This post was sponsored by Squarespace, which makes it easy for anyone to build a personal brand online. Use the code CONTESSA for 10% off of your site.
You’ve built an amazing e-commerce website!
If you’ve been following this series, you have also probably started to market your e-commerce business, too! In this installment of our partnership with Squarespace, we are going to introduce some more high-level aspects to growing your online shop.
This includes implementing more technical elements like content marketing, targeted personas, tracking your website’s performance—as well as more traditional aspects like the simplicity of making your customers feel valued.
Create Great Content
Whether it’s a blog, an Instagram post, or a YouTube video, producing content around your product is more important than ever. This gives customers (and potential customers) a 360-degree view of your product.
Content marketing is a vital tool for modern business success. Loosely defined, content marketing is the creation of content around your business—and the pain points it solves. For example, if you are selling beautiful lighting fixtures, like Schneid, your best content is going to be around designing or brightening your home.
Unlike typical advertising and marketing, content marketing traverses a more oblique road—establishing trust from an audience looking to solve their problems. It’s not about creating a YouTube video showcasing how amazing your lamps are. Instead, it’s more about giving your customers a great how-to on brightening their homes—using light paint colors, mirrors, colorful blankets, and, yes, beautiful lighting.
If you are trying to grow your online shop, you should always be creating new, helpful content for your niche audience. Content is all around us—in tweets, Instagram photos, blog posts, webinars, videos, and so on. Make your mark with some creative content.
Great Design
The last time you threw a dinner party, you probably spiffed up your entire house. You may have bought some new flowers, hid your stacks of mail, vacuumed up a head full of dog hair, and made your home look presentable—maybe even fantastic.
You want to do the same thing with your website. The thing is, your visitors are arriving at all hours—from the middle of the night until first thing in the morning.
In short, you want to make sure your e-commerce website is always ready for guests. With Squarespace, you’re 90 percent of the way there from the start. Choose any one of Squarespace’s unique templates to give yourself a head start.
For example, Schneid Studio uses the template Marta in order to showcase bold colors and beautiful photography of their lighting and ceramics. These templates come in all shapes and sizes. Some are built to showcase very visually-based work. Others allow you to put your brand’s story at the forefront. Every design is unique, customizable, sleek, and web responsive.
Create Personas + Target Them
Now, we are starting to get into the nitty-gritty of marketing. Take the guessing game out of who your customers might be by creating some personas.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of who your customer might be—based on market research around your (or your competitors’) existing customer set. If you are just starting out, you might not even have a persona yet. That’s fine.
Creating a detailed buyer persona is possible, even before you have exact data to back you up. Here’s what to do to create one (or several) buyer personas to target.
Imagine your product in the hands of its first customer. What does that customer look like? Maybe she a high-performing lawyer aged 35-50 living in the suburbs of a larger metropolitan city. Maybe she is aged 18-35, loves Bravo, and spends an average of $200 per month on clothing.
Create your personas. These are the people who want your product or service—whether because it helps them solve daily problems or simply because it enriches their lives. From these personas, you can deepen your research. Where does this person spend time on the internet? Is she watching hours of content on YouTube or does she spend her downtime on Facebook?
By creating detailed personas, you can imagine your customers into reality and serve them the content, advertising, and (of course) the products they need most.
Use Free Marketing Tools
“I can’t run a marketing budget, because I have no budget.”
Does this sound like you? If it does, listen up. There are tons of free marketing tools that you can utilize today. Whether you’re bombarded by scheduling your social media posts or you’re struggling with organization, there are plenty of free tools to help you run your marketing (even if you’re a team of one person.)
In addition, Squarespace offers a suite of helpful marketing tools. From email campaigns to detailed analytics, Squarespace has you covered.
Partner Up with Other Businesses
If you’re struggling with building your audience, consider teaming up with another business. While this may sound counter-intuitive, partnering up with other companies has become a common practice.
Partner up with another company—one with a similar audience—on an email-driven giveaway, a social media giveaway, or even a product collaboration. This is a great way for your company and your partnered company to elicit the attention of each other’s existing audience.
Form an alliance with another company—so that both of you can reap the benefits. Some ways you can partner up or worth with another company include:
- Co-advertising
- Social media giveaways
- Co-authoring a content series
- Offering referral discounts
- Sharing information and advice as a “brain trust”
Find some creative, beneficial, and even fun ways to partner with like-minded companies. Forming these relationships will help you both gather new potential customers, create unique content, and enhance your overall profile.
Treat Your Customers Well
We all know the old adage about customers, so we won’t repeat it here. With the advent of live customer reviews on Yelp, Twitter, and Instagram, it is more important than ever to treat your customers well—every inch of the way.
One way to keep your customers is by offering incentive right off the bat. Whether it’s offering a discount for the very first purchase or a discount offer for a second purchase, these are small incentives to keep your new customers coming back for more.
You might also set up automated discounts for customers—around their birthdays, anniversaries, and seasonal deals.
No matter how much data, numbers, KPIs, or ROI you track and achieve, a good word of mouth from a single customer will always be the most important currency to wield as a growing business.
This post was sponsored by Squarespace, which makes it easy for anyone to build a personal brand online. Use the code CONTESSA for 10% off of your site.
