10 eCommerce Marketing Myths You Can’t Afford To Believe [+Infographic]

What not to do if you want to excel in eCommerce marketing.

Perfection in marketing is improbable, but it's essential to strive for it. The smartest marketer can also make terrible decisions sometimes if that decision is based on rumors & misinformation.

People often don’t want to hear the truth because we live in a world that requires instant gratification. And there's no shortage of such misconceptions in the field of eCommerce marketing.

These myths arise because marketers might have had one bad experience or they heard something and ended up shaping their entire perspective around it. But, you cannot generalize everything based on one bad thing that you saw or heard.

The thing about these myths is that even though people know they are non-reliable, they still stick with it, eventually causing a massive loss to your business. Some of these myths were once true but now need to be revisited; while some were never true.

eCommerce marketing requires an appropriate strategy to be packed and formulated. Savvy eCommerce marketers will base their strategies on data and experience.

When you hear something for a long time, you start believing it even if it's not true. Maintaining these myths in your mind will be dangerous to your eCommerce marketing efforts and might hurt your brand in the long run. It's essential to discover the reality behind these myths before you start to believe them. So let's debunk them today!

• Target A Lot Of Customers Who Are Not Niche-Specific
• eCommerce Marketing And Advertising Are Identical
• Social Media Marketing Is Futile For An Older Target Audience
• eCommerce Marketing Brings Instantaneous Results
• eCommerce SEO Is A One Time Play
• You Only Require An eCommerce Website To Jump Start
• Marketing Has A Lot To Do With Money Spent On Ad Campaign
• Customer Privacy Is Not Essential
• The Only Way To Sell More Is By Lowering The Price Of The Product
• It's Too Late To Start
• How Are These Myths Interconnected?
• Get Easier With Your eCommerce Marketing Efforts With Statusbrew.

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Click here to download detailed infographic on 10 eCommerce marketing myths you can't afford to believe.

1. Target A Lot Of Customers Who Are Not Niche-Specific

Everyone cannot be your customer and should not even be.

eCommerce brands believe that the smaller the audience, the smaller is the conversion rate. But the inverse is true.

The more specific you become toward selling to a niche, the fewer direct competitors you will have to compete for your audiences’ attention. This will help you to find the most significant and most relevant pain points in your industry. You need to provide a service or product that precisely addresses the pain point to increase the value of your product.

When you target a niche, you need not lower the price of your product or provide discounts. Once you find out your correct target audience and address them how your product solves their pain points, they won't mind paying higher for products that they cannot find somewhere else and the one that makes life easier for them.

Find your target audience and direct your attention towards them completely.

The goal of a solid eCommerce marketing strategy remains to connect supply with demand. Targeting a specific audience group helps you focus on niche-specific keywords for eCommerce SEO to attract a relevant audience base.

So instead of spending loads of money in targeting a wider group of people that results in lower conversion, reach a small niche-specific group of potential customers with a smaller budget who understand the actual value of your product.

The deeper you understand your niche audience, the bigger payoffs you can get.

For example, Bonobos starts a conversation with their niche-specific audience on their social media by engaging with them in the comment section.

2. eCommerce Marketing And Advertising Are Identical

The two words are often misunderstood.

eCommerce marketing brings out a product in the market. eCommerce marketing is about educating your target audience about what you offer and why they should buy from you. The definition of eCommerce marketing remains incomplete without identifying your target audience.

Marketing creates business visibility. The more you invest in marketing, the greater visibility you gain. It does not just require time but also energy, creativity, and resources.

Your eCommerce marketing efforts will go in vain without knowing to whom you are promoting your products. If your eCommerce marketing efforts are not targeted towards niche, it won't persuade your audience to become your customers on one fine day.

Advertising communicates the messages about your products. One of the ways to market your product is through advertising. Advertising is often the most expensive and yet less effective form of marketing. Advertising can be used in eCommerce marketing strategy to reach your ideal customers.

40% of sales leads are generated through several marketing campaigns.

Usually, small eCommerce brands view the cost of advertising as a considerable investment. Hence it is essential to market before you start advertising.

But marketing goes beyond dealing with customer perception about your product. Marketing prepares your brand’s clear goal that helps you align your efforts in the correct direction. It creates clarity about the purpose of your company.

For example - The cosmetic brand Frank Body found a perfect balance between marketing and advertising to make $20 Million in sales.

3. Social Media Marketing Is Futile For An Older Target Audience

Ever since ages, marketers have been taught to target people by age. Ecommerce marketers envision younger audiences as social media enthusiasts. With the internet-breaking down the barriers of distance and time, does targeting an audience by age make any sense?

It's time to change the age game.

It's tempting to think that brands should focus on social media to communicate with young people. But this is a half-truth. The older generation might take longer to adapt to technologies like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. But they love to use new devices just as much as millennials. The difference lies in the way they use social media.

