5 Things to Know About eCommerce Growth Marketing

What is growth marketing? Well, if you're looking to expand your business reach and profits, it represents an essential strategy for eCommerce brands. It focuses on using data and experimentation to identify and grow revenue-generating channels. 

By taking a holistic approach to marketing and carrying out continuous testing and optimizing, eCommerce brands are able to drive sustainable growth and outstrip their competitors. So, with this in mind, let's take a look at 5 of the most important elements you need to consider when engaging in growth marketing.

Element #1 - SEO, it’s Vital to eCommerce Business Growth

The first key aspect of growth marketing for eCommerce brands is search engine optimization (SEO). This involves optimizing websites to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), which can help to increase both organic traffic and visibility.

The importance of this can't be underestimated because most online shoppers begin their buying journey by searching for products or services on search engines like Google. Simply by improving their search engine rankings, eCommerce brands can increase their visibility and, in turn, reach a wider audience.

The most important steps in SEO for an eCommerce brand are:

1. Carrying out keyword research: you must find the keywords potential customers might use when looking for what it is you offer, or you'll have nothing to target. 
   
   

2. Optimizing your website - having an easy-to-navigate, quick-loading, mobile-friendly website is crucial to the user experience. Your researched phrases & keywords need to be included in the meta-tags and page content to allow search engines to better understand the relevance and context of your site.
   
   

3. Building high-quality backlinks: Acquiring backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites improves your site's credibility and visibility in search engine results.
   
   

4. Creating unique, high-quality content: content is king, as you must offer value to your target audience. Whether talking about blog posts, product descriptions or how-to guides, quality keyword-rich content is key to your success.
   
   

5. Optimizing product pages: You must also ensure that every product page includes a unique, keyword-rich title and meta-description, in addition to high-quality images and detailed descriptions.
   
   

6. Using social media: Promote your brand and products on social media platforms, and include links to your website to drive traffic and improve your search engine visibility.
   
   

7. Monitor & track your performance: Using tools such as Google Analytics to track your SEO performance and website traffic is vital to understand how you're progressing.
    

8. Engaging with customers: By gently encouraging customers to review and rate your products on your website (as well as 3rd party sites), you serve to enhance your search engine visibility and build your brand's credibility.
    

9. Stay up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and best practices: SEO is constantly evolving, meaning it's vital to stay abreast of the latest best practices and trends. Otherwise, you can't be sure your strategy will remain effective.
   
   

10. Continually monitoring & optimizing your SEO approach:  SEO is not a one-time thing, rather, it involves an ongoing effort to improve your website's visibility and performance. As such, you need to continually monitor and optimize your SEO approach to ensure your brand remains both competitive and visible online.
    

Element #2 - The Importance of Content Marketing

Another crucial aspect of growth marketing for eCommerce store owners is content marketing. This involves the creation and sharing of valuable, relevant content in order that appeals to a clearly defined audience - something that helps greatly with customer retention. 

This may include blog posts, videos, social media posts, and other types of content that provide value to the audience and thereby help establish the brand's industry authority. Content marketing can be a powerful tool for eCommerce brands because it helps to build trust and credibility with potential customers. By providing killer content on a consistent basis, eCommerce brands can establish themselves as thought leaders and experts in their field.

This helps to differentiate them from their competitors, with content marketing helping to drive traffic to a brand's website. This increases its visibility and pushes the site up the search engine rankings.

The tried and true avenue of e-mail marketing is also another great channel in which to nurture and grow your customer base. Email marketing has always been a powerful tool for businesses to communicate with their customers and promote their products and services and remains so today. 

Just some of the many benefits of email marketing include:

• Cost-effectiveness: Email marketing is a relatively inexpensive method of reaching a large audience compared to other forms of advertising.
  
  
• Great return on investment: Email marketing offers a great ROI, with studies showing that for every $1 spent, you'll averagely receive $38 back.
  
