There are approximately 24 million ecommerce websites, and the industry is growing by 23% every year. This means that there can be hundreds of thousands of online stores competing for your customers every single day.
The only solution to that problem is to get more eyes on your business! Our team here in Brisbane is made up of website developers and marketing specialists, so we’ve seen it all before. We know exactly what it takes to stand out among the crowd via digital marketing.
You need a good understanding of your target market and your brand, and then the time and skills to put your strategies in place. Let’s review five methods to increase the visibility of your online store.
1. Ramp up your social media presence
Most business owners know that they need to engage their target audience using social media. The problem is that they don’t know how to do this effectively. At home, they may use Facebook or Instagram to keep in touch with family and friends, but even if they have a LinkedIn account, they don’t know how to use these platforms effectively for business. So here are a few quick social media marketing tips to help increase your site’s visibility.
(a) Facebook Messenger
If you haven’t explored the benefits of Facebook Messenger for your ecommerce site, you are missing out on a very easy way to engage your target audience in Brisbane. Website developers understand the value of Messenger and use it all the time, but many small business ecommerce owners don’t seem to have realised how useful it can be as a marketing tool.
With over one billion users every month, it’s definitely something you need to investigate! If you link Facebook Messenger to your ecommerce site, not only can you promote your products to your customers, but they can buy from your site without leaving Facebook. That’s a huge plus towards increasing the visibility of your ecommerce store.
(b) Live video, blog posts, and YouTube
You might not want to show yourself on live video, but if your competitors haven’t discovered its benefits yet, you can get a significant edge on them by being innovative! Present new products, models, or designs, demonstrate how to use tools or appliances, even unbox a product to show customers what they’ll receive in the mail.
It’s a great way to beat out the competition, particularly if they don’t use live videos. You can even create a video blog post showcasing your products or answering customer questions and upload them to your YouTube channel. Whether it’s product demonstrations, how-to videos, or sales videos, YouTube is also a phenomenal platform for increasing the visibility of your ecommerce store.
(c) Leverage influencers in your industry
You must have heard about the popularity of influencers and the huge followings they have grown on Instagram. If you take the time to identify influencers with the same target market as your ecommerce store, you can massively increase the visibility of your site. These influencers can help you to promote and market your products to their followers, particularly if they write a testimonial or review your products on their site.
2. Add regular blogs to your website
At GO Creative, we’ve seen how easy it is for the owners of ecommerce sites to engage with their target audience when they include a blog on their site. There are many reasons why your site can benefit from a blog, but one of the biggest must be that many customers only decide to make a purchase after reading a blog post about that product. That’s because consumers like to read as much information as possible about a product before purchasing, and these include product reviews.
If you write entertaining or informative blog posts, you can significantly increase the amount of traffic to your site. So what can you write about? Anything that’s important to your target market and can be associated with your products is a good start. We’ve already mentioned a few topics above (how-to posts and answering customer questions, as well as asking customers to write reviews), but you can also compare different products, brands, or models.
Thinking laterally is also a great idea, for example, if you sell kitchen appliances, then posts written about kitchen renovations, cooking for summer picnics or birthdays can be hugely popular. You can even expand into writing posts on how to live healthy, exercise, diet, and so on.
For a blog to increase your site’s visibility and bring in more traffic, you need to understand your target audience and write content that’s valuable and engaging. It can take some research to write this content, but you can also engage a copywriter instead of writing your own posts.
Regardless of your approach to writing posts, including a blog on your ecommerce site is a great way to increase your site’s visibility. One final word about blogging is that you can’t ignore the benefit of SEO when you write your blogs. The right keywords in the right places can help search engines to start ranking your site higher and making it more visible to internet shoppers.
3. Leverage the power of Google
Ranking your site higher on Google is one of the best ways to increase its visibility to your target audience. This means that if you also have a physical store, you can take advantage of Google My Business. It’s free and isn’t only a business listing, but lets you connect with your customers using Google Search and Maps.
That’s because with Google My Business, your customers can easily find your store and you can provide your address, opening hours, customer reviews, website URL, even links to your social media platforms, all in a prominent text box on the search pages.
Google Shopping is also a great way to advertise your products to searchers online. These are the thumbnail images you see either at the top of the search pages or down the right-hand side. They are a very effective way for shoppers to shop and compare products online because they can see an image of the product, its price, and the retailer.
You will need to set up a Google Merchant Center account, optimise your product imagery, and link to your Google AdWords account if you want to use Google Shopping. Then you need to set up a campaign, place bids, and schedule your campaign. It can be time-consuming when you start, but it’s a very effective way to increase the visibility of your ecommerce store.
And, of course, our SEO team and website developers here in Brisbane can assist with all aspects of improving your search engine visibility.
4. Engage leads via email marketing
Most ecommerce site owners already understand that email marketing is good for business in Brisbane. Website developers can help you to set up a subscription box on your website to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email list. However, it’s not good enough to send the occasional email to your subscribers, you need to send regular emails to promote your products. If you do this, then when they need your products they know where to go.
The easiest way to approach email marketing is to automate a series of emails to your customers and potential customers. For example, you can send a thank you email when someone buys one of your products followed up with emails giving helpful tips on how to use the item or cross-selling by suggesting other products that complement what they have already bought.
You can also send a series of emails when a cart is abandoned to encourage them to return and purchase. There are also automated emails for promoting discounts, competitions, and your loyalty program or asking customers to write a review of the product they have purchased from your site. When you automate these emails, you can simply set and forget!
Another good tip is to promote your social media pages in these emails, encouraging them to visit your site via multiple platforms. Completing the circle, you can also ask visitors to join your email list when they visit your social media sites. This helps to increase your site’s visibility and traffic to your store.
Lastly, you can also send (automated or ad hoc) email campaigns to your existing customers. With automated campaigns, it’s possible for every email to be individually tailored to the customer based on their location, purchase history, profile information, and more! We all know that repeat business is much easier than the first sale, so this approach can be massive for your ecommerce sales.
5. Promote your online store the old fashioned way
It might sound passé, but ‘back in the day’ we used to promote stores by handing out flyers to people in shopping malls and along streets lined with shops. There’s still value in taking this approach, certainly when you interact with people face-to-face. You can also do other types of physical promotions to grab people’s attention, such as posters, billboards, temporary installations, or artworks.
These can be placed outside on the street or inside train stations, shops, and even university campuses. You can even try a TikTok challenge, flash dance, or an accidental interaction where promotion can only be seen properly from above (for example when people are looking over the balconies in a shopping centre because it can’t be seen close up).
The whole aim of this type of marketing strategy is to create a surprise or unconventional interaction with people, something that’s memorable, and even funny. Often called Guerrilla Marketing (popularised by Jay Conrad Levinson’s 1984 book of the same name), if you get it right, it can massively increase the visibility of your online store.
Let our expert Brisbane website developers help you
Another great way to improve the visibility of your ecommerce store is to improve the website design so that it appeals to your target audience. As a Brisbane web design agency, we’re a little biased, but who wouldn’t want a super-fast, high-tech ecommerce site that’s designed to engage your visitors and convert them into paying customers? So if your online store is more than five years old, it’s probably outdated and slow, and is ready for a trend-setting makeover!
