on your investment, or if you are just starting out with your advertising efforts and need a little traction with your store in order to get your name out there for the first time.

PPC also works in cases where you want to push a little harder during select times of the year in order to take advantage of holidays or other special occasions. For instance, you may rely on your SEO to get you by for most of the year but as Black Friday and Cyber Monday approach, it may make more sense to turn on PPC for your hottest electronics.

If used correctly, PPC can also be used for brand-building and increasing customer engagement. A well-made Facebook ad for instance can really connect with your users and get them engaged with your brand even if they have no intention of purchasing your product right then and there.

It’s also worth mentioning that eCommerce PPC is scalable if executed by an experienced marketing team. If you start with a great strategy, you can use the new revenue you accrue from your PPC efforts and infuse them right back into your marketing budget to gain even more impressions and potential sales. This can be extremely effective if you sell products that are currently really popular or trendy and you understand how to “ride the waves” of what’s hot in your niche or industry. While PPC is traditionally seen as short-term gain when compared to SEO, it can certainly be used in a long-term fashion to support sustainable business growth.

Depending on your industry however you do want to be aware that PPC may not work well for you. PPC is very platform-dependent in the sense that what works on one platform may not provide the same kind of ROI on another. Knowing the advantages and disadvantages of Google Adwords vs Facebook advertising vs Amazon ads will help you decide what course of action is best for your particular business.

If you are selling restricted products of course, these can’t be advertised using PPC, and in some cases, Google or Facebook may bar you from advertising altogether. When constructing an advertising campaign on these platforms, your website is manually reviewed for content guidelines, and if it is apparent that you sell specific restricted products, your ad may not get approved even if you are trying to push another product entirely. There is also a chance your ad account could get penalized or removed. If your business sells products such as hemp, tobacco, vaping supplies, cigars, firearms, blades, workout or weight loss supplements, or herbal remedies, you might simply want to bypass PPC altogether and focus your efforts on search engine optimization.

Putting a Digital Marketing Strategy Together

Now that you understand a bit more about the advantages of SEO and PPC for your business, it’s time to craft a strategy that will work for you. The key thing that you want to remember when it comes to putting together a marketing plan is that you don’t want to just think of numbers. Yes, budget and ROI are important, but what you’re really doing here is building your brand. Right now in the world of eCommerce and online businesses and general, that’s what matters the most.

Selling products is one thing but an established brand can be endlessly monetized. Through your marketing strategy, you want to gain traffic, sell products, make money, and most of all get your name out there and strengthen awareness of your brand. If all you’re doing is mindlessly throwing money at an ad platform and selling products, you’re approaching the subject of marketing entirely wrong. Every step you take should be toward a greater goal that takes the long-term success of your business into account.

With all of this in mind, here are some additional points you want to keep in mind as you construct your digital marketing campaign:

• What are your users looking for specifically and how can you meet their needs as effectively as possible?
• Are your product pages or sales pages attractive enough and efficient enough to run ads to them?
• Do you want to focus on your whole product line or simply a few popular items?
• Do you currently get any organic traffic to your website or are you starting from scratch?
• Does your Facebook page already have plenty of organic followers and engagements, or do you plan on running ads from a “dead” page?
• Has your website been optimized or is it still slow and clunky?
• Does your current eCommerce platform give you full control over your SEO or is it somewhat outdated in this regard?
• What is your domain authority and how aggressively do you want to go after certain keywords?
• Do you need to make any substantial changes to your website in order to accommodate an influx of traffic that would come with a PPC campaign?
• Have you researched your competitors to see what is working for them?
• Do you know who your target demographic is and how to specifically target them when you run your ads?

There’s a lot to think about if you want to create a marketing campaign that actually gets results. No matter what kind of digital marketing strategy you intend on utilizing, several important factors have to be taken into consideration, including your familiarity with certain technical aspects of SEO or the functionality of certain PPC platforms.

For all of these reasons and more, it may be far more effective to utilize professional digital marketing services that will be able to handle all of these different points so you don’t have to. While you could try and cobble together a strategy on your own, with the resources and knowledge at your disposal, chances are this will only lead to frustration and wasted money and time.

The Value of Professional eCommerce Marketing Services

Rather than trying to become a marketing guru overnight, it’s far more logical to seek out an agency that handles eCommerce marketing campaigns on a regular basis and that will be able to easily assess the needs of your business and develop a unique strategy that will get you actionable results.

SEO and PPC can be an incredible boon for your eCommerce store, but without a proper strategy in place, the results are going to be lackluster at best. Not only do you need to understand how to construct a marketing plan, but you also need the technical skill and years of knowledge to support the plan and see it through to completion. A marketing plan is not something you just activate and hope it performs. It’s a fluid strategy that needs to be continuously tweaked and improved upon over the course of several months and years in order to get the desired results.

That’s why here at Genius eCommerce, we have assembled a team of eCommerce marketing experts that understand all aspects of what it takes to grow your store. From detailed SEO campaigns that help bolster your Google rank, to powerful PPC strategies that help drive users right to your products, we simply know what it takes to get results, and we have the case studies to back it up. If you know you need to invest in some SEO or PPC for your business, you need a digital marketing agency in your corner that has extensive experience and the skills necessary in order to put together a winning strategy.

For more information on our marketing services, hop on a call with us at 888.982.8269 and we can help you figure out exactly what your online store needs, whether it’s a sophisticated search engine optimization campaign or an aggressive Facebook advertising strategy, our team is ready to make it happen for you. Also, check out our eCommerce blog for helpful tips on managing your SEO and other marketing issues.