If you work in a small business, you’ll be aware of the importance of marketing your business across online platforms. Social media is a low-cost method of building brand awareness and marketing your business – as well as its products and services – to your target audience and even further afield.
Having an online website also means you need a marketing strategy to ensure your business can be found.
Marketing strategies for e-commerce businesses
If you offer your products or services online, there are several things to consider to ensure your website runs optimally. Search engines analyse several factors to determine where your website ranks, and that is in both content and technical makeup.
Each page must be designed in a way that is easy to read and offers the best page experience. This means ensuring text is readable; there are no elements covering anything like images or buttons.
Pages must also be optimised for mobile viewing. A recent study has shown that approx. 60.3% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, while desktop devices account for 37.7% of browsing. The rest of the traffic comes from browsing done on tablet devices.
You should also be creating high-quality content for your website. This can be from product descriptions, ‘About Us’ information, or blog posts. Using keywords that your target audience is searching for is crucial, and there are many online tools that can help you to find the correct search terms.
In such a saturated market, e-commerce businesses may look to offer their customers a competitive edge. This can be discounts via newsletter sign-ups, digital gift cards, or even a loyalty scheme.
Reward-It’s digital loyalty scheme allows for integrations with some e-commerce platforms, so when your customers shop online, they can collect points that can be redeemed for rewards such as discount codes or free products.
Social media marketing for small businesses
Another way to get your products or services in front of the correct people is to use social media platforms as promotion.
There are several different social media websites that you can use, and these may have varying levels of effectiveness depending on the demographics of your audience. For example, if you offer massage or beauty services, your demographic is likely to be women between 30-60. This target audience is more likely to be found on Facebook, and therefore you would have more success with a Facebook page than a TikTok account.
On the other hand, if you run an online stationery business, the age of your target audience is likely to be lower – such as school or university students – and you would benefit from sharing video content on platforms like TikTok or Instagram.
It’s also important to ensure that you are sharing different types of content on your platforms. Whilst video posts are being given more prominence, you must also post static images to prevent the algorithm from marking your content as spam.
The topics shared must also change, with tips or tutorials marked as most important by the algorithm, authoritative content, and product promotions marked as the least important. This isn’t to say that your products should never be promoted, and it may benefit you to find ways to incorporate them into ‘helpful’ content.
In our next tip to help small businesses utilise their marketing strategy, we will provide all the information required to boost your email and newsletters.
To find out more about how Reward-It can help to market your business, please get in touch with a member of our expert team.
