Marketing in the e-commerce world is a practice aimed at improving traffic to an online store and having the ability to convert it into actual sales and customers.

There are hundreds of ways to do this, starting from focusing on improving organic search traffic and preparing the store for search engines, to using Facebook or Google ads to attract targeted visitors.

Salla, the future of e-commerce, is an easy platform to start your business

We can also mix paid and unpaid strategies, all in an effort to find out which mix can convert most of your target customers.

But realistically, you cannot rely on just one of these strategies permanently, especially given the evolution of marketing methods as well as market algorithms. To keep up with all this, you must also evolve your strategy to win the highest return whether on ad spend or operating costs associated with unpaid strategies like search engine optimization (SEO).

If you are seeking to improve your business, you must monitor the general landscape of the electronic market before moving, as well as build a strong foundation for your business in this changing market. Without these steps, you will be in a very difficult position.

So, do you have aspirations to improve your e-commerce and achieve a massive return from it?

Good... This guide will put you on the starting path. We will cover the effective steps you need to take to build a powerful digital marketing plan for your online store that helps you achieve a massive return, along with a valuable free gift you can get at the end of the article.

The importance of building a marketing plan for your online store

In fact, you are operating in a changing environment where competition is constantly increasing; therefore, you need to put in more effort to increase your sales online.

Statistics show about e-commerce in the Kingdom:

• That revenue in the e-commerce market in the Kingdom is expected to reach USD 6.311 million in 2020.

• The revenue is also expected to show an annual growth rate (2020-2024) of 7.1%, resulting in an expected market size of USD 8,290 million by 2024.

• The largest part of the market will be the fashion trend, with an expected market volume of USD 2.058 million in 2020.

• The user penetration rate will be 73.5% in 2020 and is expected to reach 91.2% by 2024, and the average revenue per user is expected to be USD 246.69.

Statistics on the size of e-commerce in Saudi Arabia

So do you want to miss this opportunity?

On the other hand, just building a modern, feature-rich, and easy-to-use website might seem like a daunting task (you can now easily and for free create your online store through the Salla platform), but even when doing so, you are only halfway there.

Many people have great ideas for e-commerce but fail in execution. <<Knowing what you want to sell online is one thing, and knowing how to do it successfully is a completely different thing>>.

The secret to electronic commerce success is not limited only to offering your products and knowing how they perform. In order to effectively grow your business—whether you are selling retail or not—you need a well-thought-out digital marketing plan to increase awareness of your brand and boost your sales. This is what we will help you build step-by-step in the next section. Are you ready to start?

Things you have to do before creating and executing an e-commerce marketing plan:

These days, online competition has become fiercer, to the extent that if you compare your product sales with competitors now, you might be greatly disappointed. However, with your reliance on a detailed, effective, and flexible marketing strategy, you can improve your results and profits significantly, and enter the competition with strength and solidity. The important thing is to build your plan on a solid foundation. Here are the 3 most important steps to take before starting to create your marketing plan:

1- Search for competitors and mentors.

Look for companies or individuals who have already built and scaled their e-commerce businesses, then start analyzing their businesses and development paths. You can also ask for their advice and recommendations.

• Find out how they started?

• What marketing channels produced the highest short-term ROI for them?

• Did they hire a digital marketing agency or build an in-house team?

• What technology did they use to track data?

• What digital products helped them effectively?

2- Be honest with yourself.

The results will surely correspond to the quality of your products, the size of funding, and the strength of your team. There is no shame in starting small and doing digital marketing by yourself in the short term, but it is important to set realistic expectations and outline a roadmap for growth.

You can only know where you are going if you know where you are now, so make a comprehensive evaluation of the current state of your business and competition; understanding your current position will lead to better decisions, and ultimately better results.

3- Set up and optimize product pages

You must make sure that all product pages are set up perfectly because the goal of marketing is to drive potential customers to these pages and increase sales. If your marketing efforts are top-notch but the product pages are not user-focused, you will not be able to sell the products.

To be honest, potential customers will not care about your marketing efforts; they only care about the products, so if your product pages cause trouble for the user, this might be the point where the customer stops.

