GUESTPOST: 5 Best Marketing Trends for Ecommerce in 2021

From time to time, we publish guestposts from our partners. Here's one from Poptin on the top eCommerce marketing trends in 2021. English might not be Ugljesa's first language, but he makes some great points and identifies some key trends.

5 Best Marketing Trends for Ecommerce in 2021

Marketing plays a crucial role when it comes to eCommerce. Taking advantage of the best trends means enabling eCommerce businesses to make impressive progress. Often new trends emerge, and in this article, we will highlight those that are more than worthy of your attention.

1. Take the early advantage of TikTok

TikTok has become a hugely popular social network and, according to everything, it will only continue to expand in 2021.

It is focused on short clips exclusively in order to show a certain moment, some interesting things, and/or to show creativity.

Those who were among the first to start uploading videos have already collected a large number of followers, but the more users report, the more difficult the process of collecting will be.

For example, GUESS? was one of the first brands that started a hashtag challenge on TikTok #inmydenim that encouraged people to take videos with their outfits.

All videos with that hashtag got over 40M of views combined

NB: For some reason, we're having trouble embedding TikTok. Check out the original video here.

TikTok is based on just one type of content - short video clips and slightly less popular live videos.

When it comes to videos, Oberlo mentions that a survey conducted by Wyzowl shows that nearly eight out of every ten users have purchased a piece of software or app after having watched the brand's video.

So why not use this potential for your e-commerce business?

The main reason why TikTok is the next-generation social media marketing platform lies precisely in the type of content mentioned.

But, is TikTok the right fit for your target audience?

Let’s see the audience breakdown:

- TikTok has over 1.5B users

- 60% of TikTok’s users are old between 16-24 years and based in the US
- TikTok’s average engagement rate is 29%

- over 80% of TikTok’s sessions are on the Android devices

- Men are slightly more likely to use TikTok than women

How to take advantage of TikTok in the early days?

TikTok currently has a really big reach compared to other social networks where organic reach is almost gone or extremely low. There is a chance that this may change at some future time, so it should be used maximally in these early days.

You can capture interesting things about your product or present it from a completely different angle, and then invite your followers to reach you on other social networks as well where you will be presenting the same product in greater detail and encourage them to buy.

An example of a great long-term marketing strategy on TikTok is the Washington Post. They are posting interesting clips from the office which enabled them to gather a large number of followers among the younger audience.

NB: Okay, the WaPo Tiktok is really pretty funny.

When the younger audience starts buying newspapers, the Washington Post will surely be the first newspaper to come across their mind.

2. IGTV might be the new YouTube

According to Trustinsights, IGTV has a bigger medium of likes and comments than any other type of Instagram content such as stories, photos or casual 1-minute long videos.

Without any doubt, with Instagram becoming one of the largest media platforms right now, we can conclude that IGTV is becoming one of the best ways to engage with your target audience.

IGTV Best Practices to follow

Like for everything else - there’re a couple of best practices that we’ve been following to get amazing results with IGTV:

1. Align your IGTV content with your brand

When it comes to social media marketing (and Instagram as well), everything is about your brand, how you present your company and how you communicate with your followers and target audience.

Thus - following your brand guidelines is super important.

Do you have the main colour of your brand? Perfect! Use it as your background.

As a part of your brand identity, you and your teammates are friendly, kind, and supportive? Then record the videos with your teammates smiling and providing amazing value to your customers.

The great example of how to use brand guidelines comes from @soyummy:

SoYummy is creating engaging recipe videos with various “kitchen hacks”. On this way, they’re going viral with almost every video they have.

2. Repurpose your Instagram content

In whatever industry you are - you have plenty of opportunities to craft amazing content. And let me tell you one secret:

You don’t necessarily need to think about the new types of content all the time.

Sometimes, everything you need to do is to repurpose your existing one.

For example, if you have a lot of photos of your products on your Instagram page - use the same products and record the How-To videos or the videos with Best Practices.

