Many traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores have been replaced by online marketplaces. This transformation has opened up unprecedented opportunities for marketers to connect with customers, but it has also created new marketing challenges. Traditional retailers had to worry about whether or not to increase prices due to increased demand and limited supply, and how to ensure that they provided good value in terms of price and quality for their customers. With online marketplaces, pricing and value are more closely aligned to buyer expectations, which can create friction between a brand and its customers if these expectations aren’t met.

Retailers that want to succeed in the digital age need to consider how to market their products and services online. The good news is that with a little planning and research, these challenges can be effectively mitigated. Below, we’ll discuss several aspects of online marketing, including understanding customer expectations, determining the right price for your product, and using online platforms to establish customer trust and loyalty.

1. Setting the Right Prices

The most effective way to gain trust and loyalty from customers is by ensuring that their expectations are met. This cannot happen if the pricing for a product or service is incorrect or ambiguous, which can leave the consumer with a bad taste in their mouth. If you want to set the right prices for your product, it’s critical that you consider the levels of demand and the cost of goods (in particular, the cost of producing and delivering your product to market).

To begin with, you should consider the level of demand for your product or service. This can be determined using a demand curve, which shows the relationship between the price of a product and the quantity of each unit that customers are willing to purchase. You can find this curve by surveying people who are already familiar with your product (e.g., through a customer review or a social media post). Consider the following:

• The demand curve for a product with no marketing investment (e.g., organic clothing products sold on platforms like Etsy and Alibaba) tends to be flat or slightly upward sloping (indicating that customers are more or less equally likely to purchase the product at any price).
• The demand curve for a traditional brick-and-mortar retail product (e.g., Apple’s iPhone, or Nordstrom’s clothing) tends to be steeply upward sloping because customers are more likely to purchase the product at higher prices due to their familiarity with the brand.
• The demand curve for a digital asset (e.g., a game or an app) can be extremely steeply upward sloping due to the high barriers to entry for new customers (i.e., the cost of acquisition) and the product’s/service’s limited supply (i.e., the cost of delivery).

Once you have an idea of the general demand for your product, you can use this information to set the prices for various tiers of the product. For example, if you are selling a game on your website that costs $20 to produce and you want to set a selling price of $25 and $30, you would put the $20 price point on the cheaper tier (e.g., the $25 tier) and leave the $30 tier at the more expensive price point. This process ensures that your prices are consistent across all of your marketing materials (e.g., the website, email sign-up, or social media profile) and helps customers understand the value that they’re getting for their money. To learn more, read our blog post on setting the right prices for your products.

2. Identifying The Ideal Customer

While it’s important to have a general idea of the type of customer that your product/service appeals to, you should also focus on identifying key metrics that will allow you to determine the customer’s level of engagement with your product. When considering these metrics, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my product/service?
• Why does my product/service exist?
• How does my product/service make my customers feel?
• What do I want my customers to say about my product/service?
• What do my customers value most in life?
• How do I want my customers to behave?
• What would my customers like to see more of?
• What is keeping my customers engaged?
• Why are my customers sharing my product/service?
• How can I make my product/service better?
• Why should my customers come back for more?

These questions will help you identify the key metrics that you need to focus on in order to determine the customer’s level of engagement with your product. If you can answer these questions with a clear understanding of what you want your customers to feel, think, and do, you’re on the right track to creating a successful online marketing strategy.

With a little planning and research, you can develop a game plan to determine the ideal customer for your product/service. This way, every time you market your product/service you’ll be able to consider whether or not you’ve reached your target audience.

3. Online Marketing Channels

With the rapid rise of mobile shopping and increased penetration of web browsers on mobile devices, online marketing has rapidly shifted to an online platform. This trend was further accelerated by the rise of e-commerce marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay, which provided consumers with the ability to buy whatever they wanted without having to leave the comfort of their home. These marketplaces provided consumers with a variety of products from which to choose, as well as an opportunity to discover new products that they might like.

As a result of this seismic shift, a traditional media plan (e.g., newspaper ads or television commercials) simply doesn’t work the same way it used to. To succeed in the digital age, marketers need to shift their focus to online marketing channels such as email, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media. Below, we’ll discuss several of these channels.

Email Marketing

The most popular and arguably the most effective form of marketing on the internet is email marketing. This type of marketing is relatively easy to set up and very low cost, which makes it a very attractive proposition for marketers.

To be effective, email marketing campaigns should reflect what the customer wants and needs, and provide them with value in exchange for their email address. When developing an email marketing campaign, it’s important to consider the following points:

• Subject line
• Body copy
• Call to action
• Image optimisation
• List of relevant products/services

The subject line of your email should be concise but informative. The body copy should be engaging and draw the reader into the email’s content.

The call to action (CTA) will be what triggers the customer to take action. Usually this is something as simple as clicking a button or filling out a form. The purpose of the call to action is to ensure that the customer performs the desired action, which in return, will consume the content that you send them (e.g., opens an email, clicks on a link, or submits a form).

The image optimisation module refers to the process of making your images accessible and engaging for online users. Typically, the process of image optimisation includes things like size, colour, and contrast, as well as the addition of a watermark or similar graphic alongside the image. If you’re using an image hosting site such as Pixabay, Google Images, or Getty Images, you don’t need to worry about optimising your images as they are already optimised for SEO.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a form of marketing that enables businesses to improve their online presence by making their web sites more relevant to search engines such as Google.

Because SEO is based on the principle of semantic search, which scans the text of a website for keywords and matches these keywords with relevant content, ensuring your web pages contain the right keywords is an essential part of any SEO strategy.

There are three basic guidelines that you should follow when optimizing your web pages for SEO: