Top 8 Creative Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Online Store

Are you an entrepreneur running a thriving offline business? If so, you well know how important marketing is to your store. You may have used methods such as billboards, TV and print media ads, flyers, or displays to tell people about your products and services. Marketing strategies for an online store are something different, but it’s doable.

An online stop serves a wider audience than a physical one; however, you need to get your new online store in front of prospective customers. Because an online business does not operate under the “if you build it, they will come” situation.

The following creative marketing ideas will help you reach the right audience. The proven strategies will drive traffic to your business and increase its revenues.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves promoting your products, services, and brands on social networks. Your online store can use organic or unpaid and paid social media marketing tactics to generate awareness and increase its online sales.

However, you need to identify your target audience, their needs, demographics, and overall marketing goals before jumping into social media marketing.

Instead of broadcasting your brand and products on social media sites, you should understand your target audience, engage them and react to their world. This involves curating content and scheduling informative product-related posts that add joy to your audiences’ day-to-day lives.

Some popular social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WeChat, Snapchat, and TikTok.

SMS Marketing

SMS can be your route to success because over 95% of the text messages are opened and read. It’s easy to set up an SMS campaign than any other marketing drive. Lastly, it cost less to send bulk messages hence an affordable way to connect with your potential customers.

You can send one-to-many messages that alert your customers of a flash sale, event announcement, reminder, special product announcement, ticket releases, or other service-type notifications.

This will keep your customers coming back and recommend you to their family members and friends. Therefore SMS marketing will build brand awareness and improve your sales.

To build your SMS database, you can add an opt-in form on your website and social media, encouraging potential customers to subscribe to your SMS updates.

Email Marketing

This entails sending marketing messages through email to potential and existing customers. It’s an excellent marketing strategy because you control the content and its distribution.

You can automate your marketing campaigns which makes it easy to connect with customers. The following are different types of emails you can send to your customers:

• Transactional emails are primarily functional and mostly sent during checkout.
• Promotional emails are sent to build awareness and promote new deals and products, such as a Black Friday where your business offers limited-time discounts.
• Triggered emails are sent based on a shopper’s action. You can remind your customers about a complementary product to what they bought or a product they left behind.

So, build an email list and keep in touch with your customers. This will not only help you to retain them but to drive revenue for your online store.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing entails partnering with influencers or content creators aligned to your brand’s marketing objectives. This type of marketing is effective because influencers generate higher user engagement than the content your in-house marketers publish on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or blogs on your website.

Some of the platforms where you can find an influencer or creator are Acorn Influence, AspireIQ, Best Buy Influencer Network, and Blogmint, among others. You can learn more about influencers and content creators on this post, “Top 55 Sponsored Posts Networks.”

So pick your influencers, create a marketing campaign and begin tracking its metrics.

Affiliate Marketing

Your online store can pay an affiliate to promote its products and the brand. Affiliate marketers are similar to influencers because they share your products on their websites, social media, and blogs. They are paid commissions each time a buyer click on their unique link to purchase or sign up for something.

Therefore affiliate marketers earn more income when your online store makes more revenue. Many brands have affiliate marketing programs as part of their marketing strategy, and so you should engage in it to increase your brand awareness and promote your products.

Content Marketing

Brands that have a strong digital presence are those that have top-notch creators and producers of content. They create different types of content that keep their target audience engaged based on where they hang out. For instance, videos are more useful on YouTube, while blogposts are excellent on the website.

So, your online store can generate any of the following content:

• Blog posts
• Newsletters
• Webinars
• Live streams
• Infographics
• Videos
• TikTok videos
• Guest podcasting and more

Referral Programs

Referral or word-of-mouth is another cost-effective marketing idea. It involves encouraging your current customers to refer new ones to your online store. Every year this type of marketing strategy has driven over $6 trillion in consumer spending.

Actually, family and friends’ recommendations have a greater impact than celebrity endorsements. This shows that word of mouth can help a brand increase awareness and grow its revenue.

While this marketing happens naturally when your customers are satisfied with your products and services, it’s advisable to have a dedicated referral system. Having such a program will help you track its performance and identify gaps.

An online store can use a $10 model on those customers who refer new ones to buy their products. That means an existing customer gets $10 when they recommend your products to their friends who make a purchase. Actually, both get $10, which they can use to buy another product from your store.

Giveaways

This is an occasional marketing strategy that can bring in huge returns for your brand at the end of the year or during certain holidays. You can invest in some tools that provide social sharing and following as a way to join the giveaway.

The best way of running giveaways is by giving a complementary product as the best prize rather than your own. This is to remove the notion that shoppers can get your products for free. For instance, if you are in the fashion industry where you sell clothes, shoes, and handbags, you can offer a free makeover.

Build a collection of customer photos and videos and use them in other marketing strategies to market your brand.

Conclusion

Most marketing strategies overlap with one another, so it’s possible to combine a few or all marketing ideas mentioned above. Your marketing objective is to grow your revenues and achieve the highest level of growth.

So as you experiment with content marketing, you can also mix in affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, or social media marketing. You can also use photos you collected during the giveaways on other marketing strategies.