It doesn’t matter if your company is just starting up or has a strong customer base already. Current marketing trends are critical to continued success for any eCommerce site. Because launching and running an eCommerce site is such a significant achievement for your brand, it’s important you invest in effective marketing.

Here are just a few of the best methods of marketing for any eCommerce business.

1. Search Engine Optimization

Pros: One of the most critical ways of optimizing your eCommerce website for success is by making sure it’s optimized for search engines. This makes it easier for people to find your products or services just by using search engines, and if it’s done well, it can generate a lot of traffic.

Cons: Standards for SEO are always changing, and it can be overwhelming to try and keep up. SEO also cannot stand on its own. While great keywords can bring in traffic, you need to utilize more than one marketing strategy to make it most efficient.

To get the most out of your SEO, you should consider hiring expert SEO services that understand the changes and how to get the most out of your SEO.

2. Pay-Per-Click Marketing

Pros: Pay-per-click marketing is highly effective at targeting the right market when it’s done right. You can customize multiple ads for different products based on the right keywords to capture the customers you are looking for, and doing this right will rank you high in the search results.

Cons: If you don’t have harmony between the ad, the offer, and the landing page, your campaign is destined to fail. Younger audiences are less likely to click on ads than they are organic search results, so you can’t depend on PPC marketing alone.

3. Content Marketing

Pros: Good content written with SEO in mind will produce more organic search results than any other method of marketing. People want to trust brands before investing their time or money into them. Content marketing is the best way to develop that trust.

Cons: If you don’t write compelling, informative, original content with SEO in mind, customers will not only not read your content, but they won’t trust your brand. Over-marketed content turns people away. Content marketing can also be more time consuming because it requires regular posting.

A content strategy calls for the  80/20 rule: 80% informative content and 20% promotional content blended.

4. Email Marketing

Pros: Email has proven to be the most consistent and effective way to reach out to customers through personalized emails. You can send valuable promotions, blog updates, and so much more to keep subscribers engaged.

Cons: Email can’t work on its own. You need to target PPC or social media campaigns to capture addresses. You alternatively need to have an opt-in form on your eCommerce site.

The important thing is that customers have the choice to sign up.

5. Retargeting

Pros: This method of eCommerce marketing can bring previous visitors back to the site, making them more likely to make a purchase. Retargeting increases sales.

Cons: If you don’t retarget to what they were considering before (for example a pair of shoes), they aren’t likely to make a purchase. The idea is to get them to that same page again or add it to the cart when they click the add. Without this, retargeting doesn’t work.

Remember that this marketing method cannot operate alone. It needs SEO and PPC to succeed. You can also do this with your content marketing.

Experimentation is important in marketing to find the right fit. An effective eCommerce campaign will use SEO on product pages and in content marketing for organic search results, PPC ads for targeting specific sales and capturing leads, email marketing to build trust in the brand, and retargeting to catch the visitors that got away.