Things to keep in mind when designing product pages:

• Make sure your store pages are rich in content and cover all basic keywords.

• Customers must find all the necessary details, covering all attributes such as color, size, brand name, manufacturer details, product variables, as well as features and specifications... and more.

• Make sure all product pages are properly indexed so that search engines can crawl and rank them.

• Add high-quality images and videos to give more details about the products.

• Check the purchase process and ensure customers do not face any obstacles.

The main elements to building an effective marketing plan and a successful business:

1- Executive summary.

Now that you have gathered essential tips from knowledgeable mentors, you can lay out an overview of the big picture of the market by writing an executive summary of what you extracted from their experiences and advice, which will be the beginning of drafting your marketing plan.

2- Set your marketing goals.

Make your goals very clear and specific. Once you start executing, there is no shame in adjusting your goals if they turn out to be too low or exaggerated, or if any indicators emerge that require adjusting your plan.

In the end, your primary focus should be creating realistic, achievable goals, so it is important to make sure to include specific goals and metrics, such as:

• Increase sales by X% during the slow season.

• Increase traffic by X% on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

• Increase email marketing conversion rates by X%.

• Entering a specific market starting from month X.

The big benefit of these goals is that they provide a reference framework for your progress, so you can check them from time to time to see how much progress you are making in achieving your goals and get an accurate measurement of how things are going in general.

As long as you are rational and make sure they are achievable, you will not find difficulty in execution.

3- Map out the details of your target customer persona.

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves. - Steve Jobs

Now that you know what your goal is, you need to get an idea of the customers you serve, and this is called a "buyer persona".

Setting up buyer personas helps you create the right message, to the right person, at the right time.

Some people skip this step because they assume they already know their customers. That may be true, but in this case, you might ignore some of your audience and the problems they face.

If you currently have customers, you can conduct a survey for them. For example: give the last 200 customers who bought a product from you a chance to win a gift card worth SAR 400, then ask them to fill out a survey, and ask open questions that help you discover their personalities.

This gives you powerful data about your customers, hundreds of times better than your expectations. Therefore, do not create buyer personas based on who you think they are, but ask them.

But if you do not have customers yet, you can guess their personalities by observing the behavior of potential customers in communities that include those interested in your product or general statistics, as well as by monitoring competitors' websites and pages on social media platforms.

The buyer persona includes precise details such as:

• Gender

• Age

• Salary

• Hobbies and Interests

• Location

There are also some less obvious elements that you should consider, such as:

• Favorite books

• Favorite TV shows

• Hobbies

You must be aware of the nature of the potential buyer's persona to be able to answer questions like:

• What problems do they face regularly?

• How does your product solve these problems?

• How can your product improve their lives?

• What might affect their purchase?

• What kind of information do they want to see before being 100% sure of the purchase?

If you can answer all of these questions, you are starting your marketing campaign from an excellent position, and you can plan ads and write content that attracts your target audience on a personal level and converts them more effectively.

Once you have this knowledge, you can use it to ask more advanced questions like:

• What percentage of these target personas purchase this product from you?

• What percentage bought it from your competitors?

• If the competitors' percentage is higher, find out why?

• What percentage within your target segment does not buy these products at all?

• What can convince them that your product will improve their lives?

• How much revenue will you make if the entire group buys from you?

• How reasonably close are you to this number in a year? Two years? Ten?

Now that you've gathered all the information about the buyer persona, how can you keep it?

There is one good trick you can use to keep all this information in one place that is easy to read and use as a reference by anyone on your team, which is what we call a "Buyer Persona": creating a fictional character based on all the data we mentioned above that embodies the perfect picture of the potential customer.

The more you know about your potential buyer's personas, the easier it becomes to target that person in marketing strategies.

4- Find your weaknesses to build your strength.

"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer."- Michael Corleone, "The Godfather" Part II.

Good research on your competitors will help you find where the opportunity lies to grow your business faster. Most businesses make a fatal mistake when they assume that the competitors they know are the competitors their customers know.

