7 Tips for Ecommerce Marketing Success: Tip 1

There are endless marketing opportunities. Between social media, SEO, banner ads, retargeting, PPC, YouTube, etc, etc, etc, how do you figure out where to start?

This week we’ll be sharing a tip with you every day of the week, starting with some marketing fundamentals. If you follow these fundamentals, you’ll have good basis for very successful brand and product.

Let’s start with our marketing philosophy:

Marketing should not be centered around tactics.

It might sound idealistic, but we believe it’s true – marketing should be centered around a good product and a good story.

Which brings us to our first tip..

Product first.

You must have a great product. Period. And there needs to be a market for it.

In essence, marketing is simply telling the world about your great product. In years past, a good salesman might have been able to sell anything (dare I say even a ketchup popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves?). But no more. You cannot trick people into buying your product in today’s world.

Ok, sure. Maybe one or two customers. But now feedback is almost instantaneous. If your product does not deliver on its promise, your reputation will be toast in just a few hours. And once that happens, all your future marketing efforts will fail, no matter how much of a marketing genius you are.

If you don’t have a great product that makes your audience’s lives easier, don’t bother reading the rest of these marketing tips.

Go back to the product design phase until you have something worth telling people about. Otherwise, to be blunt, you’d be wasting your time and money marketing a less-then-stellar product.

Want to learn more about the components of a successful product? Check out this blog. 

Now, once you do have a stellar product…

Get it into your customer’s hands.

Heck, if it’s a low cost item, start to give it away for free. This is what our friends at Banded have done with incredible success. Their main marketing strategy is to get member’s of their target audience to test out their headbands, because once they do, Banded is convinced the customers will come back and purchase more. Their product is just that good.

The best marketing you’ll ever have is satisfied customers who want to talk about your product.

Another great product tip?

Design your products so that they go together.

Once a customer is satisfied with one of your products, you don’t want that to be the end of the story. Design products that compliment one another so that once they have one, they’ll want the others. This leads into future product sales and will increase the lifetime value of your customers. Link to Post

Not surprisingly, Apple is the master of this concept.

The more iPods that are sold, the more Macs are sold. You need to have something to sync your iPod with after all. The more iPhones that are sold, the more Apple Watches are sold.

All of their products are interconnected and are better if you have the full suite of them.

Try to build a product line, no matter what type of product, that follows this interconnected mold.

Trust us, it’s worth the effort. You’ll thank us later.

Stay tuned for tip #2 tomorrow!