Chloë Thomas is a globally recognised eCommerce marketing problem solver. Author of several bestselling books, keynote speaker, advisor, and host of the eCommerce MasterPlan Podcast. She helps her clients maximise their marketing performance.
Chloe’s latest book, How to get traffic that buys to your website, addresses the struggle people have (both in and outside of eCommerce) with knowing what marketing they should be doing for their business.
Three core marketing methods
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
People tend to ignore SEO because it is more of a slow burn and it can take months for results to show. Instead they focus on ads or emails that will bring immediate results.
There are three parts to SEO
- Be relevant and get the right keywords in the right places on your website
- Be in the index by allowing google into your site so that it knows you exist
- Be important by constantly building links to your website
In essence, SEO is of value to your business if it is going to drive traffic that buys to your website.
For those who want to start doing SEO, the good news is that the SEO community is very good at sharing and updating each other. In doing so they offer a whole host of free information online. Here’s a few pointers to get you started:
Google search console is a must for anyone wanting to start doing SEO. This is where you submit your sitemap to be in the index. Consider it also your way of talking to Google about what’s happening on your website. Google search console gives you stats which can be integrated into your google analytics for more stats.
Moz.com are geniuses in the space of SEO. They have some really nice free tools that you can use to check things like domain authority, which is an estimation of how important Google thinks another website is.
SEM Rush has a suite of really useful tools that will check rankings.
2. Search Engine Advertising
Search engine advertising tends to deliver faster results than SEO.
Once you know your profit target (this usually comes down to your return on advertising spend (ROAS) or your cost per acquisition (CPA) the two main numbers for businesses to focus on are: money spent and money earned.
To get the most out of Google ads, whether you're doing Google shopping campaigns or you're doing keyword advertising, the more focused you can make your activity, the better it generally performs.
It’s best to start small and then use the data to build out.
3. Email marketing
Email marketing is a lot more work than it used to be. The days of batch and blast are largely over but to keep emailing marketing working for you, you need to find the right strategy.
Be clever with your data and look after your customers by sending them valuable information and quality messages.Use this as a way to build a relationship with the customers.
An email marketing strategy that takes into account what you’re trying to build and what messaging you want to use and who you want to send emails to will go a long way to growing your business. It's a lot more work than it used to be but the good thing is once you build those automations into your email marketing strategy then they deliver for you.
If you are struggling with knowing what is the best marketing method or set of methods for your business
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