5 Cost-Effective Ways to Market Your Ecommerce Business In Nigeria.

The question of whether or not your business should be online is now irrelevant. With the growing numbers of online shoppers, the merits of eCommerce are glaring -- ease of shopping for the customers and faster growth for the business.

If you are running a successful offline business, you shouldn’t be new to the idea of marketing. However, the strategies for driving traffic and making sales online are quite different from offline strategies. These strategies require that you create an environment customers recognize, identify with, and trust.

As an eCommerce business owner, you are faced with challenges and obstacles while building and maintaining an eCommerce business in Nigeria. Ecommerce marketing can be demanding and can tragically head south. You need to consider how to market your eCommerce business effectively with the least cost possible. 

Whether you are trying to market your eCommerce business on a budget or you have been running your eCommerce business will little success? This blog post will show you 5 ways you can get better results with your eCommerce marketing.

Before we get into the strategies, let’s define and understand 2 important terms:

E-commerce business - Many people think eCommerce businesses are only the likes of Amazon, Ebay, Jumia or Konga whereas anyone can run an eCommerce business.

E-commerce is the transition of pick and pay shops to digital storefront of click and pay. It is the listing, selling, and buying of goods and services over the internet. It operates in all four of the following major market segments Business to Business (Alibaba), Business to Consumer (Jumia), Consumer to Consumer (JiJi.ng), and Consumer to Business (Upwork).

Marketing Strategy - Every successful eCommerce business has a well-informed marketing strategy. A good marketing strategy helps you define business goals and outline the steps to achieve these goals. 

A marketing strategy is the overall direction and goals of your project. It informs how you operate your entire business. A marketing strategy is different from a marketing plan. Marketing plan outlines the specifics to implement your strategy.

Customers are not easy to engage in today’s noisy market. Tons of ads queue around to gain customers' attention. In fact, eMarketer projects total digital ad spending to reach $455.30 billion this year. It takes persistence and a mix of marketing strategies to reach your audience and increase your sales. With the strategies shared in this article, anyone could promote their eCommerce business even with a small budget. These strategies are long term and they would help engage returning customers and attract new ones.

Let’s jump right into 5 cost-effective ways to market your e-commerce business In Nigeria.

#1. WEBSITE

When choosing where to sell items online, most people pick either selling on social media or making their own website. While every choice has its advantages and disadvantages –no law states where to sell, but any business that sets out to capture value must have an e-commerce website.

You can’t think about marketing your eCommerce business without having a website to showcase your product and drive quality traffic too. Website is one of the most important assets of an eCommerce business.

The advantages of having a website are many, amongst which you can showcase your products, take payments online, collect your customer’s info, track customers orders, monitor the kind of people that sees your business (Google Analytics), where and why they checked you out.

Creating a website can be both expensive and time-wasting, but with a plug-and-play eCommerce platform like KITCART creating a website can be a pretty straightforward and fast process. With zero requirements for a web developer, no coding, no design team, all you have to do is enter your details, choose from the templates, and create the shopping experience you want for your customers. 

SET UP YOUR E-COMMERCE SITE WITH KITCART NOW

#2. SOCIAL MEDIA 

With over 4.66 billion people using social media worldwide and each person spending an average of 2 hours 30 min every single day, Social media have become an integral part of any e-commerce business marketing strategy. 

If you’re not including social media in your marketing strategy, you’re missing out on one of the most effective and cheapest ways of reaching almost half the world’s population. A successful social media strategy boosts sales by increasing your company's total exposure, getting people talking about your brand, engaging customers, and allowing your products to reach a far larger audience. In the end, social media is meant to convert followers into customers.

What are the online marketing strategies you could use for social media? Here are a few:

Create a social media schedule - How often do you update your feed? What kind of content do you want to share? If you notice that Wednesdays generate the greatest activity, you can consider posting a video to all your channels on that day, as videos tend to generate a lot of engagement. You can better customize your social schedule for optimal results when you figure out what works for your audience.

Share User-generated content - Customers and ardent supporters will share content on social media. Distribute that material to your target audience (with their permission, of course). This will help to increase customer loyalty while also reducing your workload. For instance, you run a clothing brand with the name Style Bender. You can urge customers to use the hashtag #stylebender and tag your page anytime they upload images of themselves wearing your clothes. Then you can then use these photographs as social proof and to show off different looks in your outfits.

Regardless of whether you are just starting your eCommerce business, it’s not too late to leverage the power of social media as it provides a great opportunity and advantage for every business.

#3. CONTENT MARKETING

The practice of developing and delivering valuable, relevant, and consistent content in order to attract and maintain a clearly defined audience and ultimately generate profitable consumer action is known as content marketing.

Content marketing allows e-commerce businesses to connect and directly engage an audience — to build relationships with them. It has become one of the most powerful strategies any eCommerce business can use to generate new leads, drive more sales and boost profits. Contents are also a great way to drive quality traffic to your business without spending much on growing your business. And it’s the foremost source of qualified traffic – meaning only people genuinely interested in your products and related topics will find you.

