Business Transformation Strategy (Step 3): Scale Marketing Efforts

In our previous article, 3-Step Business Transformation Strategy (Part 2): Upgrade Your Ecommerce Systems to Scale, we discussed the second step in our sequence for strategically implementing digital business transformation and preparing your business for growth. 

The third and final step of that sequence is scaling up your marketing efforts, which should follow refining your user experience (the first step) and elevating your back-end systems (the above-mentioned second step). Following these steps in order creates a solid foundation for you to invest in your marketing and bring in more visitors without overloading an insufficient website or back-end. 

In this article, we go into more detail about scaling up your marketing efforts and preparing your business to effectively bring in AND retain customers.  

Scalable Marketing Starts with Your Website 

Scaling your marketing means you’re increasing your resources while maintaining a sustainable return on investment. To ensure the success of your scaled marketing efforts, you need to have a solid website. Even if you increase your marketing spend and get more people to your site, a bad website experience will cause frustrated customers to drop off, leading to revenue loss and missed opportunities. To effectively scale your marketing, you need the customer-facing side of your site to engage visitors and get them to convert, and your back-end systems to seamlessly manage orders and process demand.   

Sustainable ecommerce growth involves creating healthy customer relationships throughout the buyer journey. Invest in your website first, demand. Having these prerequisites completed will allow you to get more purchase-ready users and visitors to your business.  

Invest in Long-Term Customer Acquisition 

After refining the user experience and back-end processes, you can expand your marketing engine. A solid acquisition strategy opens the floodgates to interest and activity and leads visitors down the path to purchase, resulting in sales. 

Media like display ads, retargeting, SEO, social media, and influencer marketing are key to reaching relevant shoppers and converting them into customers over time. Look into your marketing channels and identify where you can create buildable, long-term processes for sparking customer interest. Your business could test different audience targeting, create unique and compelling content for each audience, and optimize each visitor touchpoint to build a continuous flow of traffic and convert high-quality visitors. 

Another way to scale your customer acquisition is to use technology to automate and optimize your campaigns. Consider investing in new tools, integrations, and software to send personalized recommendations, collect customer data, analyze user behavior, and intelligently retarget users. This will allow you to save time, generate more results, and level up your acquisition strategy.  

Further Reading: 

• The Online Seller’s SEO Survival Guide. Go beyond SEO best practices and get real strategies for bringing in more traffic to your site and driving sales. 
• 5 Social Media Trends + Tips Every Seller Needs in Their Online Strategy. Check out 5 tips for keeping your business top in mind among today’s social savvy shoppers. 
• Ecommerce Secrets: Hacking Your Paid Social Media Advertising. Take a look at some of the clever ways marketers are using social ads to get their messages the right people at the right time. 

Ramp Up Your Retention Strategies 

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for bringing in and converting new customers, it’s time to keep all those visitors coming back. If your marketing funnel is leaky—causing friction for the customer or creating exit points—you will only attract only one-time customers or lose out on all the visitors you’ve worked hard to acquire.  

This is where your retention strategy comes in. At this stage, you should be deliberate about your retention efforts to reactivate customers and increase lifetime value. Reward customers with a loyalty program, nurture customers with email marketing, generate repeat business with a subscription program, encourage word-of-mouth with referral strategies, and build loyalty with a solid post-purchase experience. Retention marketing allows you to engage customers at a regular cadence to keep your brand store top of mind. In today’s ecommerce landscape where customer loyalty is in flux, enticing visitors to return to your business will be key to growing and thriving. 

Retention marketing requires a deep understanding of all customer touchpoints. A customer might start their journey after hearing about your brand from an influencer, exploring your website, or from researching brands on a search engine. Gather insight into your visitors’ activity and preferences on each touchpoint, and use this to inform the kind of content you need to retain customers. 

Further Reading: 

• 5 Ecommerce Strategies to Boost Customer Lifetime Value. See what successful brands are doing to turn their visitors into loyal customers.  
• Complete Guide to Starting a Subscription Service. Here are a few things you should think about before starting a subscription service. 

• 3 Tips for Boosting Customer Loyalty in the New Era of Ecommerce. Discover 3 ways to create an effective loyalty program that keeps customers coming back.  
• A Revolutionary Guide to Ecommerce Email Marketing. Learn how to attract quality subscribers, create engaging email content, and take advantage of email testing. 

Scale Your Marketing and Enhance Your Digital Presence 

Scaling your marketing is the last (but certainly not least) step in your growth plan alongside improving the front-end and back-end experience. Scaled marketing efforts allow you to bring in customers and to foster loyalty with a standout online experience. 

Ultimately, you want to invest in your systems in such a way that you’re able to build meaningful customer relationships and generate returns. This is the key to a successful business transformation and long-term ecommerce growth.