With the rise of simple online store builders and logistics solutions catering to smaller businesses, the e-commerce market is more accessible than ever before.
However, with 2.8 million e-commerce retailers in the United States alone and the industry expected to grow exponentially in the future, running a successful e-commerce business is also fiercely competitive.
Whether you’ve just started your e-commerce venture or you’re planning to revisit your approach to marketing, you’ll need a strategy to increase brand awareness to stand out in a crowded marketplace and forge a closer relationship with your audience.
In this guide, we’ll look at how to increase brand awareness for an e-commerce startup using five effective methods.
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Run Social Media Giveaways
Social media has limitless potential for increasing your e-commerce brand awareness, allowing you to boost your visibility through the strength of your audience’s personal social networks.
Running product giveaways on social media can be one of the most effective ways to encourage people to get your brand name in front of their friends and family, allowing you to stimulate word-of-mouth marketing and enjoy the in-built authenticity that comes with it.
Like any other kind of social media marketing drive, a product giveaway needs to be planned carefully in advance. This means figuring out how you’ll target the social media channels and spaces where your audience is most active with tailored copy and imagery, as well as clearly defined rules for entry, for example commenting with a specific hashtag or sharing a link to your store.
It can also be useful to make your giveaways stand out by promising a prize selection from a few different flagship products. Email marketing tool Drip suggests that “you can make your contests even more attractive by letting your site visitors choose the prize they want themselves.”
With the promise of winning a free product (or products!) and the motivation to share your brand name with their followers, a social media giveaway can be a fantastic method for broadcasting your brand to your audience.
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Blogging and Guest Posts
Increasing your brand awareness is all about getting your products seen by people who weren’t aware of them before, and then holding their attention long enough to make your brand identity stick in their minds.
One of the most effective ways to do this is through creating quality online content that provides some tangible benefit to your audience and links back to the type of product you’re selling.
If you’re running a pet accessories e-commerce store, for example, you may want to publish a blog post titled “The Ultimate Guide to Bringing a New Puppy Home.” If you’re selling vegan snacks and meal kits, on the other hand, you might attract readers with a piece like “Top X Tips for Adapting to a Plant-Based Lifestyle.”
To build even more visibility for your content, guest posting on high-quality external sites related to your industry niche is worth considering. Link building agencies like Hive19 consider over 45 data points such as “Domain Authority (DA), Domain Rating (DR), TrustFlow (TF), and country-level traffic” to assess suitable opportunities that will provide positive ROI for your efforts and help generate additional exposure for your e-commerce brand online.
With a little research into these kinds of variables and an informed search for opportunities, you’ll be able to leverage other sites’ larger readership and broadcast your brand name more effectively.
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Reduce Friction in the Shopper Experience
One of the most powerful ways for an e-commerce startup to build brand awareness is through word-of-mouth marketing from satisfied customers.
According to data collated by online form builder tool forms.app, roughly half of marketers “think that between 20% and 40% of leads originate from recommendations”, and “26% of consumers will stay away from a brand entirely if a friend or relative has had a bad experience with it.”
Before you think about creating brand awareness through more proactive marketing initiatives, it’s always a good idea to audit your customer journey and make sure it’s as frictionless as possible.
Using social selling via whatever platforms where your target audience spends most of their time is a good way to reduce the steps from one touchpoint to another, and make it easier for potential customers to learn about your products and make a decision.
Past this, making sure your e-commerce store has simple, intuitive navigation, detailed product information, and fast-loading, mobile-optimized pages, can all be effective ways to streamline the customer experience and maximize your chances of word-of-mouth recommendations.
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Promote Around Seasonal Events
Important dates on everyone’s calendar, like Mother’s and Father’s Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, can offer a great opportunity to capitalize on the buzz around these events and step up your brand awareness strategy.
Aside from enabling you to use a trending topic to earn more visibility for your brand, a well-executed seasonal event that resonates with your audience can help you convert one-time shoppers into loyal, regular customers, increase your sales volume in typically quiet periods, and boost engagement with your existing customer base.
Obviously, you’re not going to be the only brand using national holidays and other special dates to bolster their marketing, so it’s important to make sure you use seasonal promotions to connect your products to your audience’s universal needs.
By tailoring seasonal promotions so that they resonate with your audience segments, rather than using a more tenuous or generic connection to your brand, you’ll be able to stand out from the crowd on your marketing channels and create more memorable interactions with your audience.
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Invest in Influencer Marketing
Suppose you’ve enjoyed a nice burst of traction from your e-commerce startup immediately after launch, but this has started to stagnate recently. In that case, it may be a sign that you need to start diversifying the audience segments you’re marketing to.
Influencer marketing can often be one of the best ways to bridge your product with new audiences, while creating brand awareness and prestige through the audiences of popular content creators.
Because the recommendation of influencers is often seen as more genuine and trustworthy, having influencers promote your product will not only help the overall exposure for your store but will inject some additional equity into your brand name in the eyes of your audience.
Though influencer marketing is fairly quick and easy to get started with, remember that it’s important to choose partnerships that are a good match for your unique brand identity.
Aside from making sure the influencers you shortlist have audiences that overlap with yours, you should try to ensure that anyone you market with is fairly discerning about their partnerships, and doesn’t work with any brand that can pay their rates. This will ensure that their promotional posts come off as authentic to your shared audience, and maximize your potential ROI.
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Increasing Brand Awareness for Long-Term Value
Putting some momentum into your brand awareness initiatives can feel challenging when you’re trying to sell in a crowded marketplace. However, once you’ve planned and executed campaigns that are right for your brand identity, you’ll be able to enjoy long-term equity and ROI thanks to an inflow of loyal customers.
We hope these methods and more help you achieve great results as you work to increase brand awareness through different channels, drive more shoppers to your store, and grow your e-commerce business!
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