Search for all competitors, read their reviews, and find out what customers complain about. Is this a problem you want to solve with your product or content? Then look at your competitors, what they offer, and what marketing advantage they focus on in their campaigns.

5- Pricing and positioning strategy.

Make sure your pricing and positioning provide real value to your target audience. Forcing products on your target customers at an exaggerated price is a losing game; because buyers today have become more experienced and aware, especially when it comes to comparing prices.

Therefore, do your research!

Sure, there are opportunities to test and optimize throughout your product's lifecycle, but studying the market well in advance will yield better results in the long run.

6- Create a keyword research plan to rank easily on Google.

Now that you know your competitors, and offer a high-quality product suitable for your target customer's needs, now come the time to learn how to easily outperform them.

Your goal is to find phrases or keywords used by your customers to help you attract them to your site through search engines.

You can use tools like Ahrefs or Google Keyword Planner to look at organic keywords.

Most important e-commerce marketing channels and tactics to consider:

Now there are countless marketing channels, but these three are the most widely used and highly influential.

1- Search Engines

Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and Ask are the main search engines in the world right now. According to Statcounter, Google controls the search engine market with the largest share of 92.85%.

Search engines are one of the most important sources of targeted visitors for online stores, so we cannot ignore this!

There are two main ways to get traffic from search engines:

● Organic traffic.

● Paid traffic.

How to get organic traffic from search engines?

Preparing your store for search engines, or what is known as SEO, is a way to get targeted traffic from search engines naturally. It is a process based on activities that show search engines that your product page is more relevant to the audience compared to other brands.

Search engine optimization is the unique process of creating engaging and valuable content, and collecting reviews in order to get the highest ranking in queries related to your products.

As you can see in the image, Google ranked the most relevant results by analyzing their content and references from other sites. Speaking explicitly about Google, it has more than 200 factors to judge and rank a page, so that users can find the most appropriate products.

If we look at SEO as a separate industry, it will have a bright future because of its importance, as it is the process that every online store needs to build its brand, so SEO should have a priority in your marketing budget.

How to get paid traffic from search engines?

Every major search engine offers paid services to get a higher ranking, where you have to pay per click.

Search engines have different ways to display your sponsored products, where you can set your budget and display your results without investing efforts in search engine optimization, here is an example:

Pay Per Click (PPC) is an easy way to acquire targeted traffic very quickly, as your result is displayed above the first organic results, depending on the bid amount.

Since there are many competitors competing for the same type of products, they will all place bids on different keywords. The result of paid ads will be determined based on the competition and the amount you are willing to spend per click.

Not only on Google, but all search engines offer such services, so you have to target the right audience and determine key phrases to attract traffic to your store.

2- Social Media

Social media can be a great source of traffic, expanding your reach, as well as increasing sales, if marketed correctly.

Posting about your products regularly on social platforms can increase your followers, and directly increase the chances of selling your products. Specifically, Facebook allows you to set up your store on the platform itself and redirect customers to your online store.

1- Marketing on Facebook & Instagram

For example, LG Electronics' page on Facebook constantly posts information about new products to raise awareness about its brand and products.

Also, you can set up a store on your page and list your products in it directly.

Just like Facebook, Instagram can also be a powerful platform to post about your brand, and sell online too. We take Converse as an example - a legendary brand in Sneakers.

If you look at the images below, Converse used the product tagging feature to sell products on Instagram; users can check the images and go directly to the Converse store, without leaving the app.

With high-quality images and the correct use of hashtags, you can gather like-minded people who are interested in seeing your products on Instagram. (In this guide you will find everything you need to know about marketing your online store on Instagram)

2- Paid ads on Facebook and Instagram:

Both Facebook and Instagram also offer paid advertising options. On Facebook, you cannot promote your products directly; you can create engaging content and build value for your brand to collect more followers, and this ultimately forms a solid base. You can promote the content, as well as collect engagement using paid ads.

Using Instagram, you can also promote your products through paid ads, and target the most relevant potential customers based on their interests.

