Online stores, also known as e-commerce stores are trending these days. Corona has positively impacted the growth of online stores. Due to COVID-19, more people are focused on online shopping instead of visiting conventional stores. Similar is the case with every consumer product, whether it be food, clothing, or accessories.
People are more indulged in buying from e-commerce websites, which has increased the demand for e-commerce stores. As more businesses are stepping up in this game, the competition is rising. With a diversified product range, every e-store plans to make the best out of its targeted audience. But it is not that easy. To increase online sales, an online store needs to work on certain steps that are as follows,
- Competitors analysis
- Diversified product range
- Digital Marketing
Competitor Analysis:
To defeat the competition, you should invest in competitor analysis. Competitor analysis helps in examining the firm’s main strengths, weaknesses, and points of concern. It varies in different industries but an in-depth competitor analysis is required before launching your e-commerce store.
A firm must remember that before entering a competitive yet profitable niche, a proper marketing strategy to defeat the compelling competition is required. Otherwise, defeating existing brand names is impossible as it takes time to establish your brand perception in the minds of the customer.
For example, a clothing e-store focuses on selling different branded products on a national scale. It requires a lot of expertise, team management, and an inventory management system. If you are planning to compete locally, find locals, and explore their business model. This competitor analysis is not only useful in devising business strategies but also helps in digital marketing planning.
Diversified Product Range:
Knowing what your competitors are doing is good research to invest in, however, an e-commerce store should have a diversified product range to minimize the risk of loss. The law of risk management states that the greater the risk the greater the return is. Therefore, it is better to diversify your product range to explore more markets at a time, while diversifying the risk of low sales as well.
Continuing the previous example, a clothing e-store should also sell other related items as well. Selling accessories with clothing is a norm, similarly, selling shoes, bags, and hosiery can be included to diversify your initial risk. A portfolio with a vast product range will sell some products depending on the local or trending demand. However, e-commerce sales are solely dependent on digital marketing.
Digital Marketing:
An online store can only be marketed digitally. If proper digital marketing and ecommerce bookkeeping integration measures are not considered, the risk of loss is inevitable. Therefore, social media marketing is the most probable solution for increasing and ensuring regular sales.
Social media marketing needs daily time and investments to set up a brand name. Many benefits can be linked with e-commerce social media marketing, but an e-commerce store without a website lacks credibility.
The website builds trust and credibility. In this competitive market with a diversified product range, the next step after brand awareness is sales generation. To increase salespeople should land on your web page to buy your products. To make people land on your website you need to run an SEO strategy to boost online traffic.
The main aim of SEO is to increase page traffic, visiting time, sales, and brand awareness. Thus e-commerce SEO is required by startups to compete intensely. SEO plan helps in improving your website’s ranking on all search engines. Though it is a long-term process but ensures productivity at the end. This process should not be ignored as it forms the backbone of the digital marketing activities of an e-commerce store.
There are numerous ways and tricks to improve your store’s web ranking however, SEO experts are required to fully focus on the ranking process. SEO ensures sales. It ensures that if a web page is well designed, structured, and a proper mobile layout is optimized for all mobile devices then the chances of new customers are positively increased.
If you are planning to open on a local scale with fewer team members, then outsourcing digital expertise is the best alternative. There are certain digital marketing agencies providing e-commerce SEO services as well. Contacting these agencies would save up your additional costs while giving you time to focus solely on product range and inventory management.
Hence, it can be concluded that with COVID-19 marketing trends have also evolved. Marketing structure has changed this year while giving digital marketing a boost to target more industries ad specifically e-commerce stores. However, e-commerce stores can not only rely on social ads to increase sales instead should work on long-term, competitive SEO plans to establish their brand identity.
