It is well worth investing in professional eCommerce design and development services for your Magento store but a great looking, well-functioning site is not enough to make your business a success. In order to make sales and generate profit, you need to spread the word about your business; hence why having a powerful Magento marketing strategy is so important.

Today eCommerce businesses have a wealth of opportunities when it comes to marketing their brand online. From email marketing and SEO to affiliate marketing, there are so many different channels to explore. The key to an effective Magento marketing strategy is to target the right audience with the right message at the right time. This is something our team of Magento marketing experts can help you with. Here we’ve provided an overview of key marketing channels, along with some great tips to help you get your Magento marketing strategy off the ground.

eCommerce SEO

If you’re new to digital marketing and online business, you’re unlikely to have come across the term ‘SEO’ before. SEO stands for search engine optimisation and is basically the process of making your eCommerce website more appealing to search engines. Google and other search engines have criteria that they index your site against in order to determine its rankings on search engine results pages. The more boxes you tick, the higher rankings you will achieve, allowing you to benefit from greater exposure on search engines.

Unfortunately Google and other search engines like to keep their SEO criteria close to their chests. However we know that user experience, site performance, site architecture and content all have important roles to play. It is therefore essential that you focus on creating an eCommerce website with a user-friendly design and great content, which offers customers the optimal shopping experience.

Everything can affect your site’s SEO from its web design and the content it features to the websites that link back to it. See our page on eCommerce SEO for more information.

Magento is SEO friendly

One of the great things about choosing Magento as your eCommerce platform is that it has been built with SEO friendly architecture. Its clean, efficient code makes it super easy for search engines to crawl and index. Magento also comes with SEO friendly features out of the box. These features can help you increase your search rankings organically and get one step ahead of your competitors.

You can find out more by visiting the page: Is Magento SEO friendly?

Magento SEO tips

When setting up your Magento eCommerce store, you need to think carefully about how you’re going to optimise it for search engines. There are a number of things you will need to consider from its design theme to the content you upload.

First things first, we recommend checking that your Magento website can be crawled and indexed by search engines, otherwise your site won’t be able to rank or be found by users through search engines.

Once you’ve done that you will be able to look into customising your page URLs and creating unique titles, descriptions and image alt tags for your products.

It’s also of critical importance to ensure you are using a responsive Magento theme. This will ensure your site is offering a great user experience across all devices, including smartphones and tablets. Google calls responsive web design ‘best practice’ and has even created an algorithm to elevate the rankings of responsive websites in mobile searches.

Finally you will need to think about creating content for your website and getting natural backlinks to your site from other high authority websites. For more in-depth information, see our Magento SEO tips page.

SEO extensions for Magento

SEO can be a little hard to get to grips with, especially if you are new to eCommerce. The good news is that there are a number of different Magento extensions you can use to optimise your Magento website with ease.

Magento extensions (also known as modules) can be downloaded from the Magento Connect store, as well as various other websites. Some SEO extensions for Magento are free to download and use, whereas others have to be paid for. Have a little browse of the Magento Connect store and you’ll find extensions for everything from optimising site performance and improving user experience (a major ranking factor) to creating canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content issues.

We recommend that you always check the ratings and reviews before downloading a Magento extension. See our Magento SEO extensions page for our top choices.

SEO is important; however it’s not the only way of spreading the word about your Magento eCommerce store. You need to use other marketing methods to increase the visibility of your business and engage with your target audience.

Affiliate marketing

In addition to SEO, social media marketing and PPC, we highly recommend investing in affiliate marketing. This is where you pay users to promote your products or services. They simply include links on their websites, blogs, social media pages and emails and then get a percentage of the sales you make as a result of their efforts. See our page on Magento affiliate marketing for more information.

Email marketing

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to communicate with your target audience, drive traffic to your Magento website and increase conversions. The great thing about email marketing is that it produces immediate results. It’s also low cost and allows for personalisation. You can get even more value out of your email marketing campaigns by investing in a marketing automation extension – see the next section for more information.

Find out about the benefits of email marketing here.

Marketing automation for Magento

Marketing automation makes marketing easier for Magento merchants. It helps them to make better use of their customer data so they can create more effective email, SMS and website marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation can be used for a wide range of purposes from recovering abandoned shopping carts and attracting back old customers to upselling and cross selling. There are a number of extensions you can use to automate marketing processes on Magento. See our article about Magento marketing automation for more information.

Here at the Magento eCommerce Agency, we understand that as important as marketing is, not everyone has the time or resources to conduct it in-house. This is why we offer customers the opportunity to outsource their Magento marketing to our talented team of marketing professionals. Get in touch for more information.

 

Image credits: altemark, nogran and RaHuL Rodriguez