Which traffic acquisition levers should you use for your e-commerce site?
Do you want to attract more visitors to your site but don't know how to go about it?
Do you want to find the right strategy for your business, and the right solutions for your budget?
Here's what you need to know about the different levers of traffic acquisition.
Traffic acquisition is essential: why?
Without traffic acquisition, only your existing customers will be in contact with your e-shop. You won't be gathering enough information to optimize your offer and thus build customer loyalty, increase your conversion rate or attract new prospects.
Without traffic acquisition, your sales will stagnate or even decline - even your most loyal customers won't be enough to make you profitable. You won't be able to increase your sales or raise the budget you need to expand your brand awareness.
Now that we've established that, let's take a look at what you can do!
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1st lever: natural referencing
SEO and SEA... what's the difference?
Natural search engine optimization (SEO ) is "free" (apart from the time you have to devote to it, and the possibility of delegating some of the work to a service provider).The difference between SEO and SEA (search engine advertising) is that SEO is "free" (apart from the time involved and the possibility of delegating some of the work to a service provider). The two can be combined.
SEA is responsible for the results that appear at the top of Google search pages, with the mention "ad" (or in the "Google shopping" section). These fast-paying advertising actions consist of "Adwords campaigns" (Google's advertising network) initiated by sites to appear in the first results of a search and therefore be more visible.
This definite advantage comes at a substantial cost - so be careful about profitability.
Websites that have been referenced thanks to SEO then appear , an action that is free of charge, but whose benefits can be seen after several months.
The benefits of SEO
SEO should be seen as a long-term investment, since successfully positioning your free site in Google search results will ensure continuous traffic and new visitors every day.
This means you can predict your sales and plan your investments.
In short, SEO is less immediate than SEA, but less random and more sustainable .
How Google works for SEO
Google obviously doesn't reveal everything about how it works, but a few key lessons will help you optimize your site's SEO and, above all, banish certain practices that will earn you Google's wrath.
Google works with a robot (or GoogleBot) that constantly analyzes new pages and registers ( indexes) them. It relies on hundreds of parameters to judge where your site should rank. The two main criteria? Relevance and popularity.
To be relevant, your site needs to provide effective answers to questions asked by Internet users during their searches. Popularity means getting qualified links to your site.
If you don't have the budget to entrust SEO to a service provider, you can take a less expensive SEO training course that will enable you to manage your natural referencing in-house.
Second lever: social networks
Today, social networking is not only an essential communications strategy, but also an important lever for attracting qualified traffic.
Social networks: an indispensable tool for building brand awareness
Buyers of e-commerce sites like to use social networks to find out in advance whether the brand corresponds to their expectations and desires, to read reviews, to check its reputation... A small number of subscribers is not reassuring. On the contrary, a large community will suggest that your brand is too 🙂 .
Above all, people who subscribe to a brand via its networks are more loyal to it. By regularly seeing your posts, then liking and commenting on them, your brand will be more and more present in their minds, and they'll more spontaneously think of you for their purchases.
Not to mention the virtuous circle of the Facebook or Instagram algorithm : the more engagement you show for a brand's posts (by viewing, liking, commenting, saving or sharing them), the more it will appear in your "feed" (the stream of posts you see when opening Instagram or Facebook) and that of the brand's other fans because Facebook will deem this content relevant.
Social networks: a "free" but time-consuming tool
Today, it's hard to imagine a brand not being present on social networks. But committing to them means agreeing to devote a minimum amount of time to building and animating your community.
Your fans and followers will expect you to provide them with attractive content (although communities are more tolerant of smaller brands), interact with them, answer their questions... In short, like your site, your networks must help solve your customers' problems.
So there's no point in opening up your networks unless you're sure you can play by the rules. If a fan of your brand notices that your networks are inactive, he'll be disappointed, and you'll lose credibility. The sentence will be even more terrible if he notices that you don't respond to comments from unhappy customers.
But rest assured, up to a few hundred subscribers, you can manage your networks yourself by monitoring them morning and night. Beyond that, you can hire a community manager.
Social networks shouldn't be an end in themselves
Be careful, however, not to "maintain" your fans solely on your networks. Encourage them to visit your site (you can put links in your Facebook posts, in your Instagram bio - and in your stories beyond 10,000 subscribers) and to sign up for your newsletter to build a valuable database.
The most direct way of draining traffic from your networks to your site is through sponsored posts and advertising campaigns. Here too, there are many rules.
Third lever: advertising
The costs of advertising
While advertising generates traffic almost immediately, it comes at a high cost, and requires a well thought-out campaign.
👉 If your campaign is profitable, you'll have even more cash to plough back into advertising to further boost your sales.
👉 If it's unprofitable, you'll lose cash, which could jeopardize your business.
How to optimize advertising?
To be effective and encourage conversion, a campaign needs to be attractive and broadcast to a sufficiently large target audience. Otherwise, you're investing at a loss.
As network users are increasingly exposed to advertising messages, you need to be even more inventive to capture their attention. Advertising non-quality content won't work , and your investment will be useless.
What's more, advertising is subject to an increasingly expensive bidding system for exposure to your targets, making low investments counter-productive. Competition is fierce and places are expensive!
Fourth lever: influencers
Before benefiting from its own notoriety, your brand can rely on the legitimacy of third-party players, in particular influencers - instagrammers or youtubers in particular.
Win over an already loyal community in tune with your values
Although they may not be as fooled as they once were, the people who follow an influencer lend him or her loyalty and credibility. If he speaks positively about your brand, he engages his entire image, encouraging his fans to take a less suspicious look at the promise of your products. You'll then benefit from a legitimacy that would take you longer to build yourself.
Drive traffic to your site via influencers
You can organize a contest with an influencer to encourage their followers to follow you too. In this way, your networks will be the first gateway to your site.
You can also initiate a partnership with an influencer, offering his or her community a discount that will make a visit to your site more tempting. The "accidental" discovery of your products, if convincing, could lead to the loyalty of these new customers.
"Choosing your influencers
While it's important to target influencers in line with your values, the final choice will often depend on your wallet.
The better known an influencer is (and the larger his or her community), the more expensive the negotiation. If your budget or notoriety is too low, you risk losing interest.
Betting on more modest or even "micro" influencers will certainly generate less visibility for your brand, but potentially more engagement, as influencers with small communities often have very loyal and committed fans.
Deals with influencers who are still building their communities can also be free 😉
Search engine optimization, social networks, advertising, influencers: it's up to you to choose the lever(s) best suited to your site, your budget, but also what you want to dedicate time and effort to 🙂
Guest article. Expert contributors are authors independent of the Appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.
Article translated from French