Older generations don’t use social media just as a medium of engagement; they instead use it to extract useful information. Hence, they will be the consumers of your in-depth content and blogs. This will help you to become a Thought Leader in your niche. Whereas the younger generation finds it convenient to consume snackable short-form content.

The younger audience finds it easy to switch from one platform to another. In contrast, older people stick to a platform for a long time allowing you to connect and engage with them, eventually forming a long-term relationship.

For a relatively successful eCommerce marketing strategy, focus on creating content that pulls out interest in audiences of all ages, irrespective of their age.

Get into the minds of your audience for creating content. Go beyond the age to create content that connects with their audience and is consumable for people of all age groups. The age might not help you communicate to your audience, but the tone and style of your content will.

4. eCommerce Marketing Brings Instantaneous Results

You don't want to make an instantaneous relationship with your audience. You surely don’t want your customers to be of a one-time-purchase type. Hence, your eCommerce marketing strategy will be requiring some time, energy, and effort to build a connection with your audience.

It takes time to create a high-quality eCommerce marketing strategy that can produce effective results in the long run. Ecommerce marketing is an investment that takes time to see great results.

Some of your marketing tactics might bring in instantaneous results. But you need to carry out marketing efforts consistently to create long-term impressions in your customer’s mind.

Marketing works when you have sustained contact with your customers. They might not need your products now, but your eCommerce brand should first click in their minds when they need them. Although eCommerce marketing is time-consuming, it is worth every second you spend on it.

The results of marketing are very subjective to the strategies. Before your audience becomes customers, they are your prospects.

In the early stages of marketing, your efforts should build an audience base and make them aware rather than directly selling. They are entirely unaware of what’s even happening in the market. They need to first go through Awareness Stage to understand the problem, its solution, and the solutions available in the market at present.

Only if your audience understands these aspects in the awareness stage will they be willing to spend money on the solutions. This leads to creating a marketing funnel that depicts the path your audience takes to convert into customers. Awareness forms the first stage of a marketing funnel, followed by Consideration (informing about your products) and Convincing (convince them that you are the best option). And all of these stages will take time to show long-term results.

The baby care brand Bazzle Baby harness the power of social media by regularly putting up post to educate parents about baby care.

Learn How To Build Your Marketing Funnel For Sales-Ready Leads

5. eCommerce SEO Is A One Time Play

eCommerce SEO makes your online store more visible in the search engine results pages (SERPs). So when people search for products that you sell, you want your product page to rank as highly as possible (possibly in the first few pages) to get more traffic. But you probably wish to rank consistently, and hence you need to keep up with the changes in the SEO strategy to stay on top.

Search engines change their algorithms day by day because of competitiveness. If you want your business to last long, see eCommerce SEO as a long-term continuous process.

Since your competitors will also be coming up with strategies day after day, you need to keep creating quality rich content so that your competitors don’t surpass you. SEO is about testing and strategizing to come up with reasons to increase traffic.

Tons of black hat and grey hat SEO techniques used in the 2000s have become ineffective today. The field of SEO has grown a lot today since then. eCommerce SEO is not just limited to keyword optimization today. It now consists of technical SEO, Social Signals, optimizing navigation, integrating responsive design, optimizing for load speed, mobile, switching to SSL, and there are always new additions coming to this list.

The best SEO strategies are the ones that take time to show results. The better the content you put on your website from the start, the better results your SEO will show in the long run. Hence, the earlier you start producing quality content, the faster you see results.

Remember the golden rule of SEO: A good SEO campaign will always rely on quality content. So never stop producing high-quality content for your website.

For example - The health supplement brand Lupus Health Shop has optimized their product page by writing product descriptions that address specific customers with their specific pain points and by targeting relevent keywords.

Image Source: Lupus Health Shop

6. You Only Require An eCommerce Website To Jump Start

Building an eCommerce website can be a Stepping Stone for your business, but that's not all. When you create a website and share it with your friends, they will probably visit your website (some might not). But they won't purchase anything. The simple reason is that they are your friends and not your target audience.

That's where you require a well-crafted eCommerce marketing strategy to connect with your target audience and gradually build up sales with time. You cannot just build a website and leave your customers to 'find you.’

Your best customer is a stranger whom you have never met.

Image Source: Twine & Twig Style

You need to create a buzz on the internet. You will have to think wisely about whom you need to reach out to as your potential customers for the future and start by engaging with them. In fact, your eCommerce website is not the only medium that you require to sell your product. You can also sell on Facebook and Instagram. But what you do need to start selling is a basket of loyal and trustworthy audience base who have a problem that you can solve.

Learn How To Set Up A Facebook Shop And Instagram Shop

The Jewellery Brand Twine & Twig Style daily puts up styling videos and fashion content on their social handles tto stay connected with their audience.

Image Source: Twine & Twig Style Facebook

Image Source: Twine & Twig Style Instagram

7. Marketing Has A Lot To Do With Money Spent On Ad Campaign

Effective eCommerce marketing strategy involves producing quality content that helps you deliver the correct message to the right set of people. Effective eCommerce marketing never has to be an expensive one. Instead, it should be done correctly.