To illustrate this, if you’re selling a dog leashes, you can ask your customers to send you over some videos of how are they using your leashes to walk around with their dog.

Or, you can record a longer IGTV video where you’ll explain to your target audience how to walk with their dog on the leash. This can be a perfect thing to do for two reasons:

• You’ll educate your target audience and build credibility

• You’ll promote your product in the same way.

As an example, Paul Mitchell is a huge e-commerce brand for hair accessories, and their IGTV is crushing it:

https://www.instagram.com/tv/BmmfqP7lGi-/

3. Create your own community

Community is an important part of any business. Only a community that gathers around the same goal can make a serious shift when it comes to business. Once you gather the right people inside your community - be ready to share a lot of knowledge and value - engage with your community members so they can start the conversation on their own.

Once your community becomes very active - you will easily end up with a lot loyal customers. But remember - don’t be too promotional at the beginning.

Great community development must be:

• effective
• productive
• well-organized
• educated

Once you've organized your team, you will find ways to promote your product in the best way possible, get started with the selling, and provide the unique value.

Just create the community around your products (if you’re selling the pug accessories that can be pugs), work hard on finding your target audience and asking them to join your group - and the sales will come by themselves.

Where can I create my community?

There are various channels that you can use for your community. The choice will mainly depend on your target audience, but here are the channels that performed the best so far:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Telegram
• Slack

These platforms allow you to send content in the form of pictures, text, infographics, videos.

Remember that the most important thing you need keep in your mind when it comes to running your community is to:

Keep educating your community members all the time. Once you do that, you’ll be able to grow your ecommerce business.

How to find people for communities?

There are many tactics to find right target audience to join your communities. Here are some examples of the best practices we’ve seen so far:

• LinkedIn promotion – create a promotion and notify people that you are looking for newly qualified members of your community
• Website resource – add a link to your existing community to your website and when interested visitors click on it, they can read an announcement and find out more about how to join
• Facebook groups – join groups that are closely related to your niche and from time to time, when you have a need, announce that you are looking for new members of your community and invite them to join
• Word-of-mouth – spread the word about your community to people in your business environment so that they can inform those that would be the perfect match for your needs

Networking and gathering data is everything in the business e-commerce world. Only by spreading the news of the search for members of your community you will be able to reach the qualified people that you can educate and later upsell them your products.

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of collecting information, preparing, writing, and distributing content that is intended to nurture people through different inbound sales funnels. The intention is to attract leads and then to convert them into customers.

When people want to find specific information or a solution to a particular problem, the first thing they do is visit Google. They search using keywords based on which the results are sorted.

If your content matches the keywords you used, it is more likely that you will find yourself ranked high in Google search results.

By being at the top of Google's search engine results page, the chances that people will look at your content are very high, so you need to take advantage of that. Since you have already attracted attention, try to keep it. Keep posting high-quality content constantly.

What does content marketing look like?

There are a couple of segments that you should be aware of.

1. Finding the right keywords

Again, keywords are the main item. After you have done the research on accessible sources, and before you start writing, you should find the keywords that you will be targeting and include them in your content.

There are many SEO tools that will help you find the easy way to rank high-intent keywords. Some of the most popular tools are Ahrefs, Mangools, Moz and SemRush.

High-intent keywords are the keywords that are typed from the people who are, let's say "ready to buy immediately". Some examples of these can be "T-shirt store", "Game of Thrones apparel", etc.

2. Writing an in-depth article

It's time to write an article that will include previously mentioned keywords. The article should be original, with important information and explanations, clearly written, and divided into breaking points that will make the text more readable. Use simple fonts and short passages to keep your audience from getting bored and giving up reading.

3. Adding backlinks

Build a couple of backlinks through guest blog posts, backlink building outreach campaigns, or backlink building partnerships. When you mention relevant sources, Google also recognizes your article as a relevant and quality source.

