The global eCommerce marketing campaigns generates trillions of dollars in revenue every year. While the world has been moving online over the past decade, the 2020 pandemic accelerated eCommerce growth tenfold. As a result, many businesses now have an online presence today, however, most are still struggling. Why?
Let’s not fool ourselves: achieving success online takes specialized knowledge and strategies. One of the best ways of replicating success online is to study those who have done it before. Luckily, there’s no shortage of successful eCommerce businesses today. If you are trying to replicate an online success to better your own business, you have come to the right place.
Many new ecommerce business owners focus too much on things such as WordPress vs Shopify vs Magento or having the perfect product descriptions when in reality the most important thing for an ecommerce business is marketing.
Our focus here is on a few exemplary eCommerce businesses and the marketing campaigns/strategies that made them successful:
Notable eCommerce marketing campaigns and what we can learn from them
1. Beardbrand – Content marketing
Beardbrand is a U.S. men’s grooming company established in 2012. The company sells men’s grooming and styling products for maintaining beards, mustaches, hair, and skin. As of 2021, the company’s yearly revenue stood at $7 million.
The company’s success can be largely attributed to its content marketing strategy. Beardbrand’s blog stands out as the greatest men’s grooming blog today, with consistent, useful, targeted, and SEO-optimized posts, since 2012.
The company identified a gap in men’s grooming and purposed to create content to fill that gap. They realized men wanted to understand several aspects of growing a beard: how to maintain it, the best care products, related information on grooming, etc., but there simply weren’t enough resources about it, so they decided to create them.
Beardbrand is a perfect illustration of how to execute an SEO content strategy. For years, Beardbrand has been providing men with useful grooming and related information, which helped them build authority in the niche. The content has helped them acquire and convert blog readers into actual clients who spend millions every year on their grooming products.
Beardbrand is a perfect example of converting site visitors/blog readers into actual paying customers, given how potential online buyers are also interested in their useful information. In fact, brands that offer useful content have an easier time building trust and converting their traffic. It’s clear Beardbrand took the time to create a solid content marketing strategy that focused on SEO content and actually meeting the needs of potential customers, not simply promoting their brand and products.
2. Namecheap – Social media marketing (Twitter)
If you’ve ever tried to register a domain name, you’ve probably heard of Namecheap – a U.S.-based web hosting and domain name registration company. The company was established in 2000 and currently boasts 10 million registered domains and 11 million users. While Namecheap enjoyed some growth over the years, it wasn’t until 2007 that the company became a global domain registration & web hosting company.
In terms of its marketing and advertising strategies, the company began with two people handling its marketing. They decided to start with a social media strategy specifically focused on Twitter. To drive traffic and sales, the company launched Twitter marketing campaigns (contests) via its official Namecheap Twitter account. The campaign rewarded participants with a free one-year domain registration prompting many people to open Namecheap accounts just to participate and receive rewards.
While the campaign had cost implications (considering it ran for an entire month of December 2007), the results outweighed the cost. The company’s social media following grew 20x that month and continued to grow steadily. Website traffic increased by 30%, and domain registration generated revenue of close to $1 million.
It’s safe to attribute Namecheap’s initial and current success in the eCommerce space largely to this single social media campaign. Most importantly, Namecheap’s social media campaign was crafted by a social media strategist – Michelle Greer. It’s clear it takes strategic social media marketing to convert social media traffic into buying customers.
3. Canva – Content marketing
Canva is a leading graphic design platform used globally to create presentations and social media graphics. The Australian company was established in 2012. Like Beardbrand, Canva’s success as a startup can be attributed to its blog strategy, which made a significant difference in just a few months.
The marketing team at Canva focused on creating the best content possible from the onset. Their target was teaching and inspiring people to design. The process began with a comprehensive competitor analysis to establish the content that would outperform their competition. Canva used many tools, including Quora, to discover “hot” topics with their niche and actual design concerns from real users. They also studied the reading and sharing trends of their target audience keenly and used these insights to inform their blogging strategy.
Clearly, they were able to convert high-quality content that met the needs of their audience and we have no doubt they crafted a very thoughtful content marketing strategy to fully understand what their niche audience wanted.
4. Allbirds – Display & Social Ads
Allbirds is a NASDAQ-listed U.S. apparel and footwear company. It is a product of a Kickstarter campaign that transformed a startup into a $100 million-dollar eco-friendly apparel and footwear company. Having great products is a huge part of Allbirds’ success, there is no doubt, but that is not the only reason. The company also had extremely savvy advertising that really took its efforts to the next level.
Allbirds used a unique blend of display and social media ads featuring vibrant visuals and powerful messaging to stand out. Their ad strategy has been unique, simple, and effective from the onset: all of their ads have a unique color palette mimicking the product in question. The campaigns are also accompanied by limited releases. Since its formation in 2014, its mission has been disrupting the traditional industry and we can confidently say the company has managed to do that via its eco-friendly products and online ads.
From the above examples, it’s clear that it takes expertise to launch successful eCommerce marketing campaigns: Beardbrand and Canva are a result of brilliant content marketing while Namecheap and Allbirds are products of a great Ads strategy. Most of these companies continue to use their marketing campaigns to drive growth further.
For instance, Namecheap also uses Google Ads (PPC) advertising aggressively as part of their marketing. It’s safe to say successful eCommerce marketing campaigns can therefore be a product of using multiple eCommerce marketing strategies. However, one thing is crystal clear – you need the expertise to create eCommerce marketing campaigns that stand out.
Other articles from mtltimes.ca – totimes.ca – otttimes.ca
