eCommerce is a competitive space.
Whether you’re a new brand or one with an established audience, successful businesses are those that run a cohesive strategy to continually up their brand awareness and conversions.
But when you’re starting a new eCommerce brand, bridging the gap between interest and action is easier said than done.
An integrated marketing strategy is all about nurturing potential customers and guiding them from awareness to purchase through multiple touchpoints - all the while helping you build trust, boost engagement and drive conversions from campaigns.
In this article, we dive into actionable steps to create an integrated marketing strategy. But before that, let’s quickly compare how brand awareness and conversion campaigns differ.
Comparison between Brand Awareness vs Conversions
Brand awareness and conversions are quite different approaches. The below table will help you understand their unique role in a comprehensive eCommerce marketing strategy:
What should new eCommerce brands do?
Developing a results-driven marketing plan needs you to use both awareness and conversion campaigns in tandem.
1. Define your objectives and KPIs
Start by identifying what your brand aims to achieve.
Is it driving brand awareness, more traffic to the website, getting more newsletter signups for an upcoming sale, or getting more sales?
Setting clear objectives will help you choose the right strategies and track their effectiveness through KPIs. These can include impressions, traffic or clicks, engagement rates, conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS).
2. Choose the right platforms
Once you have defined your key objectives, identify the platforms where your target audience is the most active and their intent.
For example, many users discover products on Meta platforms like Instagram and Facebook. While these channels are best for running brand awareness campaigns, brands often need to run campaigns on Google Search to drive conversions.
This makes it important for brands to create multiple touchpoints with their audience to guide shoppers through the funnel.
3. Start with brand awareness
The initial focus should be on building awareness around your brand.
This stage is about getting noticed by the right target audience, building trust and initiating meaningful interactions.
Here are some tips to follow:
Offer value with ungated informative content. For example, join online discussions to find out what questions your target audiences may have and maintain a social media presence to explore and answer those questions.
SEO and brand awareness go together. Improve your SEO game so your website ranks higher and puts your brand in front of a larger audience.
Contribute to valuable content on reputable websites in your vertical as guest posts can help drive more organic traffic to your website and build authority.
4. Integrate conversion campaigns when the brand gains recognition
As your brand starts gaining traction from the target audiences with awareness initiatives, it’s time to integrate your marketing efforts with conversion campaigns.
At this stage where your potential customers are familiarized with your brand or products, they are more likely to take action, i.e., make a purchase, provided you re-target them with tailored content.
For example, use Meta ads to retarget website visitors or social media engagers, and complement this with Google Ads to capture high-intent searches.
This method of combining the efforts of awareness and conversion campaigns lets you create a balanced funnel.
5. Personalize messaging for each campaign
Your potential customers are overloaded with marketing messages and ads from other eCommerce brands throughout the day. The only way to stand out is through personalized messaging.
Customizing messaging to their needs, current situations, or challenges is the best way to drive faster sales.
For example, a brand selling vacation rentals can use personalized messaging in a display ad awareness campaign to target new customers who may be exploring weekend getaways. Similarly, you can run a Meta or a Google ad conversion campaign with an expiring discount on the vacation rental.
6. Understand the journey of your target audience with attribution analysis
Ecommerce attribution involves identifying and assigning credit to conversion ads, marketing channels, and other factors that led to key user actions, such as purchasing a product or interacting with a brand message.
But it’s easier said than done.
There’s no standardized way to attribute eCommerce sales.
However, some tools make accurate attribution analysis possible and help you understand the buyer’s journey and behavior.
With Graas’ AI-based and data-driven attribution models, you gain granular insights on each marketing channel and their impact on sales, the best touchpoints to be used along their journeys, and make the best use of your resources through smart allocation across channels.
This solution works best for brands looking to leverage Meta ads and its multiple platform support on apps like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc., thus creating omnichannel campaigns for a more immersive buyer experience.
7. Leverage eCommerce analytics to monitor campaign performance
Early marketing efforts by a new eCommerce brand must be tracked, optimized, and turned profitable. And that’s what campaign analytics are for.
Campaign analytics help you evaluate campaign performance across channels via a data-driven approach.
Graas’ Marketing Deep Dive is one such eCommerce analytics tool that gives you a comprehensive overview of all your awareness and conversion efforts by tracking metrics, such as conversion rates, ad spend, impressions, ROAS, and more.
This way, you can pinpoint what works and what doesn’t and make smart decisions without the guesswork.
For example, if you’re running Meta ads for conversions, Grass’ Marketing Deep Dive showcases deep ad-level data so you take immediate action on ads that may be underperforming and stagnating ad budget.
Wrapping up
As new eCommerce brands, rather than choosing between brand awareness and conversion campaigns, try combining them and aligning your marketing efforts for better results.
Support your actions with an all-in-one analytics tool like Graas to conduct reliable marketing analysis on every campaign.
Comments