How to Make Your Ecommerce Store Known? (10 Tips)
Generating awareness and driving traffic towards your ecommerce store is elementary in making sales.
There are many ways to make your ecommerce store known. Some are paid, some are free, some bring immediate results, and others take more time to build. In this article, we tell you everything about them.
Let’s dive right in!
1. Facebook ads (conversion objective)
Facebook ads (which include Instagram) are one of the best methods to bring traffic to your site and generate sales.
The advantage of this method is that you can be up and running within minutes, bringing instant results.
The downside is that it may take longer to become profitable due to the high advertising cost on these platforms.
Learning how to run these ads profitably can take time, especially money. Alternatively, you can hire a professional company to do it for you.
What type of traffic can Facebook ads bring?
It is a great and cost-effective way to bring traffic to your store, primarily if you use a conversion objective like ‘view content’ or ‘traffic.’
However, for an e-commerce store, we recommend sticking to the purchase conversion objective since that allows you to tap into an audience with higher buyer intent.
2. Google shopping
Google shopping is a variant of Google ads that displays your products at the top of relevant search queries on the SERP.
This method’s main advantage is that you will only pay per click, meaning that you will only pay for an actual visit to your site.
It’s also pretty fast to set up and very straightforward, with the main downside being the amount of competition you may face.
3. Google search ads
Yet another Google service, Google ads, has been around for e-commerce Brands and Publishers for quite some time.
It’s a very effective way to appear at the top of the search results with your ecommerce Brand for the exact search terms you choose.
With this method, you can expect to be set up and running within 30 minutes to an hour, and it can bring traffic to your store immediately. You get charged every time a user clicks on your ad.
Google Shopping & Search ads traffic
These are great ways to bring traffic to your site. They will typically get much more targeted traffic than the Facebook/Instagram alternatives because you target people searching for queries relevant to your product before they visit your store.
They are in the mood to shop for your exact product before you appear in front of them.
On the other hand, Facebook is Interruption marketing, which means the target users are not looking to buy or look specifically for your product.
They are just being entertained on Facebook/Instagram, checking what their friends are up to, and may become interested after you interrupt them with a video or image ad.
A target audience visiting your site instead of bulk non-targeted traffic and tire kickers is especially beneficial when retargeting (not saying that Facebook drives this kind of lousy quality traffic, this is just an exaggerated example to drive the point home)
4. Influencers
Working with influencers can be a great way to make your ecommerce store known.
When using this method, you contact content creators on platforms like Instagram and YouTube and offer them compensation in exchange for promoting your product.
The advantage of doing this on Instagram is that it can be very cost-efficient if you land the right partnership with an influencer with a good audience for your product.
The added advantage of doing these on YouTube is that content on YouTube is everlasting, meaning that your promotional video will stay up there forever (as long as this is what you negotiate with the influencer).
The downside of this method is that it can be challenging to find the right influencer to promote your brand, and sometimes, this leads to no results or a bad reputation for your product.
Bringing traffic with influencer campaigns
If you run these campaigns the right way, the traffic you can get from them will usually come recommended by the influencer you are working with; generally turning into a much higher conversion rate than the other methods discussed.
As we previously shared, this is an excellent method to bring traffic to your ecommerce store, as long as you choose the right influencer (with the right audience).
Landing a deal with a YouTube influencer can mean that you will have an ongoing traffic stream from the video they make for your product (as opposed to an Instagram influencer, where posts usually last 24 hs and are removed)
5. Youtube ads
Youtube ads is another service offered by Google to advertisers and another great way to promote your ecommerce store.
These ads typically show before or within a YouTube video, and you get to choose precisely in which videos you want the ad to be displayed.
This is especially attractive if your products are visually attractive or can benefit from being used in a video displaying all its functionalities.
This modern version of TV commercials can prove to be very profitable. However, like with all paid methods, you must beware of how you spend your money and learn how to do it correctly.
Traffic from Youtube Ads
This is also another type of interruption marketing, making your visitors coming from this method not as targeted as some of the other techniques discussed.
However, youtube ads allow you to explain in video format what your product does and usually show it being used, which makes for a compelling selling experience.
6. Pinterest ads
If your product is tailored to women or pretty visual, you want to look at Pinterest ads.
With this method, you pay to give your pins more reach, translating into clicks to your website and sales.
Pinterest’s alternative to promoting your content on their network can be very effective for specific niches.
7. Multiply your selling channels (Etsy, Amazon, eBay)
Another great way to expand your ecommerce brand’s exposure, which is not very much talked about these days, is to broaden the channels where you list your products.
A website is excellent, but if you have a good quality product that people love, you should list it on Etsy, Amazon, and eBay to bring sales from these platforms.
Listing on Etsy and eBay can be done for free (they also have paid alternatives to increase your products’ exposure to their users), and you can very inexpensively list your products on Amazon.
You cannot overlook these three platforms since they can improve your brand’s reach very inexpensively.
8. Create a Blog
Creating a Blog is also a great strategy to make your ecommerce brand more known within your industry.
The strategy entails creating content around topics relevant to your niche market and posting them on your website.
With time, these articles will find a stable position on search engines and bring you traffic consistently.
This is an excellent method to grow your brand organically and establish yourself as an authority within your niche.
Traffic from a blog
Traffic from your blog to your ecommerce store can not only be targeted, but it’s already familiar with your brand from a previous interaction with your content.
This can considerably affect your conversion rates because your blog’s traffic probably comes from a transactional post.