Once your audience finds your content interesting they most definitely would click “follow” or subscribe to your email list(we spoke more about this in the next point) or come revisit your blog just because they enjoy your content, even if they don’t patronize you immediately down the road, they might become a happy customer because of your content strategy. The most popular examples of content formats are blog posts (like this one), newsletters, magazines, e-book, guides/ how-to, videos, podcasts, graph/infographics, memes, webinar/webcasts, research reports/studies, white papers, press releases, opinion piece, product review, et cetera.

For a quick start, you don’t have to come up with a content strategy for your eCommerce business. There are tons of similar brands in your niche doing a great job with their social media accounts that you could draw up inspiration from.

#4. EMAIL MARKETING  

Email marketing has been around for a while and it’s surprising that more than ¾ of e-commerce businesses still don’t still integrate emails as a channel of marketing.

Forbes Business Council reports that email marketing is still the most cost-effective marketing channel for e-commerce businesses as it drives the fastest immediate results in terms of webpage traffic and sales. Customers can opt into your list when they check out, which will help you grow your mailing list. Alternatively, you might include an opt-in form on your blog, homepage, and other frequently visited sections of your website.

What are the top marketing strategies for email?

Create an Email list - To increase your email marketing impact, you need to build an email list. There are several ways of building an email list from offering discounts to lead magnets like ebooks or a free shipping offer to Apps like Spin-A-Sale that allows Customers to enter their email address to spin the wheel and receive the coupon.

Create email funnels. An email funnel is a step-by-step, sequenced set of emails. A standard newsletter might include your best selling products. However, an email funnel might start with a couple of blog posts to help customers get familiar with your brand. You could then send out an email about the best sellers for the week to convert that sale. But the most important thing to note when creating an email funnel is that you only send out a sales email after sending a non-salesy (valuable content type of email) email first. You could also build funnels for your abandoned cart and those that viewed a product but didn't proceed to check out.

Segment your email list. Personalization and segmentation become increasingly important as your email list grows. You'll have customers that have placed orders for a variety of things in your business. Personalizing your emails, on the other hand, allows you to present things that they might be interested in based on their previous browsing behaviour. Because your products are tailored to that specific buyer, they are more inclined to buy them. 

And if you are wondering what to send to your email list, there are a variety of emails you could send out, including promotional, transactional, and reminder emails. Promotional emails are used to educate customers about the company's products or services; transactional emails are used to provide information about orders or deliveries, and reminder emails are sent out at regular intervals to remind customers of special offers and specials. 

All these features are freely available on all Kitcart plans and can be easily managed right from your dashboard.

#5. STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIP

Collaborations or partnerships between brands can help you grow your business. Collaboration and co-marketing are marketing tactics that allow you to grow your business by tapping into the audience of another brand. Brands in similar areas are often seen as competitors, yet they can also be allies. If two brands serve the same audience but sell distinct products, they can collaborate on content, conduct a contest, or introduce a combined product to assist each other expand. Your marketing effort can reach a larger audience by utilizing the audience of another company, making it even more successful.

What methods may be used effectively for collaborations and partnerships?

Influencer marketing- You may use influencer marketing to develop your business by leveraging influencers. This is especially effective if you have a limited audience and want to make a huge impression. When hiring an influencer, keep in mind that they must have a proven conversion audience, be able to exhibit your products effectively, and positively represent your business. It's not just a matter of picking an attractive person with a large number of followers at random. Investigate the data in greater depth.

Get Reposted by a fan page. - similar to influencer marketing, instead of a person, you're engaging a community. Community sites/pages tend to convert better than influencers. This is due to the fact that fan pages have audiences built up around a common interest, such as pets or fitness. As a result, when you pitch your product to them, they're already qualified or at the very least curious about your topic. You can always message them on Instagram or find their email address in the bio of most fan pages.

Feature other brands in your niche in your content - Use your content to promote other brands in your niche. If you highlight other influencers in your material on a regular basis, they'll eventually notice you. They might contact you in the future about collaborating or partnering with you. They might even use your image in their article. If you mention an influencer in an article, you can message them on social media to let them know they were mentioned. It's possible that they'll share it with their audience. Increasing the number of pageviews on your website.

CONCLUSION 

Although there are many other methods to market your eCommerce business, these 5 ways are the most cost-effective. They require little financial commitment and less time to produce incredible results in sales, brand awareness, and engagement.

Many of these channels work together. Content marketing is needed for your website, blogs, social media, and email marketing. Choosing a single channel, method, or tactic isn't the most effective marketing plan. Growth is best achieved by combining multiple marketing methods. Each of these methods complements the others in order to help you reach your marketing objectives.  

If you would try one of these ways or you need some other help to get crazy results drop us a comment– we’re always ready to help.