Effective marketing to do after you launch an ecommerce business

 Starting an ecommerce business is not just about launching your website. That’s the easy part. You want people to know about it, visit, and eventually making a purchase. But not every business have the budget for a press release. Here are 5 marketing activities that you can do right after you launch your online store (and get results right away!)

Personal Outreach

Start with the people closest to you. Let them know that you have started an ecommerce business and could use their support. They might not be in your target market but that’s ok. Ask them to visit your site and provide feedback on the user experience. Your friends and family will be excited and will try to be a part of your endeavor any way they can. Which means that they will help spread the word out to other relatives and their friends. When one of them are interested, treat them like a potential customer and try to get the sale. It’s not easy to deal with friends and family because they will most likely ask for “family discounts”. You might have better luck with professional contacts. Maybe people you have known from your career. This could be colleagues, partners, or people who you have hired their service before.

Instagram marketing

I highly suggest ecommerce businesses to hop on Instagram as early as possible. It’s a cost effective way to build traffic to your site. First, start off with hashtag research. Hashtags on Instagram is used to find and showcase content. It’s sort of work like a search engine. You search a keyword related to your product and you can browse through content around that hashtag. Take a look at the profile of those creating content around the relevant hashtags. One thing you want to observe is what kind of content are they producing and does their Instagram have an obvious theme? Look through more accounts and get ideas for content to post on your account. You can use a 3rd party Instagram repost app to share other people’s content. Something that adds value to your target audience. Be careful not to repost a competitor’s content. After you have some content on your account, go back to those accounts that are providing relevant content and have a look at their followers. Those might be potential customers. What you want to do is follow their followers. By the rule of reciprocity, they will follow you back. Keep doing this to get more followers. When you are posting content on Instagram, make sure to include relevant hashtags so that you can when your target audience search for those keywords, they will see your content. Related: Display your Instagram post on your website with Instagram Feed

Influencer Marketing

When doing Instagram research, you’ll come across accounts with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers. These are influencers. Influencer marketing allows you to target an audience of like-minded people that follow an influencer they trust. It’s a great way to tap into an engaged audience to build brand awareness in an organic way. Looking for influencers is not just simply looking for accounts with the most followers. There are influencers basically in every market so you want to make sure you choose the right one to get returns. Search hashtags and check out the content they are producing. Are those content something that your target audience would like? Once you’ve found the influencers you want to work with, you need to reach out to them and agree on the collaboration terms. Payment, timeframe, and content are important things that you need to discuss. Aside from Instagram, you can also reach out to influencers on Youtube and Facebook. Video views are increasing these days. Working with influencers that create video content is a more effective way to get the message to your target audience.

Online Marketplaces

When people shop online, most likely the first thing that comes to mind are the Amazons and Lazadas and so on. These online marketplaces are already established brands and they have strength in numbers (of customers). People have more trust in these sites than a newly launched ecommerce site. List your products on these marketplaces and they will do the marketing for you. But there will be charges to make use of these platforms. Look for those that you only need to pay when a sale is made. These are commission based platforms and they only charge per transaction. There are also shopping comparison sites where you can have your products listed and when shoppers click on your products, it will bring them to the product page of your ecommerce site. These kind of shopping platforms are also great for new ecommerce businesses because they bring you shoppers that are at the “ready to buy” stage and you will only be charged if someone clicks on your products. Related: Sell on multiple channels with just a few clicks with EasyStore

Facebook Adverts

Facebook has over a billion of active users monthly and most likely your target audience are on Facebook too. Reach out to hundreds of thousands of your target audience without spending too much of your time. With Facebook Ads, Facebook will do all the work for you and show your posts to specific audiences that you set. It is paid advertising but you can set it up so that it's within your budget. The higher the budget the more people you will be able to reach. Make sure to put aside some budget for advertising when you launch your ecommerce business. Another great thing about Facebook Ads is that it allows you to automate every step in your sales funnel. You can run ads to drive awareness, retarget those that visited your store or abandoned cart, and even to get your customers to purchase again. Read: 5 Facebook hacks that will help increase your ecommerce store sales It is not necessary to do all of these marketing activities and what work for other businesses might not work for yours. The most important thing is you need to test and see which marketing strategies work best for your business. And when you find that out, go all out on it.