Check out this post if you want to learn more about creating an influential blog content strategy to grow your ecommerce traffic and understand the difference between informational and transactional articles.
9. Pinterest organic
You can also make your ecommerce brand known by posting regularly on Pinterest. Again, this method is usually better for highly visual brands that target women 20-60 (mostly).
You can use canva to create beautiful pins and software like Tailwind to automate your posting schedule.
The main benefit of posting on Pinterest (instead of Instagram) is that Pinterest posts are everlasting, meaning that they will stay there and continue to bring traffic to your e-commerce store even months, and sometimes even years, after you post them.
Pinterest traffic (ads & organic)
Pinterest can be a fantastic way to bring traffic to your site, but results vary widely depending on your industry.
As a general rule, you should always try it organically first and see how valuable the traffic coming from this source is for your ecommerce brand.
If you have proof that Pinterest could organically generate sales for your ecommerce brand, you’ll most likely get good results with Pinterest ads.
10. Instagram community management
Depending on your niche, Instagram can be a great way to bring awareness and traffic to your ecommerce brand.
By posting regularly on your account, you will progressively grow a following, and by adding a link in your bio, you can have those fans visiting your store.
Another way to bring traffic to your store using Instagram is to create swipe-up stories; however, you need at least 10,000 followers.
Traffic from Instagram
Traffic from Instagram is typically something we do not recommend striving for, mainly because it’s very sporadic.
Unlike Pinterest, YouTube, or even your blog content, Instagram content grows old very quickly, requiring you to consistently post to grow your channel and bring traffic to your ecommerce store.
Apart from that, Instagram content does not compound, as it does with the other three platforms described above.
As a general guideline, and especially if you’re starting, don’t focus on Instagram but your blog, your YouTube channel, and your Pinterest account instead.
BONUS: Traffic from your email marketing efforts
We didn’t list email marketing as one alternative to make your brand known because email marketing is usually a form of ‘warm’ marketing.
This means that people who subscribe to your list already know your brand, so email marketing is not a strategy to make your brand known but one to nurture your current leads.
However, we include this strategy to generate traffic to your site because it can be super effective.
With email marketing, you send regular emails to your list telling them about a new blog post that you may have created, a new product that you may have launched to educate them about features of your existing products, and many more subjects that interest them.
Your emails will typically have a call to action with a link to your ecommerce brand, and that’s how you generate traffic from this message to your site.
The wonderful thing about this is that you can considerably increase your customers’ lifetime value by having them buy from you multiple times.
The traffic from your email marketing efforts is probably the most valuable traffic you can generate.
How to generate free organic traffic to my e-commerce store?
Okay, to wrap up this article, we will discuss which strategies listed above can be done for $0.
Let’s begin…
1. Influencers
You could manage to land an influencer deal without putting any money on the table if you can work out a commission-based pay (the influencer gets paid based on the sales it generates for your ecommerce store).
Finding an influencer willing to do this takes a lot of hustle; however, it is doable, and if you don’t have money, it’s worth trying.
Another widespread alternative is to offer the product you send them to promote as payment. That wouldn’t be completely free (since you pay for the product), but you will probably want to send them the product if you work with an influencer.
2. Organic traffic from Pinterest
Pinterest content is everlasting, which means that once you create your pin, it stays there forever. People can search and find it anytime, which can mean an ongoing traffic source for your website.
Posting on Pinterest is free. You can create a business account to do so for your ecommerce brand, and all it takes is persistence and consistency to grow your account and expand its reach.
Every pin you create is a seed that can drive traffic to your ecommerce brand down the line.
3. Generating free organic traffic from your blog
This has to be one of the best, if not the best, strategies to bring free traffic to your ecommerce store.
Like Pinterest and YouTube, once posted, a blog post remains on the net forever.
This means that if your content is evergreen (does not get old like news events, for example), you can have an ongoing traffic source coming from it consistently for months and years to come.
However, reaching this point takes time and consistency; if you want to learn how to grow your ecommerce blog, here’s the article you need to look at.
4. Traffic from your subscriber’s list
The last of the free methods to bring traffic to your ecommerce store is using your subscriber list.
Email marketing, as we just discussed, it’s a great way to bring traffic to your site, and best of all, it’s completely free.
However, building that list of subscribers takes the most time, and to do so, you will need to have some sort of traffic and some sort of lead magnet to offer in exchange for their mail.
If you want to know exactly how to build your subscribers list from scratch and use email marketing to your advantage, you can look at this article.
Conclusion
As you’ve seen, there are many strategies to make your brand known and attract traffic to your online store (both in paid ways and on freeways)
Of course, when it comes to picking the best alternative to bring traffic, there are many things to consider and different opinions.
Our opinion is that the best ways to bring traffic to your ecommerce store are those that compound your efforts, meaning that the work that you’ve done today is going to continue to get results tomorrow and for years to come.
These methods include:
1. Creating a Blog
2. Creating a YouTube channel
3. Creating a Pinterest account
4. Leveraging email marketing
A recommendation is that only after creating these organic traffic sources should you start to dabble into the paid advertising world, where more money is at stake, and the risk of making costly mistakes is high.
Don’t get me wrong; it doesn’t mean that starting with paid advertising doesn’t work and cannot help you build your brand into profitability very fast.
The organic methods listed above have much more room for error and will teach you many other things about marketing that you can later apply to your paid advertising strategy.
Good luck!