We have outlined inbound marketing for ecommerce as a general concept. You have seen that inbound marketing consists of three main objectives: traffic and demand generation, lead capture and nurturing, and customer delight.
We also outlined how Inbound ecommerce, just like any other industry relies on a funnel that stretches across 4 stages in order to convert visitors into purchasing customers.
It is time to take a look at the services an ecommerce inbound marketing agency offers, what actions they take in order to implement an efficient, customer-centric inbound marketing strategy.
Strategies Ecommerce Inbound Marketing Agencies Implement
Ecommerce success starts when your business understands the customers, what are their needs, and their purchasing problems.
The key ingredient for success in any ecommerce inbound marketing campaign is the degree to which your business spends time to gain insights into various customer habits. Thus, the first step ecommerce inbound marketing agencies takes is to develop a buyer profile, or buyer persona.
Creating Buyer Personas
Buyer personas are defined as a research-based profile that depicts, or imagines, a target customer. Buyer personas describe who your business’ ideal customers are, what are their daily routines, the challenge they face, and how and when they make purchasing decisions.
It is common for your business to have multiple buyer personas: for instance, if the end user of your product or service needs to gain the approval of others before making a purchase, each individual involved in that decision is a separate persona.
As a result, an ecommerce inbound marketing agencies develop ideal buyer profiles to help your business clearly understand customer demographics and their behaviors and preferences.
In other words, inbound marketing agencies take into consideration the following factors:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income Level
- Educational Level
- Nationality
Additionally, ecommerce inbound marketing agencies analyze the customers’ purchasing decisions by seeking answers to the following questions:
- Are these customers new buyers?
- How often do they make purchases
- How much do they spend on daily, monthly, and/or yearly averages?
- How do they interact with other businesses?
Based on the aforementioned questions, data collected will help your business develop customers personas, and will further help it implement an inbound marketing approach.
Secondly, one of the main components of a comprehensive inbound ecommerce strategy lies in building a strong brand foundation, or brand development.
Brand Development
Brand development is the process of maintaining the quality, distinctive marketing assets, and consumer trust of your business’ brand.
It is the ongoing, continuous process of attending to customer needs. Branding is a marketing strategy that can set your ecommerce store apart from the competition.
The main reason branding is essential is that it allows your business to get closer to your customers in a natural and organic way, which is the goal of all inbound marketing campaigns.
For brand development, ecommerce inbound marketing agencies develop a unique selling proposition for your business, apart from creating a brand identity that will appeal to customers.
More specifically, an inbound marketing agency develops your business’ mission statement, its brand promise that outlines your core values to your target audience. This identity will attract more prospects who can relate to your brand.
In other words, an ecommerce inbound marketing agency will promote who you are instead of what you sell, thus enabling customers to flock towards your brand organically.
An ecommerce inbound marketing agency also harnesses the power of social media to expand your business’ reach.
Content Creation
Creating content lies at the heart of inbound marketing, regardless of the industry in question. Any ecommerce inbound marketing agency that does not include content creation as part of its approach is a fraudulent one.
High-quality content is the foundation stone for your business’ inbound marketing strategy. It can be hosted on your website, shared on social media platforms, or included in your email marketing campaigns. It serves the purpose of helping a prospect know that you understand the key business challenges that they are facing within the ecommerce industry.
Prospects are harnessing the power of the internet to do their own research to see how they can address their pain points. For that reason, an ecommerce inbound marketing agency will work towards creating high-quality content to encourage a web visitor to find out more about your business’ products and services, and deliver across various channels.
Ecommerce inbound marketing will address fundamental topics, that also include tips to customers how to use your business’ products and/or services.
They will generally create content using the following types:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Whitepapers
- Product reviews
- Case Studies
Social Media Leverage
When it comes to implementing a successful inbound marketing campaign, social media platforms are crucial tools. Your business generate qualified leads through conversations and relevant content without having to rely on a hard sales pitch.
Social media platforms also enable your business to create various other inbound strategies. An Ecommerce inbound marketing agency can leverage influencer marketing and get an influencer to endorse your store’s product(s).
Through social media channels, inbound marketing agencies can also create contests and reward your audience with meaningful rewards, such as discount offers, or prepaid credit card points.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is also a key inbound marketing strategy that can provide your business with more customers organically.
The purpose of SEO is to bolster your ecommerce store’s visibility, awareness, credibility and exposure so that your business generates natural traffic towards it.
An Ecommerce inbound marketing agency will seek to boost your rankings and help prospects and customers find you more easily online. From a technical standpoint, if your business wants a store designed and coded from scratch, an ecommerce inbound marketing agency will aim to optimize the website’s speed, implement a responsive design and an easy-to-use user interface and secure the website from viruses such as adware, malware, trojan…
On-Site SEO
Regarding on-site SEO, they will optimize the web pages and the whole content creation process through the implementation of keywords. These keywords will enable search engines to crawl the website and improve the store’s search engine ranking page (SERP).
Off-Site SEO
When it comes to off-site SEO, an ecommerce inbound marketing agency will mainly work toward link building. In other words, they will try to generate backlinks and guest posts on other websites, in order to better position your business as a voice of authority within the industry it operates in.
As you can see, ecommerce inbound marketing is a multi-layered process. Inbound marketing agencies must ensure that customers can see you, as well as generate interest in your business without pushing them with sales and custom offers.
While all the aforementioned strategies are efficient and will be able to generate customer interest and drive sales, LetsMarket.it is a results-driven ecommerce inbound marketing agency that will push the envelope even further.
