Looking for marketing tips on your Magento stores to market your products better?
Even though marketing strategies change over time as technology and customer demand shift, the basics remain the same: SEO, social media, email marketing, and so on.
The trick to more effective marketing is to take advantage of your platform. Share on XMagento developers, for example, spend their time creating apps, extensions and other tools specifically for Magento stores, which means that store owners can create a much more customized strategy, even if they’re still doing the “classics.”
Here are a few sales and marketing tips and tricks for stores looking to take advantage of everything that Magento has to offer when it comes to marketing.
Marketing Tips for Small Businesses Using Magento
While the marketing tips we give here can be used by small businesses using Shopify, BigCommerce and so on, Magento store owners will find resources for updating their specific platform.
Magento offers quite a few features for eCommerce that allows you to effectively market your business across multiple channels quickly and easily, which is why it’s one of our favorite.
Here are a few eCommerce marketing tips for small businesses using Magento’s unique features.
Integrate Your Social Media Channels
Utilizing social media can make a tremendous impact on your bottom line, but managing those social media accounts while running a store can be an overwhelming endeavor if you don’t know what you’re doing.
There is a way that you can make this process easier using Magento, however, by integrating your social accounts directly to your site through Magento apps and extensions.
These extensions provide various features to improve site management, customer experience, and market directly from your dashboard instead of having to navigate to each site individually or use third-party software to manage accounts.
The benefit of integrating directly with Magento is that it allows you to create a seamless social media marketing strategy that can be promoted across channels while also giving your customers more ways to connect with your business directly.
The Social Login extension by Magestore, for example, allows users to sign into your site directly from their social media channel, giving them the ability to share products with the click of a button (not to mention forgo tedious logins):
Source: DreamGrow
You can add social bookmarking for customers to save products, for instance, or include a Twitter widget on your product pages for quick follows and retweets.
Source: DreamGrow
If you’re not sure which apps to start with or how to start integrating them, DreamGrow has a few tutorials for integrating social media channels with your Magento store, and you can also find more social media apps and extensions on Magento Connect.
Two examples of social media extensions for Magento that you might want to try are:
Create a Lead Generating Funnel
Another way store owners make marketing efforts easier and more effective is by developing a solid lead-generating funnel.
According to digital marketing experts, lead generating funnels typically rely on three things: lead capturing, lead qualification, and lead nurturing.
Lead capturing is everything that goes into capturing customer attention. This can include things like using pop-ups, social media marketing, blogs and other forms of digital content to raise awareness and get people to your site.
Lead qualification is where prospective customers are assessed for their “sales-readiness” – whether they’re ready to buy or need more information to complete a purchase. This can be done through email marketing, especially abandoned cart email campaigns.
Lead nurturing is the process whereby site traffic turns into customers. Engagement is a key factor in lead nurturing, which means that marketing strategies like newsletter sign-ups and interaction on social channels will lead to a first time (or repeat) purchase.
Again, this is another area where using Magento-ready apps and extensions can help you manage your lead funnel directly on your site.
Magento Connect has promotional pop-up extensions that are easily integrated with your existing store, for example:
Source: Magento Connect
Setup Abandoned Cart Recovery Emails
Part of the lead generating process is creating abandoned cart email campaigns (recovery campaigns) that prompt customers to return to buy products still left in their carts.
The trickiest part of developing these campaigns is knowing exactly why people abandon their carts so you can target them more specifically. According to Statista, the reasons shoppers leave without buying are more complex than you might assume.
In one survey, 56% were shown to abandon their carts because of unexpected costs, like taxes, shipping, and other fees. Another 37% were just browsing without any real intention to buy, 36% found a better price somewhere else and only 26% said it was because they decided against buying.
The rest abandon their carts for security concerns or inconveniences while shopping: website crashes, long buying processes, and so on.
Retargeting these shoppers through automated email campaigns can help mitigate some of the issues that prevent shoppers from buying from you, thus increasing not only your revenue, but your reputation.
You can make this process much easier by working with companies that specialize in Magento stores and can integrate email recovery campaigns efficiently, like we do here at Recapture.
SEO for Magento
New customer acquisition is also an important part of ensuring your Magento store is performing at its best.
Even if your store is fairly well known, it’s still relatively rare that a customer will enter your site’s URL directly into their browser. More often than not, customers and potential customers are finding your site through social media links and search engine result pages (SERPs).
But getting to the top of Google’s SERPs can be difficult for eCommerce stores, especially if you have a lot of competition on common keywords your customers search on.
Thankfully there are plenty of ways Magento stores can improve SEO rankings, such as:
- Changing the default settings (headers, titles, descriptions, etc.) in your store configuration
- Creating your own XML site map
- Upgrading your Robots.txt file
Magento extensions like those offered at Amasty can help with things like layered navigation and page speed, which assist in your SEO rankings as well.
Magento Connect also offers SEO extensions specifically for WordPress integration, mobile platforms, and adding attributes that assist search engine crawling so that your site gets categorized properly.
PPC for Magento
In addition to organic search results netted through SEO, take advantage of pay-per-click (PPC) to market your Magento store more effectively.
The best way to do this is through Search PPC, Shopping PPC, Display PPC, or Remarketing PPC.
Search and Shopping PPC are inbound methods (people searching for your products), whereas Display PPC targets a much wider audience (visible on websites that have ad space).
Combining methods allows you to target the largest range of customers, but it can also require a much larger budget. Shopping PPC (Google Shopping), on the other hand, is an excellent way for Magento owners to put product directly in front of the customer on SERP’s and increase traffic to your lead funnel.
Magento Connect has PPC extensions that will help with PPC tracking and integration, including free extensions like PPC Call Tracker.
Rand Marketing has a few marketing tips for Magento store owners looking to manage their PPC campaigns here, and marketing experts at Embitel have suggestions for creating finely targeted keyword searches for Magento stores here.
Final Thoughts on Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
In order to really get the most out of your marketing with Magento, you want to work with companies that understand how Magento works and how to integrate solutions with your website on your platforms.
You also want to take advantage of Magento’s apps and extensions, since they are specifically designed to save you time and energy when it comes to marketing. The more that you can do directly from your dashboard, the better your marketing efforts will be.
Remember that the best marketing tips include a diverse approach to getting in front of your customer. You want inbound leads coming in from social media channels, SEO and PPC ads, but you also need a good marketing funnel to capture those leads and nurture them into real customers.
And you will need a solid strategy for getting their attention back if they wander away without buying.
