Stop Overthinking It: Digital Marketing Simplified

Anyone who has been in meetings knows that they can be hit-and-miss. Some will be full of productive ideas, action points, goals reached and new goals set. Others could definitely have just been an email (and even then, one that is likely on its way to the trash). Most fall somewhere in between the extremes, with an action here or an idea there.

But in one meeting recently, as the team was discussing ideas for client KPIs and business targets, someone said a phrase that has stuck with me over the last few months, making me question: ‘Is it really that simple?’. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it is possible to simplify digital marketing:

Attract, Convert, Retain.

I think it simplifies marketing in such a clear way that it cuts all the noise and the buzzword bullshit out of the way.

The marketing process truly operates as a cycle. It begins with attract: Are you bringing in the right volume of visitors? If not, that’s your primary goal. Once you’re generating traffic, the next step is to convert those visitors. Are you seeing a return on that traffic? If conversions are solid, then the focus is to retain those customers and keep them engaged. From there, the cycle naturally repeats, continuously driving growth.

These three pillars can give you the simplest version of where to focus your marketing efforts. Let’s go through them in detail, one by one, and examine how they apply to eCommerce marketing.

Attract

Whether you are a newer business or you’ve been established for a number of years, the fact is that you always need visitors. If people aren’t visiting, then they aren’t converting. At this point, they may not even know who you are, so how could they? So your focus should be to attract. Marketing is all numbers and probability. The more visitors, the greater the chance one of those will turn into a sale or lead.

If you are looking to attract more traffic, then you need to be looking at your external marketing efforts, where your target audience is likely to be and the timescales you have to start gaining said traffic.

The 2 most notable channels are Organic and Paid Media. The latter is ideal for a quick, scalable boost and with costs that can be managed so that it is mostly always profitable (margins permitting). You also have a number of paid platforms, from shopping ads to social media channels, to find your audience. PPC eCommerce strategies can also work well for new launches and releases that haven’t had the time to get the

Organic is a long game involving site health, landing page intent, and a host of other techniques to gain more of that monthly search volume that comes from the highest click-through rate positions, thus gaining in the search rankings. While there is always the chance of seeing fast increases in rankings, most SEO strategies are focused on gains over months and years rather than weeks and days.

So now you have visitors coming to your site from one or a combination of channels. Now ask yourself: are they converting?

Convert

With all that lovely new traffic, attention should turn to how they engage with your site. Scrutinise your engagement rates, conversion rates, drop-offs, and more.

Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is one of the more difficult and time-consuming aspects of marketing. It is about making incremental gains through small tweaks and testing them against a control page. These changes can be anything from ‘is the add to cart button the right colour?’ to ‘we are redesigning the whole navigation’. As long as all the correct tracking is in place, almost every point of a website can be tested and refined to guide as many users as possible to convert to your desired goal.

Now is the time to start your A/B testing and CRO plans. Are people having difficulty using a page? Is there a step in the checkout that is tripping users up? Are your users being taken on a well-thought-out path of research information to their solution?

The drawback of eCommerce CRO is that it takes time and balance. Too many changes at once, and you lose track of which change made the impact. But run the tests long enough, and you’ll gather enough users to get a true test of what works for your audience.

Retain

Now you’re making more sales with your new traffic, so what is the next step? This depends on your product type. If your service is a one-off purchase, then you can mostly ignore this step and go straight back to gaining more traffic for other areas of your site or new products (although letting users know about upcoming products is always useful).

If your products or services are repeatable, then you need to inspire loyalty. Retaining customers who have already had a good experience should be easier than finding new customers who haven’t heard of you. There are three ways in which to retain customers, which are as follows:

Email Retention

Follow up with users who have purchased through clever email marketing campaigns. Entice previous customers to come back with loyalty discounts for repeat purchases, offer discounts, and provide information about new and upcoming products to keep the customers you have already converted, building up a brand fan base.

Paid Retention

Paid campaigns can be used to retarget and remarket to users who have already visited and interacted with your site. Using audiences, you can cross-sell and upsell other products based on what the user has purchased previously, or even use paid social media channels to run special offers for loyal followers.

SEO Retention

Continuing to provide top-tier help and advice means giving the best chance of a user coming back if they have found your site to be a useful resource in the past. Having up-to-date news sections and new product updates can keep users checking what’s coming along next.

Bringing It Back to Basics: The Attract, Convert, Retain Framework

While marketing strategies can get complex, these will always be the three core pillars of a marketing cycle, helping to identify where your marketing needs improving and giving your business a focus on what type of tasks you should be looking at to continue this cycle. It’s worth noting that all of these pillars may need to be addressed at the same time or any combination of them, depending on a site’s needs.

If you’re still stuck with your marketing goals, then get in touch with our team, and we’ll help cut the fluff and help plan a strategy to improve your site and start meeting your targets.