Looking to elevate your brand’s online business — or aiming to add online sales to your entrepreneurial arsenal? Here at TBA Outdoors, we’ve put together a toolkit for e-comm success that features a collection of the key ingredients to success mentioned above. To launch or lift your online business, be sure you include the following 10 strategies in your plans for optimizing/leveraging your e-commerce platforms:
1. Brand and marketing strategy/goals
Before your brand jumps into its e-comm marketing campaigns, take the time to establish your campaign goals and develop a strategic plan/tactics to help you reach each of those goals. From your campaign’s overall messaging to the imagery and content it leverages to convey it, set goals and establish KPIs that you can measure against. Then follow the game plan you’ve created and adjust your strategy as needed to achieve the goals you’ve established.
2. Authentic content and messaging
Especially when speaking to a consumer audience that’s as passionate and highly educated about its pursuits as most outdoor enthusiasts are, authenticity is key. Make sure that your outdoor brand is creating content and delivering messaging that is true to the brand’s values and speaks to the consumer’s needs and desires. For example, with marketing assets like blog articles and videos, aim to cover topics that are of genuine interest to your target audience. In doing so, try to highlight your brand lifestyle and the proper use of your products while conveying a deep understanding of your consumers and their interests.
3. E-commerce platforms
To have success selling your brand’s offerings online, you’ve got to put them in the right places and on the right platforms — spots where your target consumers spend time and can easily find them. And to know where these are, you’ll need to stay on top of the latest tech and trends, which can evolve and change over time.
Some of the current top platforms where brands are finding high levels of e-comm success include:
- Your brand’s website, with Shopify a preferred e-comm platform for your online store
- Amazon Marketplace
- Walmart Marketplace
- Social shopping on popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest
4. SEO
To generate sales on your brand’s website, you’ll need to attract the right consumers to visit and explore your offerings. And one of the first steps to achieving this is ensuring that your brand can easily be found online by those who are searching for your specific solutions or those like them. Implementing a strong SEO strategy will help you generate traffic organically by showing up high in the search rankings when consumers turn to leading search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! to find what they’re looking for online.
5. Paid search
Implementing paid search (aka PPC) tactics can help your brand build on its SEO efforts with paid placement on search engine results pages (SERPs). Like SEO, paid search tactics can help your brand drive more traffic to its website, boost brand awareness and develop high-quality leads — and it can achieve all of this relatively quickly in a highly targeted (and therefore highly cost-effective) manner.
6. Paid social advertising
With nearly three-quarters of U.S. consumers using some form of social media, paid social advertising is another way to reach your brand’s target audience members where they are spending their time online. And like paid search, it can also deliver high-quality leads with high levels of targeting and a high ROI. Further, continued AI advances make it easier to attract interested consumers to your brand’s website and lower your customer acquisition costs. And by leveraging available automation tools, you can achieve all of this with less work, too.
7. Email marketing
Offering an average ROI of $36 on every $1 spent, email marketing delivers the highest ROI of any form of marketing — digital or otherwise. It also offers a highly effective way for brands to leverage existing customers to drive more revenues, a solid investment considering that it costs substantially less to sell to existing customers than to acquire new ones.
To maximize the effectiveness of its email campaigns, make sure that your brand is constantly growing its lead acquisitions and adding new email addresses to its database of customer data. Also, be sure your email campaigns are leveraging automation, which can save you time and effort while moving customers along the path to purchase with strategic and timely messaging. And to further increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, use promotions to catch consumers’ interest and boost sales.
8. Affiliates/influencers
Today’s social media influencers offer brands an attractive way to reach large numbers of new consumers via messaging from a personality they’ve grown to know and trust over time. And by choosing/working with the right influencers and tapping into the high levels of trust they command among their followers, brands can drive added traffic and revenues, all while building trust for their brands among consumers.
9. Reviews and loyalty program
Surveys show that nearly half of consumers trust online business reviews as much as word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family members — making it imperative to e-comm success to find ways to get more online reviews for your brand. (Check out this TBA Outdoors blog article for our advice on how to beef up your brand’s collection of online reviews.) And with a loyalty program in place, you can reward regular customers for their business, incentivize repeat purchases and even move regular customers farther along the path to true brand loyalty.
10. World-class customer service
Of course, by boosting the experience your customers have with your brand via excellent customer service, you can greatly increase the chances of bringing them back for more business and establishing strong and lasting connections with them. Today’s consumers have come to expect strong customer service — and if you don’t deliver it, your brand won’t keep them coming back.
Overall, to find more e-comm success, make it as easy as possible for consumers to find your brand online and do business with it. By creating a seamless path to purchase, you’ll rev up your brand’s online purchases and boost your bottom line.
Ready to put all of these critical e-commerce elements into place for your outdoor brand? TBA Outdoors, is a fully integrated marketing firm, which means that we’ve got all of your brand’s marketing needs covered — all in one place. From e-commerce and analytics to branding strategy, research, creative, social media, video production, media planning and buying, public relations and more, you can count on us.
To explore how we can help your outdoor brand reach its e-commerce potential and amplify the effectiveness of all of its marketing campaigns, reach out to our team of marketing professionals today.
