Revenue in the eCommerce realm is exploding, with the industry positioned to grow to over $600 billion by the year 2022. And that shouldn’t come as a surprise since eCommerce consistently reports record growth year after year. That means emerging companies are coming up with plenty of unique, new digital marketing ad strategies to earn new customers and maintain their most loyal ones. Let’s take a look at a few ways to engage your audience and grow your brand.
Improving Online Ads: Best Practices
Though there are hundreds of unique approaches to online advertising, there are a few things that all good marketers have in common. They all use segmentation, personalization, retargeting and dynamic ads to create campaigns that win.
- Segment — Leveraging your customer data and demographics is the first thing you should do when designing any marketing campaign. It helps you determine exactly who your core audience is and how they prefer to shop. Once you’ve got your target audience, breaking it into sub-groups to more narrowly segment is a must.
- Personalize — We all know that personalization is everything in modern marketing. Consumers don’t want to feel like faceless figures in a crowd, and studies show that over half of them are willing to share personal information if it means a better experience. This strategy also helps you funnel ad dollars where they’re best spent.
- Retarget — Using effective retargeting campaigns can seriously boost your bottom line and take your ad spend to new heights. This strategy requires you to market to consumers who have already visited your website or viewed a product but haven’t yet pulled the trigger. Online retargeting helps you score more transactions.
- Be Dynamic — Dynamic ads are those display ads that factor in user data and change from person to person. In other words, they use your audience personas and segments to create a more personalized shopping experience for every user.
- Be Creative — The fact of the matter is that consumers will tune out ads that don’t catch their attention, so creativity is an essential piece of the puzzle. Using captivating language, eye-catching imagery and interactive features can help.
Creative Ideas to Help Market Your Online Store
Understanding the basic tenets of a good ad is essential, but leveraging these strategies to create something bigger and more attention-grabbing is the best way to get the most out of every single marketing dollar. Let’s take a look at how some growing eCommerce businesses have used these strategies for big wins in the marketing department through creative messaging, storytelling and personalization.
If you want to engage your audience, you’ve got to create memorable messaging. Take a set of viral ads by workplace chat software, Slack, as an example. They’re all about creative wording and storytelling — banner ads and social sells with elated workers above phrases like “what it feels like to get 48 percent less e-mail” and “what it feels like to be 32 percent more productive.” We love this campaign because it creatively weaves in value props.
Is creative personalization what you’re after? take a look at some of the ways budding eCommerce brands have adopted the strategy beyond segmentation and retargeting. For example, many brands are weaving in customizable, shareable elements — think of the famous Share a Coke campaign — to encourage users to take photos of their products and share on social media. What could be better than free advertising?
And then there’s the interactive ad approach. This one has been used by brands big and small to boost user engagement. Turning an ad into a game or having some moving component can help capture a user’s attention so that they’ll spend more than a few seconds looking at any given ad. One great example of interactive digital advertising is the Lysol Power & Free ad that challenged users to clean up messes with a virtual bottle of disinfectant.
The Takeaway
The core thing to know about digital advertising is that it’s got a ton of potential, both to help you reach new audiences and to revolutionize the way we think about and employ marketing efforts. With virtually limitless targeting and reach, digital advertisers are working hard to break boundaries and set new precedents in their realm.
