Everything You Need to Know About Launching a Robust Ecommerce Brand
Building a brand is about much more than setting up shop online; it involves carefully crafting an identity, then portraying it to the world through ongoing marketing efforts.
Brands thrive on loyalty and longevity. The last thing you want to do is sink significant time and effort into an ecommerce endeavor that ends up being a flash in the pan. Here’s a bit of everything you need to know about launching a robust ecommerce brand.
Believe in Your Product
The first step is achieving complete confidence in your product, including its manufacture and distribution. If you don’t stand behind your product, your customers will certainly have no reason to do so. Your offerings should be safe, high-quality and fill a proven gap within the market you wish to enter. Pre-launch is also the time to consider logistics like pricing, order fulfillment and inventory.
At the end of the day, setting your product lineup often comes down to finding a niche and calculating your potential profit margins.
Understand Your Target Audience
One make-or-break factor for your ecommerce brand will be whether an audience is interested in purchasing your products. Remember, customers must be willing to actually spend their hard-earned money on your goods. To whom are you aiming to sell your products? To start, you’ll need to know the following about your target audience:
- The shoppers comprising your target audience
- How they prefer to shop and make purchases
- What value your store can offer them
- The pain points they encounter along the way
Crafting a detailed buyer persona, or hypothetical composite of your target customer, will help you make smart sales and marketing decisions along the way.
Create a Responsive, Branded Website
Your ecommerce website acts as your branded online space. Besides being highly responsive and navigable, your website should also employ design and copy in line with your chosen brand identity. When visitors arrive at your website, they should enter an immersive experience matching up with their expectations of what your brand does. Conducting a cloud ecommerce platform comparison to learn more about the various design and functionality features available will help you build something reflective of your established values.
Promote Your Brand on Social Media
A huge component of branding is voice. Brand voice takes into account your messaging, audience and communication goals. A furniture store targeting apartment-dwelling millennials will sound significantly different than a shop selling camping gear to serious outdoor enthusiasts, for instance.
Social media is where you will connect with your existing audience and potential new business. So, it only makes sense your social media presence should incorporate your brand voice. Whether you’re making a post about a seasonal sale or answering a customer question in a comment thread, it’s important to exude a consistent brand voice and identity. The same principle applies to graphics, photographs, videos or written content you produce.
Create and Share Quality Content
One way for your brand to provide concrete value for your target audience is by creating and sharing quality content. Creating a hub for great content will boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and drive traffic to your website. But it will also boost your brand’s legitimacy and authority in the eyes of visitors. When customers can depend upon your brand to produce useful how-to guides and more, it builds trust and loyalty.
Launching a robust ecommerce brand takes planning and careful consideration up front, but the payoff—an opportunity to build a legacy—is well worth it.
