In our opinion, effective marketing for magento websites starts with the basics of good coding practices and search engine friendly content. First, what’s the point of sending visitors to your site when its ugly, difficult to navigate, generates errors and so forth? Second, good content is what both customers and search engines want. Well written content pays exponential returns because it both helps sell more, and it helps generate more traffic. Further, good content is an investment that pays for itself over and over, but you only have to pay for it once.
The Problem with Immediate Gratification
But then what? That’s where it starts to get tricky. There are dozens of ways to build traffic to your Magento website. Some of our favorites are:
- Email Marketing
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
- Display Advertising
- Social Media
- Link Building
- Remarketing
Now a common mistake is to fall into the trap of using a tool that’s easy to measure the results quickly. You can see in the chart below, marketers find it easy to quantify returns from PPC. As you’d suspect, I buy a keyword on Google, and I immediately get traffic. I can see my investment, and I can track conversions in my eCommerce site. Google Analytics tells me my ROI. Wonderful?
Ability to Measure ROI from Digital Channels
It is wonderful that you can measure ROI on PPC campaigns – we recommend it. However, as marketers have learned, the cost of PPC campaigns have grown greatly, and continue to increase. And, you still don’t know if its the best choice for your budget, goals and competitive position.
So What’s the First Step in Marketing for Magento Websites?
We start with a competitive analysis. Typically, we spend 6-8 hours researching our clients competitors, and what they’re doing to promote their websites. How much traffic are they getting, and from what sources? Where are they strongly represented online? What opportunities are they missing? What can you do with excellence that they can’t do? Once you find the gaps, then you can find success in doing the marketing competitors aren’t.
For example, if a competitor is already using PPC campaigns effectively, it will likely be very expensive to compete with them. Often content marketing is a great tool that competitors ignore, so we find ourselves recommending that frequently. The point is, hit the competitors where their weak. Not a new concept, but it still applies to digital marketing.
Finally, need some help getting started? Or, just want an expert to handle your marketing for Magento websites? Talk with our our experts!