Inbound Marketing For Ecommerce Brands
When it comes to marketing for your ecommerce company, an inbound marketing approach can help you get where you want to go. Inbound marketing allows you to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry and keep prospects and customers coming back for more.
In this post, we highlight how inbound marketing works, and how it can help your ecommerce brand.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing is a marketing approach that focuses on attracting visitors to your website through interesting and useful information, then nurturing those visitors down the sales funnel until they make a purchase.
Inbound marketing focuses on:
Attraction – This is how you initially attract visitors to your website. This is done by offering content that helps your target audience solve a problem.
- Search engine optimization – One way to attract your audience to your website is by optimizing your content for search engines. This includes blog posts and website pages.
- Social Media – Amplify and promote your content to your audience using the social channels that they spend the most time on.
Conversion – After attracting visitors to your website, your next step is to convert them into a lead. This is typically done by offering a piece of content in exchange for the visitor’s contact information. Content that typically converts well:
- eBooks
- White papers
- Case studies
- Email courses
- Infographics
- Webinars
Closing – After a visitor becomes a lead, it typically takes some nurturing on your end to get them to make a purchase.
- Lead scoring – By scoring your leads when they perform certain actions, you’ll be able to determine whether they’re ready to make a purchase or not.
Delight – Your contact with a customer shouldn’t end once they make a purchase. Ensure that they are happy with their decision and continue to offer them valuable content and resources. This allows you to upsell them, get them to purchase again, and hopefully become a promoter of your brand.
Benefits Of Inbound Marketing For Ecommerce
Now that you have a better understanding of what inbound marketing is, you should start to see how it can be beneficial for your ecommerce business. Below, we highlight the benefits of inbound marketing for ecommerce brands.
Thought Leadership
By publishing content that is thoughtful and helpful, you’ll be able to position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. If you continually post content that helps your target audience, they’ll continue coming back to your site when they have problems to solve.
The more often a prospect comes back, the better the relationship you’re able to build with them, which will ultimately help your brand when it comes to the prospect making purchases.
Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is website traffic that comes from search engines. We touched on search engine optimization earlier, and how optimizing your content for search allows you to get found by search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
By continually publishing fresh content that is optimized, your website creates more opportunities to be highly ranked by search engines, which ultimately leads to more traffic to your site.
Social Media
By pumping out great, helpful content, you’re able to gain traction on your social channels, as well. This includes likes, favorites, retweets, shares, followers, etc. If your content resonates with your brand, they’re more apt to follow you to receive similar content in their feeds, and they’re more apt to share the content on their own profiles. That all equates to you building a larger social presence for your brand.
Data
Inbound marketing allows you to collect valuable data about your website visitors, prospects, and customers. Inbound marketing allows you to collect data on your audience like:
- Where are your website visitors coming from
- Which content best resonates with them
- Which lead generation tactics are working
- What percentage of website visitors are turning into prospects
- What percentage of prospects are becoming customers
- Which social platforms do they interact on the most
- Which step of the sales process are prospects falling out
And that’s just scratching the surface of the valuable data that an inbound marketing approach allows you to collect.
Ultimately, inbound marketing is an exciting approach to marketing that your ecommerce brand can use to separate itself from the competition.
To dive a little deeper into what inbound marketing is, download a free eBook from Primitive Social below.