  
• Highly customizable: Marketers can create highly-personalized messages with eye-catching pictures and designs. This allows you to offer a consistent brand experience across all channels.
   
• Targeted reach: With email marketing, businesses are able to segment their email lists and send targeted messages to specific groups of customers based on what interests them.
  
  
• Measurable results: Email marketing results in detailed metrics and a wealth of data that can help businesses track their campaigns and determine the efficacy.
   
• Customer engagement: Email marketing provides an opportunity for businesses to build and strengthen relationships with customers through regular communication and interaction.
  

Advertising is another important growth marketing aspect for eCommerce operates, and it typically involves promoting a brand's products or services via paid ads on social media and search engines. There's no doubting the power of advertising in the eCommerce world, making it key for driving targeted traffic to your website.

Setting clear goals and tracking the results of your advertising efforts is also a good idea so as to ensure you're meeting your short and long-term objectives.

Element #3 - Community Building

Community building is another crucial aspect of growth marketing for eCommerce brands, and it takes the form of creating and fostering a community of customers, fans, and brand advocates.

This is done through social media, forums, email newsletters, and other online platforms where people can engage with you and each other, including loyalty programs for VIP Customers or users that sign-up to be the first to know about the latest deals, become featured for their engagement through unboxing videos or engagement with content, and showcase their affinity toward branded content.

Another benefit of building community-first programs is the direct feedback you can gain through NPS feedback loops, surveys (both pre-purchase and post-purchase).

Strong branded communities can give you valuable feedback and insights that allow you to improve your products, services, and overall customer experience.

Element #4 - Influencer Marketing

Additionally, influencer marketing can be powerful because it helps to create brand loyalty and foster long-term customer relationships. By delivering value and support to their community, eCommerce brands get to create a positive brand experience and encourage customers to continue purchasing and recommend them to others.

This can be done by sending product in exchange for pictures or videos, as well as small placement and promotional fees. This really depends on the level of influencer and their criteria, but we have found that working with a larger audience of micro/nano influencers produces a better return than hiring one very expensive celebrity or personality. They tend to only promote in 1 or 2 posts, but then require large payments and brand commitments.

Element #5 - Business Intelligence & Analytics

Lastly, reporting and analytics represent yet another vital element of your growth marketing efforts. As such, you need to track and analyze customer behavior data to fully grasp what's working and what isn't.

There are many popular systems that can help you analyze how your growth marketing is going, which include entries into the eCommerce space, such as Glew Analytics and TripleWhale. Their goal is to create a dashboard where you can view the data from multiple sources - Facebook, Google Analytics, eCommerce store data, paid ads, and many other sources such as shipping and logistics, email marketing platforms like Klaviyo, and other data silos.

Their claim to fame is to generate actionable insights into how your product merchandising efforts are going in all areas of the business. For example, if your welcome email contains a less than desirable product as the headline photo, the system will gather that intelligence and suggest that we may want to change that photo based on the CTR and Open Rates, providing an opportunity to enhance results through a simple but effective optimization.

Similarly, this applies to the website product merchandising, offers, and overall LTV (Lifetime Value) of the customers, their profitability, and your costs of running campaigns. Sometimes after analysis, it's clear that we are over-doing email marketing or under-doing Paid Acquisition Instagram Ads - knowing the difference, how to analyze the data, and how to act accordingly is vital to understanding your business expenses, customer purchasing cycles, and ultimately profitability.

Achieving the Commercial Results You Desire

As is evident, growth marketing is something that can be accelerated with the right, well-chosen tactics and measures. Sure, there's a lot to it, but the rewards are there to be grabbed, so it's well worth the time and effort it takes to work on all the elements we've talked about here. 

Just remember that your growth marketing approach should encompass a wide variety of marketing techniques that include SEO, great content and leverage powerful channels like influencer marketing. 

Moreover, the job doesn't end once your growth strategy is in place, as analytics are vital, steering you away from ineffective tactics and towards those that yield results. Only then can you be sure that no opportunities are getting missed.