Owning and running a successful e-commerce store takes gumption, strategy and more importantly, creativity. Fact: Unless you are in an obscure niche, you are competing with tons of other e-commerce stores. Fact: Many e-commerce stores are failing or closing up shop every day.
The question, therefore, is how do you avoid becoming one of those shops? How do you edge out the competition, gain a footing and drag in so much revenue? What can you do even with limited ad budget to grow your brand and transform your business? The simple answer is that you need to find effective ways to make your e-commerce business standout. You should find ways to ensure that your store is not just one of the herds. How do you do that?
Out of the Box Creative Thinking
Yes, you must have heard of that so many times. However, what exactly does this mean? Most people just yawn when they hear people talk about out of the box thinking. For many, that expression translates into “out of the box but pressed right up against the wall”. Bottom line, people do not believe in that. It is this nonchalance that you will be taking advantage of.
First you need to identify the competition’s weaknesses. Think about it this way: to improve on what is currently available, you must know about what is available. Hope that makes sense. Once you do, it is time to think about ways to improve on what anyone has out there and use that to your advantage. A good example of a fashion e-commerce site that’s doing that well is Blackmilk.
They use simple visual-based marketing techniques integrated into their social media accounts. For instance, they frequently take pictures of models or even have their customers send in pictures of themselves wearing their apparel and then encourage them to retweet, like, share or repin those pictures.
Because their clothes look magnificent on people, they tend to get much business from word of mouth marketing. Moreover, the interesting thing about this is that a significant part of their advertising is free.
Sell Incredibly Attractive Products
If you sell shoes via your e-commerce stores, do something completely uncharacteristic with your design: create a “purple cow-like” design and sell. This design will be both trendy and unique. Preferably something wildly different from what you already sell.
If you are not that bold, try same designs, but entirely different color. You see, the idea is not to sell that unique design, although if that takes off, that is good too. The idea is to create so much awareness and media blitz from your uniqueness, hook your audience in and show them other fantastic stuff you’ve got.
Remember the days of those pointy crocodile skin Mexican shoes? People bought that just for the fun of it, even if they did not get to wear it.
Adopt a Crazy Month or Week Attitude
You know how they say controversy sells? Well, devote a week a month or a month a year to craziness and controversial material. Yes, it is unconventional, but who cares about boring, conventional stuff. During this period, you’ll be doing stuff with your brand or designs that will get tongues wagging about our business.
For instance, if you are into fashion apparels, pick up hobos from the street and give them a complete makeover using your apparels and invite the media to document it. Alternatively, you can do a 30-day ordinary folk to sophisticated folk video casting or daily blogging, where you chronicle people’s rapid transformation from drab to glam. That is just two examples. The idea is to create something newsworthy; something that will get people curious about your brand.
Standing out from the crowd takes guts, and to survive in the fierce e-commerce world, you need to know just how to do that.
About the author:
The writer, Oscar King, is a freelance writer who has been studying ecommerce sites to figure out what works and what doesn’t. One of the most important lessons he picked up was having a safe and reliable method for processing transactions, and to make it happen he highly recommends making use of the services ofFastspring®. You can learn more about Oscar onGoogle+.
Robert Gomboş is a contributor to Mr. Hoffman's blog. The views and opinions are entirely his/her own and may not reflect Mr Hoffman's views.
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