An Overview of the Most Important Channels for Digital Marketing

When it comes to ecommerce success, there’s a lot more to it than simply opening an online shop. Merchants must advertise their websites in order to attract visitors and, as a result, generate sales.

This is where digital marketing enters the picture. Digital marketing is a fantastic way to boost awareness of your brand and items, win back trust from customers, and encourage them to visit your online shop in order to make a purchase—and return again in the future for more goods.

When utilized intelligently, digital marketing is an extremely effective instrument for ecommerce companies. Start with a plan rather than spreading yourself thin and attempting all the channels at once. Consider your company’s objectives, budget, and target audience. Let’s look at how you can use digital marketing to promote your online business.

What is digital marketing, and how does it work?

Digital marketing is the process of advertising a brand, product, or service using either paid or unpaid online media. The practice of digital marketing covers the promotion of your ecommerce business across various internet platforms.

Brands don’t have to be the ones spearheading the message, as savvy internet businesses allow their consumers to speak for them. So, if a consumer posts an excellent review of your product or makes a positive social media remark about your company, these are all examples of digital marketing.

More than three-quarters of businesses use marketing campaigns to promote their brands on a regular basis. The most frequent marketing objectives for these firms are increased brand recognition, sales, interaction, leads, and money—all of which can be reached through intelligent digital marketing.

Creating a digital marketing strategy is fairly simple.

A comprehensive digital marketing strategy covers a variety of platforms. In general, the majority of businesses use a mix of social media advertising (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.), E-mail marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing and PR. The channels that are most effective for your company are determined by where your target audience hangs out, how much money you have to spend, and what business goals you want to accomplish.

Let’s take a look at how you may use some of the most popular and effective digital marketing channels to promote your online business.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is an excellent technique to interact with existing customers and develop connections with new ones. The term “social media” refers to all of the platforms that are available, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok as well as niche sites like Twitch. The following are some of the most important social media sites to explore:

• Facebook, with its 2.3 billion monthly active users
• Instagram, with 1 billion monthly active users
• TikTok, with more than 650 million users
• Twitter, which has 206 million daily active users
• Snapchat, with a total of more than 520 million active users
• Pinterest, which reaches more than 450 million monthly active users

You may use each of these networks to create organic social media posts. Organic social media messages are postings on your company’s (or brand’s) profile(s) that aren’t paid advertisements. With organic updates, skewing more toward interesting content is usually a good idea. Unfollowing may be triggered if there are too many self-promotional

However, with organic postings, your reach and interaction are entirely reliant on algorithms. You should therefore use paid social media advertising to increase the number of people who see your social media content and guarantee more views and engagements. Each of the major platforms offers its own ad space in which you can purchase ads, and advertising is more or less the only way to facilitate scalable growth nowadays, as most social media platforms have limited the organic reach of business accounts substantially in the past years.

Email marketing

Email is a popular digital communication mechanism that people utilize to connect with each other and businesses. According to the Forrester Analytics: Email Marketing Forecast, 2018 To 2023 (US), email usage is increasing. More and more individuals are willing to sign up for businesses’ marketing emails, according to 96 percent of those aged 12 years and older.

Email is also a powerful tool for reaching out to people of all ages. In fact, email is preferred by more online users between the ages of 12 and 17 than Snapchat and Facebook.

You may deploy email to convey a mix of promotional and non-salesy material—newsletters with useful information on how to utilize your goods, special discounts for your email subscribers, early announcements, and access to special sales.

Build customer profiles and segment your list with email marketing software to craft personalized emails. Make sure to read the article which I’ve previously published about the best e-mail software solutions which are available at the moment.

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO)

The goal of search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve your website’s visibility and findability in online search engines. Paid methods are referred to as SEM, while organic, or non-paid, strategies are called SEO.

According to a study, internet firms will capture 35% of all traffic and 33% of the entire revenue through search engine result pages (SERPs). While there are many different search engines available on a global scale, Google has by far the most dominance due to its enormous market share. However, other engines like Bing and Yahoo do also have a decent global present.

You can use the Google Ads dashboard (Google Adwords) to run pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements in your targeted locations for keywords relevant to your goal. Depending on your objectives and keyword competitiveness, you may have a different budgets from one campaign to another. The most prominent Google placement are their Shopping placement, search, and display.

Content marketing

Content marketing is the practice of creating and/or curating content to promote your company. For some, content marketing takes the form of a blog. In reality, more than half of marketers use blogs in their digital marketing mix. Content is an important part of growing client loyalty, increasing brand recognition, boosting SEO rankings, and gaining authority in your chosen

Marketing automation

The term “marketing automation” refers to the use of technology to establish a sequence of rules that cause automated actions from your marketing solutions. Marketing automation might be restricted to a single platform or include integration across various technologies. For example, the Shopify App Store offers several marketing automation applications that you may install on your ecommerce site.

You may also use Shopify’s dashboard to start marketing automation campaigns. The post-purchase automation is one example of a marketing automation that most ecommerce businesses can use. You may utilize post-purchase communication as a method to nurture customer relationships and cross-sell other items, depending on your product and purchase, using personalized recommendations.

Remarketing

Remarketing, also known as behavioral retargeting, is a form of advertising that targets people who have previously engaged with your company’s brand. You may create retargeted marketing campaigns that are informed and tailored to your audience’s previous actions.

Consider this scenario: You’ve launched a collection of sunglasses for your store eyewear webstore. A few months later, you collaborated with another designer on a new sunglass design. You can remarket to the people who bought your first drop and show them that they already have an interest in what you’re offering.