Instagram ads can be a highly effective channel for your brand, to build a huge audience and redirect potential customers to your store, here is an example of that:

3- Marketing on LinkedIn:

Although LinkedIn is a professional network, it can be an excellent channel for content promotion. To be honest, LinkedIn will be a great choice for B2B companies, but LinkedIn is expanding its reach to more fields.

As an online store, you can definitely create a company profile and share valuable updates on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn also offers paid advertising services, where you can reach potential customers using different methods such as sponsored content, personalized inbox ads, and sidebar ads. It can be a massive platform to promote books, electronic books, templates, or graphic packages.

3- Creating useful content

Have the keywords you want to target? Now you need to find out what you should write about.

To start, you need to write the best answer to your customers' questions. Put yourself in the customer's shoes: what do you want to know if you are conducting search on this topic?

For example, when we wrote an article about product photography professionally and at the lowest cost, we wanted to share and help you with a vital problem faced by most retailers.

Not only did it support and improve my ideas, but I also discovered new topics I hadn't thought about, such as adding value before placing an order.

You can also look at other articles written on this topic; this will help you find gaps in your content, as well as in your competitors' content.

A strong article should lead potential customers to a solution to their problem. Creating a list of 120 possible solutions is not useful if your customer only needs a single solution.

This doesn't mean you can't publish an effective list; this is a list we published on 10 free ways big stores use to increase their followers on Instagram. It's useful because each one complements the other.

Finally, you must find out which content actually works, and use parts of it to make your content shine among competitors.

Easy ways to find content ideas that your audience is searching for:

• The Buzzsumo website is a great tool for finding the most shared content on any topic.

• The Reddit communities are forums that include collections of sub-forums called subreddits. You can look at each subreddit to see which topics get the most votes and comments.

• Quora allows users to ask community questions based on many topics. Just search for questions with 50 or more followers, and there are many, many other ways.

4- Creating a Content Calendar to organize content publishing

The duration of creating a content calendar varies according to the stage the brand is going through and its goals. We provided you with an integrated guide to help you create a Content Calendar to organize your content. You can access it from here.

Tips to increase conversion rate in e-commerce

Here are 7 tips that will help you increase conversion rates on your online store.

1- Highlight what you offer in your store.

The most important thing you should do when a customer enters your store is to show them exactly what you sell. Use the home page to display different categories of goods you offer, or show some of your most popular products. The further you go, the more customer interest increases.

2- Tell customers about yourself.

Most companies do not think that the "About Us" page is important, but you would be surprised if you tracked its traffic. So, tell your site visitors who you are, what your slogan is, and your story.

3- Use trust signals.

Show customers that they can trust you. Use customer reviews to brief potential customers on what they will buy, and allow them to leave a review when purchasing from you.

4- Focus on selling to the same customer more than once.

You should not push the customer to buy another product, but it is always good to show them items they might be interested in. If they have just bought something from you, they are more likely to look at what you suggest to them.

5- Do not try to convert everyone.

It sounds like a good idea to try to convert 100% of your store visitors, but realistically, that will not happen. Instead, focus on converting visitors relevant to the buyer personas we discussed above, as they are more likely to buy.

6- Encourage social sharing

When someone has just bought from you, they feel good about what you offer. This is the right time to ask them to share their purchases on social media, or recommend your store.

7- Write excellent product descriptions.

Content expert John Lane at Elite Assignment Help says, "A good product description will go a long way towards securing that sale. Make sure to write descriptions that highlight the product's benefits to customers, and speak to them directly."

Conclusion:

Formulating a well-thought-out marketing plan for e-commerce might seem daunting, even though the strategies and channels that can help increase online sales are massive (and keep growing). However, the most important step is to lay a good foundation for your store, then choose the marketing strategies and channels most suitable for your target customers, and start testing them.

Now, before you think about entering the race or relying entirely on influencers to promote your products, ensure you have a deep understanding of your product and the size of demand for it.

Do not be afraid to make assumptions, as long as you test them. The more organized and detailed-oriented you are, the harder it is to go wrong.

After reading this comprehensive guide that outlines all the steps you will need to build a digital marketing plan that helps you grow your business, you will be qualified to make an impact and earn real profits from your store.