How to Build a Successful eCommerce Brand from Scratch

The world of ecommerce opens an array of opportunities for aspiring business people. But, because of its huge potential and the wide reach, the ecommerce business is also a very hard industry to succeed in. With brands that go viral overnight and marketing tricks with the biggest successes ever, the competition is constantly on the rise. Consumers are given so many options now, even they find it hard to make a choice.

By the end of next year, the ecommerce sales are expected to reach up to 17.5 percent of all retail sales on a global level. In such a busy market, how do you succeed? How can you leverage the amazing powers and reap the benefits of ecommerce branding?

To make this happen, you need a great branding strategy. This strategy will help you build a connection with the target audience and turn them into buyers. Ideally, it should combine the right message, amazing visuals, and quality offers. Altogether, these three elements make a successful ecommerce brand. Let me teach you how to achieve this.

1. Pick a Brand Style

A brand cannot exist or survive without a style. How will people recognize your ecommerce store if you don’t give it a unique style and purpose? The entire strategy for your brand should be based on its purpose. This is what will lead and determine the customer’s shopping experience.

There is one thing that all buyers appreciate in this crowded market – authenticity. If you want to meet their expectations and turn heads with your strategy, you need a unique style that reflects all the focus toward your brand. Essentially, this includes the right choice of colors, logo, quote, images, and products.

Through suiting color schemes and font, your website and your brand should boost the user experience for people who shop on your website. Your style should be embedded in your CTAs, your content, your headlines, and your ads.

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In other words, a brand style should reflect the values of a business and tell the reader why your brand is their best choice.

2. Speak Your Customer’s Language

Customers won’t buy from a website they don’t understand. Therefore, use your customer research to find and make the right message. The goal is to connect your brand to your buyers, and the best way to do this is by leveraging their needs and expectations.

Creating content for your ecommerce is mainly based on your writing capabilities and the target audience research. Ideally, the messages sent through your ecommerce brand should access the buyer persona and convince them that you are their best choice. Eventually, if you are having troubles figuring out how to approach the buyer persona, you can reach out to customs writing and ask them for some help and guidance. Then, you can copy their conversational style into your future pieces of content for the website, or keep hiring them to provide you with quality copy for wider reach.

There are some ways that you can learn what your customer’s language is like. You can check the competition's content in brands that are already established. You can analyze feedback on your website and online. Or, you can survey your existing customers to find out what they expect of you and what works best in your current strategies.

3. Share Your Story

As I mentioned before, authenticity is highly valued in this industry. To show your audience that you are authentic, use the biggest tool at your disposal – your business origin story. This goes beyond just plain advertising or a collection of general facts. Tell the audience what your business is, what its purpose is, and how your brand intends on changing their lives for the better.

There are plenty of methods for sharing your brand’s story. You can post it in the form of a video or text content in your ‘About Us’ page on the website, hire influencers to spread the word around, and include the story on your packaging’s tag or label.

4. Aim to Build Relationships with the Customers

The goal of every ecommerce marketer is to make sales. Naturally, that’s why you start such a business in the first place. But, what many marketers fail to consider is that people react better to a more personal approach. They are more likely to buy from a brand they trust and have an authentic relationship with.

Therefore, don’t just work on your marketing and sales. Assess your business from a more personal stance, too. Answer your potential customer’s questions, ask them how happy they are with your service, and encourage them to share their feedback to help you improve. Spark some conversation among them to provide future buyers with social proof for your brand’s quality.

5. Maintain High Quality

Hiring the best marketers or content writers, designers and influencers won’t work if your product is bad. You might reach an audience at first, but a bad product will soon result in a reputation that’s beyond repair. The Internet is a great place to find more customers than you ever can with traditional selling. However, it is also a really rough place for those who sell average or bad quality.

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Before anything else, make sure that your product is of high quality, and it remains such for as long as your ecommerce business is up and running. Otherwise, you can’t expect your customers to remain loyal to your brand, or recommend it to new potential buyers.

Keep checking your product’s quality and the feedback from your customers regarding its success and value. If needed, tweak the product to meet the target audience’s needs.

6. Use Video Content Marketing

Nowadays, one of the most popular and effective ecommerce tools is video content marketing. People love videos and many prefer it over traditional content. Some social media pages like Instagram are aimed to spread the message through the use of visual tools only, such as images and videos. Use this to your advantage. Create informational, explainer, and product-demo videos that reflect the value of your brand and gives people access to your ecommerce store.

Final Thoughts

An ecommerce brand is more than just the product it sells or the logo the designer created. It’s a way to earn you a fortune by connecting with the buyer persona. There are plenty of tools you can use to make this happen, so start working on building your ecommerce business as soon as possible.

BIO

Sandra Larson is one of the owners of Elizabethan Authors and a freelance content writer who works on a project-based basis. She is often assigned to the most difficult writing assignments requiring skills and experience. In this article, she shares her opinion on the most common mistakes in sales prospecting email writing and gives a clue on how to avoid them.