Spending more on advertising isn't all that is required. You also need to know if you are using the right advertising platform whose audience base matches with your target market, how effective are your PPC ads, who is seeing your ads, are they the correct customers to pitch your product?

You can implement an advertising strategy to get started, but you will still require to create an online presence; otherwise, the advertising platform will charge you more money pay per click than others who already have an online presence.

This happens because your competitors decide how much you will pay. When customers search for products using keywords, the website that ranks more for that keyword will appear first, followed by fewer ranking websites. That’s why you need to pay attention to eCommerce SEO as well, even if you are advertising.

So even if you want your advertising efforts to work, you will have to work on your brand’s awareness. For that you need marketing.

Hence, the two words "Marketing" and "Advertising" complement each other but don't have the same meaning; neither they are synonyms.

8. Customer Privacy Is Not Essential

An eCommerce transaction cannot be completed without entering payment details. But that's not the only requirement. To place an order on your eCommerce website, your customers have to enter several information such as their name, shipping address, phone number, billing information. This introduces a complex data privacy issue. Your savvy customers have all the right to think about how you would be using this data and if you will safeguard it.

Even though you have put up a privacy policy on your eCommerce website, it doesn't mean that your business can compromise on data security to cut costs. Suppose your customers have the slightest feeling that their privacy is being invaded. In that case, they won't hesitate to purchase from another eCommerce website, thus leading to a loss of revenue and your customer's trust.

Take steps today to protect and secure your customer’s data today so that you don't have to pay a price tomorrow.

See this to gain the upper hand in your competitive circle. When you implement better security for your eCommerce website, you earn your customers' trust. Hence they feel safe in buying from your eCommerce website without having to worry about their data privacy. Remember, the more burden you take off your customer’s shoulder, the more they become likely to purchase from your website (this can work for any aspect).

One in five small businesses fall victim to a cyberattack and out of those, 60% go out of business in six months.

Once your website falls prey to a cyberattack, it also damages the online reputation of your business. You might have taken every single best eCommerce marketing practice into account to fulfill your customer’s needs, but if their data privacy is at risk, neither will they purchase from your eCommerce website nor recommend it to anyone.

Image Source: The Sill

9. The Only Way To Sell More Is By Lowering The Price Of The Product

If that were always true, no one would ever buy a BMW. Your customers have their own idea of what is valuable to them and where they should invest.

That is why it is so important to market your product to the correct target audience. This allows you to provide the maximum value at the right price.

10.92 million customers agree that a branded product that provides high quality has to be expensive.

High-end customers often perceive low-cost products to be of inferior quality. Such customers have the thought process that if you are charging high, you offer an exclusive solution that no one else in the market provides. If you are lowering prices to increase sales, you are also reducing the profit margin.

Image Source: EddieBauer

Your product pricing doesn't just charge your customers for the features it provides; it also includes the price of good customer service that you offer. Hence, customers believe that if you are charging high, it's also because you have exceptional customer service to provide them with.

Learn How To Provide Great eCommerce Customer Service

10. It's Too Late To Start

Chunk off these things from your mind right now. You are absolutely in your best shape whenever you are ready to start. Throw away your worries and move forward.

eCommerce marketing is a never-ending process.

Because in this field, the correct eCommerce marketing strategy works. And your eCommerce marketing strategy is bound to change with the altering trends in the market.

However, don't jump into eCommerce marketing without any appropriate strategy. Analyze your target audience, identify their expectations, and frame a marketing strategy around it before you start implementing it.

Apart from strategy, what you do require to kick off with eCommerce marketing is

1. Eagerness to learn about the audience and align their needs with the latest marketing trend.
2. Identifying your brand's unique angle and culture and highlightning these into your marketing effort.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes in your marketing effort.

All big brands have made marketing mistakes, but if they have built a successful brand today, it is because they afford to fail at the start. eCommerce marketing does require preparing a perfect strategy from the beginning itself. A well-planned marketing strategy will reduce the chances of failure, but it won't eliminate failure.

So embrace your failures today to succeed tomorrow.

How Are These Myths Interconnected?

Did you ever feel that some of these myths are dependent on one another while reading? We could bring out four such interdependencies that strengthen our beliefs that these are just myths that are detrimental to the growth of your eCommerce brand.

1. When you target a niche-specific audience, you don't need to lower the price of our product, and you can rank higher for your niche-specific keywords.

2. An essential aspect of marketing remains to educate your target audience, without which your marketing efforts hardly draw any result.

3. Since marketing is a continuous process, SEO also requires constant inputs. Due to the highly competitive nature of the eCommerce industry, the trends in eCommerce marketing and SEO keep changing, which needs to be looked after regularly.

4. It's never too late to start with eCommerce marketing since marketing is a continuous process that keeps getting revised with time.

If you were able to figure out more interconnection between several myths, let us know in the comment section below.

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