Advertisement in E-commerce
Ecommerce stores work in so many areas. They ensure order fulfillment, tracking inventory and management, content creation, vendor management, hiring, and so much more. Above all, new customer acquisition is always a major focus of an ecommerce business.
New customer acquisition is always a major focus in e-commerce, no matter if it is in the beginning stage or earning millions of dollars in revenue. And one of the best ways of acquiring new customers is advertisement and promotions. There are different ways of advertising that you can use in e-commerce business to keep making new customers wire engaging the old ones at the same time. Let’s understand E-Commerce advertising first.
What is E-commerce Advertisement?
E-Commerce advertising is the placement of favorable content or ads on online or offline spaces. Online spaces typically cover website search engine newsletters, social media sites, mobile apps, a few more, whereas offline spaces may include more traditional forms of advertising such as TV commercials billboards and brochures. Currently, mobile app trends have gone extravagantly, and brands are consulting mobile app developers to get their business app. A mobile app enables brands send notification about new updates and offers, which, as a result, increases sales.
Advertisement reference to paid marketing that allows a company to reach potential users may or may not be aware of your products and services. The goal of e-commerce advertising just not only caters to acquiring new customers, but it also accounts for creating brand awareness, newsletter subscriptions, app signups, and ultimately sales.
Whatever goal you set as your focus, make sure you test the ad strategy that you adopt for your business and iterate if it works for your businesses. It is advisable because an advertising strategy that works well for one ecommerce business may not work for another efficiently. So you should always be testing and analyzing return on investment (ROI) on each advertisement channel for both online and offline spaces.
Don’t rush into trying so many strategies at once. It’s best to start gradually and then move on to others. Meanwhile, you will get an idea of what strategy or ad campaign works best for you so that you can focus on that one more significantly. Starting with a larger budget may cause you to spend a lot of money on unnecessary strategies that couldn’t be productive for your business.
One very basic yet complex strategy to try is SEO. Start with writing plenty of deep and meaningful content which is exactly related to the niche of your business. There are tons of factors to remember when trying SEO but one of the most overlooked is having met the minimum number of characters. Pro tip, you can use a character counter online to quickly determine the current number of characters that you have in your articles so you can easily identify if you have met the minimum character count required to be considered as a credible source.
Online Advertising for Ecommerce
The objective of advertisement needs to be defined before starting any ad campaign. The primary aim of any ad can be driving sales and revenue, create brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or increase email subscriptions. Since each of these ad objectives has different key performance indicators (KPIs), so clarity of your ad goal makes it easier for your brand to measure its performance.
For instance, if you want to spread brand awareness, you would measure the visits-count to your website from search, impressions, unique users to your website, and click-through-rate (CTR) on your ads. This will help you in comparing your brand name to your competitors on Google Trends. On the other hand, in order to analyze sales, you have to track transactions, sales, repeat sales, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value (LTV).
Below are the two primary types of online advertising channels, display ads, and social media advertisements.
Display Ads
Display ads or banner ads are one of the earliest forms of online or web-based advertisements. They have become much more sophisticated over time. Noe Google enables its users or advertisers to dynamically target audiences based on interest, location, demographics, and more.
Display ads are generally payable in cost-per-thousand impressions, or CPM, format. Moreover, this cost has increased a lot in the past few years. But it largely depends on ad placements and targeting strategy.
Although many marketers depend on Google Ads to increase brand awareness, businesses have strategically incorporated a sound marketing strategy that involves channels within a brand’s control, including their website, email, and mobile marketing. This helps them gain more control over the customer experience, and communicate more effectively with customers on their own terms and significantly cut costs.
For display ads, however, you should begin with a confined budget and experiment and optimize to make sure your ads reach the right audiences. To start with Google Ads, start here.
Social Media Ads: Facebook and Instagram
Techjury reports that people generally spend around two hours and 33 minutes each day on social media. The most popular social media channel is Facebook, with users spending an average of two hours and 24 minutes every day, while they spend around 53 minutes per day on Instagram averages. The usage is largely associated with mobile except for a few desktop users.
Social media platforms ate not only a place where billions of people spend their time, but they also offer a variety of ad formats and targeting options.
Facebook offers options to display image-based ads, video ads, slideshow ads, lead ads, and more. With lead ads, you can collect the contact information without them needing to leave Facebook. And, since Instagram is owned by Facebook, it enables you to manage your Instagram and Facebook ads in the Facebook Ads Manager interface.
Facebook also offers a lot of targeting options like interest, location, behaviors, connections, and more. With all of the advertising channels, you should start with a small budget and needs to figure out the format that works for you.
While social media advertising seems to be a necessity for brands to create and grow their lists and acquire more new customers, they have to careful while setting a strategy for your social media ads.
If you belong to an established ecommerce business with having an existing customer base and a good amount of web traffic, Facebook enables you to build a list of custom audiences and a lookalike audience. A custom audience enables advertisers to upload a list of target people on Facebook who have visited your website. Facebook allows you to customize your messaging to different types of audiences. A lookalike audience, for instance, is an audience that is generated through Facebook’s algorithm. This is an extremely strong way to reach those people who match the same characteristics with your existing audiences. To start with Social Ads, visit Facebook for Business.