Backlinks add credibility to your article. It is important that you check all the links so that they do not lead to a non-existent page in order to avoid so-called broken links that can create a sense of disappointment for readers.

Once you build your backlinks, you will easily end up ranking first some high-intent keywords that will essentially bring you people who are ready to buy immediately - just like on the example below:

4. Distributing article

It is your intention with this article to gather as much attention from those readers that you will be able to convert into customers. To do this, immediately after posting it, share the article on all channels that your target audience is on. Some of these are:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Quora
• Pinterest
• StumbleUpon

Use all other types of social media and forums where your article might spark interest.

Here’s an example of a successful article distribution on Pinterest:

A great way to convert even more readers into buyers is to grab their attention with visually appealing pop-up windows. They will appear at certain moments when the reader shows some interest. For example, when the reader clicks on a link or scrolls a certain percentage of the page, after some time spent on the website, and similar.

With pop-ups, you can encourage people to subscribe to your email list or immediately encourage them to make a purchase.

To create nice and compelling pop-ups, you can use various Optinmonster alternatives such as Poptin, Sumo, Sleeknote, and others.

If you follow these tips and tactics, your article could be in the top 5 Google search results in a few months!

5. Social Media marketing

Social media marketing implies the presence of your e-commerce business on social media channels such as:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

By being present on these channels, you are creating an opportunity for your product to become more known and attracting more leads. No matter how big your business is, you need to build brand awareness in different ways.

Today, social networks also affect the credibility of a business, so people will sooner decide to buy the brand that is present across multiple channels and that seems more transparent.

Of course, not every product fits every social media channel, so you should keep that in mind when deciding on your sales channels.

What are the most important things to consider when doing Social Media marketing?

Social networks regularly update their channels and strive to maintain their popularity with people. As an e-commerce business owner, you can use their efforts to your advantage.

Let’s see what are the most important things to use in social media marketing.

• Post content regularly

Social networks now offer analytics that allows you to track the followers’ engagement as well as the time when most of them are online.

Take advantage of this, and post quality and engaging content at that time exactly. Depending on what your product is, how many articles you have on offer, what are its features, and similar, determine what number of posts would be appropriate for your business. Try to find the right measure.

You can also post news from your niche or other related news. You should not only be tied to a product.

• Maintain communication

Be available for your followers. Respond to their messages and comments because it is the only way you will be able to make and maintain your connections with them.

• Upload high-quality images

Although we have said that it is important for the content to be of high quality, special attention should be paid to creating high-quality images.

Keep in mind that a picture sometimes speaks more than words and it is usually what visitors will notice first. So, do not neglect this information.

• Write outstanding copy

In addition to images, a copy is another part of your post that should never be ignored. Create a catchy copy that will intrigue your followers. Make sure the beginning itself is especially interesting as you only have 2 seconds before they continue scrolling further, and you certainly don't want that to happen.

Also - don’t forget to take the power of real-time marketing as well. Great real time marketing in addition with an amazing copy can bring you a lot of results. For example, During the Lunar (Chinese) New Year in January 25th 2021, Steam discounted a game Plague Inc - although the Corona virus was spreading around China.

Brilliant marketing or in horrible bad taste? It doesn’t matter what we think. What matters is the success Steam got with it. The results were so great, that the game wasn’t able to be played online for some time due to a high number of players

• Use Facebook pixel

Facebook pixel is an extremely powerful tool. It is a code that you can put on your website and it will track your website visitors. The information it collects will help you retarget your visitors.

In other words, those who have shown any interest in your business at some point will be "remembered" when you decide to create an advertisement and, in that way, remind them of you. This is one of the most powerful tools in today's marketing.

The Key Takeaways

Use the power of these top 5 marketing trends and make your e-commerce business the dominant one in your niche.

• Become the early mover in Tik Tok
• Start using videos, especially on IGTV
• Create a reliable and productive community
• Produce outstanding content articles
• Spread the word through social media channels

Written by Ugljesa Djuric from Poptin.