Advertising Strategies: 8 Best Ways to Drive Effective Traffic to Your Online Store

With new players coming up almost every day, the present eCommerce landscape has become extremely competitive. In this ever-changing industry, it can be tough to stand out of the crowd and generate more leads for your online store.

Though, if you take some smart and calculative steps, then you can certainly come up with effective advertising campaigns. In this post, I will make you familiar with some proven advertising strategies that can help you make your online business profitable.

1. Optimize Your Online Store

Before you start running your advertising strategies, make sure that your online store is ready for it. Too many times, marketers start rolling out ads for unfinished products that end up turning their prospective customers off. If your online store is not easy to use, has a limited range, or features bad product shots, then it can be a turn-off for your customers.

For instance, if your website is not friendly to mobile phones, then it can also create a negative impact on your customers. In the present scenario, where more than 60% of people are more likely to purchase products from a mobile-friendly website, it is extremely important to have an optimized store.

Try to have a clear and uncomplicated interface that is quick to load and must be easy to navigate on every platform.

2. Use SEO Practices to Make your Store Visible

Even today, SEO remains one of the major sources of generating traffic to websites and online stores. You can try both organic and paid advertising campaigns to get traffic from search engines like Google, Bing, Baidu, DuckDuckGo, and so on.

Search Engine Optimization is a long-term and ongoing process to make it easier for search engines to discover your online store. Since SEO can be a complex domain, you can make yourself familiar with its basics or hire an expert instead.

Apart from making your website keyword-rich (via product descriptions or blogs), you should also work on off-page SEO practices. Besides running all kinds of SEO techniques, you can also bid for keywords and run ads on search engines like Google to get some immediate results.

3. Don’t Underestimate the Power of Social Media Platforms

If you run consistent and smart advertising strategies on social media platforms, then you can certainly reach out to millions of people out there. You might already know that platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, and so on are used by billions of people.

Therefore, you can start by maintaining a consistent and uniform presence on all the major social media platforms. Subsequently, you can understand your target audience so that you can pick specific platforms to focus on. For example, if your target audience is young adults, then Instagram might prove more effective than Facebook.

Instead of having a standard account, try to switch to a business profile on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. In this way, you can get tons of insights about your target audience and can come up with better content.

Remember, posting on social media platforms is not enough as you need to set a balanced tone and be more conversational. Apart from redirecting your audience from social media, you can also choose to directly sell your products on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

4. Organize Different Sales Campaigns

Let’s say you have got your target audience from your advertising strategies on social media and search engines. Now, to retain your customers, you need to keep offering them ongoing offers and other reasons to get back to your platform.

I would recommend exploring some of the following sales and advertising campaigns that you can also run on your store:

• Give special sign-up bonuses and offers for first-time purchasers to improve lead generation.
• Host all kinds of giveaways on your online store and social platforms to reward your customers.
• You can also run time-specific campaigns to give discounts on special occasions and festivals (like Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, and so on).
• Focus on particular regions by running country or state-specific offers to make your audience feel valued.
• A lot of online stores also create a sense of urgency in the mind of their customers by running sales for a short duration.

5. Host a Rewarding Referral Program

Referrals are undoubtedly one of the best ways to gain more loyal customers in less time. You might not know this, but referrals have 70% higher conversion rates and around 28% of millennials hesitate trying a product that is not referred by their friends.

Therefore, hosting a rewarding referral program will certainly be one of the best advertising campaigns that you can run. You can give your customers in-store cash and other tempting rewards that would encourage them to refer their friends.

Besides that, you can also come up with some exclusive offers or loyalty programs to retain your customers in the long run. Interested in tapping into the potential of referrals? Discover effective strategies and tips on how to get referrals here.

6. Tap into Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is currently on a high and it is expected to grow even more in the coming years. In this, you can partner with leading industry-specific influencers who would share your products with their followers on social media.

When it comes to these advertising strategies, the key is to find the right influencers who would have the same kind of audience as your target customers. In this way, with the help of influencers, you can reach out to millions of people instantly.

While Instagram is one of the best platforms to run an influencer marketing campaign, you can also explore other platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.

7. Run an Affiliate Marketing Program

Just like hosting a dedicated referral program, you can also consider coming up with a program for affiliate marketing. While in a referral program, you reward an existing customer for referring a new user, affiliate marketers are rewarded a specific cut on every product that is sold by them.

In the US and Canada, affiliate marketing is solely responsible for around 16% of the total eCommerce sales. From Amazon to Etsy, around 80% of the global brands run an affiliate marketing program for a reason.

What makes affiliate marketing so effective is that you don’t have to manage so many advertising campaigns on your own. Instead, your affiliate marketers will do it for you and will get tons of traffic for a small cut.

8. Explore Other Channels of Content Marketing

Most importantly, make sure that you create the kind of content on your website and social platforms that would keep your audience engaged. There are tons of channels that you can explore to run content-driven advertising strategies.

Blogs

Make sure that you have a dedicated blog on your online store where you post industry-specific articles regularly. It would be your way of communicating with your audience and educating them about your products. Besides that, it can also help you with search engine optimization.

Videos

Don’t miss out on the rise of video content marketing that helps us promote our products in less time. You can come up with product demos, marketing videos, brand promotional content, and more to meet your requirements.

Emails

Email marketing still works and is used by over 60% of small businesses to reach out to their audience. Just make sure that you have mobile-friendly emails and focus on the kind of killer copies (subject headings) that would increase the click-through rates of your promotional emails.

Bonus Tip: Step into Dropshipping with DSers

While running successfully advertising strategies might be tedious, managing an online store isn’t. If you also want to work on a successful dropshipping business, then simply take the assistance of DSers.

It is the official AliExpress dropshipping tool that has tons of back-end features to help you manage your store without any technical hassle.

· You can find millions of products in almost every feasible category from tons of trusted AliExpress suppliers.

· DSers provides a seamless integration option with leading front-end eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce.

· To save your time, you can explore its Supplier Optimizer feature that would let you pick the best and most profitable supplier in your niche.

· The best part is that the basic plan of DSers is available for free, and you can later upgrade your account to its premium plan to access its advanced options.

· Some other features that are offered by DSers are bundled products, bulk purchasing, automatic orders status updates, stock management, dynamic pricing, and much more.

Summing it Up!

While running an online store might seem a bit complicated at first, you can do it all with the help of the right products and tools. Though, if you want to promote your products and increase their sales, then you should work on the above-listed advertising strategies.

From SEO to social media and content marketing to influencer partnerships, there are so many kinds of advertising campaigns you can run. Besides that, if you want to have some of the best products on your online store, then you can also explore DSers, and make it your go-to dropshipping tool as well.