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How to Create an Online Store Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

If you are interested in making money online and want to start your e-commerce project, then marketing an e-store is a fundamental pillar for building your e-commerce project and moving forward in this field, because marketing plays a major role in the success of any project, whatever its type, and the quality of e-store marketing is what distinguishes your store from others. The more creative you are in marketing an e-store and relying on diverse and innovative promotional strategies, the more profits you will get. In today's article, we will share with you practical guidelines stemming from practical experiences on how to market an e-store.


How to Create an Online Store Marketing Plan in 7 Steps

These are the most important points that we will share with you in this article:


Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy is a method or several methods that try to make the audience that follows you loyal customers of the content, product, or even the services that you provide. Therefore, its primary role is to attract the largest number of followers, then convert them into customers and achieve profit from e-commerce by marketing an online store.


What is the role of marketing strategy?

There is no disagreement about the importance of marketing and developing a marketing strategy to make your online store successful. However, before developing an online store marketing strategy, you must determine the desired goals behind it. We will present to you 6 online store marketing goals that must be included in your marketing plan to achieve great profits:


1- A general study of the market you want to enter, then setting goals that are in line with supply and demand in order to market an online store in a realistic manner.


2- The marketing strategy enables you to get closer to the audience you are targeting, study their behaviors, reactions and needs to be able to get a clear idea of ​​what you should focus on in marketing your online store.



3- Identify the social media sites that get the highest level of interaction from the public so that you can rely on them to market your online store.


4- Work on various marketing strategies and allocate a certain amount of money to each strategy separately.


5- Based on the information you will obtain through applying the previous stages, you will be able to make modifications to your online store marketing plan and your products or services as well, according to customer requests.


6- An online store marketing strategy will help you deal well with the developments that your store will witness after promoting it and making modifications.


The importance of developing a solid strategy for marketing an online store is clearly evident, and now we will move to the next stage, which is no less important than the previous one, which is manifested in the method of creating an online marketing strategy.


Steps to develop an online store marketing strategy

Online store marketing

The process of developing an online store marketing strategy is divided into 7 basic stages:


1- Real-time market study

Take a general look at the market and the movement of your competing e-stores, monitor the interactions of sellers and buyers together, then compare what you offer and the behavior of your customers. After that, you will have a good idea about what to add to your store to achieve distinction from the rest of the competitors and work to establish your store’s identity in the minds of the public. You can use a method called SWOT for this, which consists of four main axes, which are:


  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats or challenges

This method, which highlights each of these four elements, is an accurate diagnosis that enables you to develop a successful strategy for marketing your online store, and you will become fully aware of the modifications that you must make in order to compete with other online store owners and stand out from them.


2- Targeting a specific audience

At this stage, you must accurately determine the customers you will target with your store's products according to the field you want to work in. You must study the geographical area, the popular culture in that country, the age group, the products, and the needs of your target audience. You must adopt all of these criteria while marketing an online store.

You must coordinate between your products and the target group with these products. For example, if you own an online store for women's accessories, your audience in this case will be adult women.

After determining the target group of the audience with your products, it will be easier for you to know the social media platforms most used by that group and focus on them primarily to market an online store.



If you want to work more professionally, you can create what is called a Buyer Persona, which means embodying a customer character that is compatible with the type of products or services you offer. This will greatly contribute to marketing your online store.


3- Monitoring competing online stores

There is hardly any e-store marketing strategy in all fields that does not monitor competing e-stores that have entered the field of e-commerce and marketing before you, and you will certainly have accumulated a set of experiences and corrected a set of mistakes. When you want to develop an e-store marketing strategy, you must see what your competitors are doing in terms of the types of products they market, the audiences they target, and the marketing methods they rely on to make a profit from the Internet and the social media platforms they rely on. You must be careful to study all of these data in depth to benefit from them and develop them further in marketing your e-store, because the goal of this process is not to imitate competitors, but to distinguish yourself from them, benefit from their strengths, and work on developing their weaknesses to make money from the Internet.


4- Create a marketing formula

If you want to market an online store in a distinctive way, you must be creative in four elements, which are:


  • Product
  • Price
  • Place
  • Marketing Promotion

When you combine these four elements, we get what is called the Marketing Mix . If you carefully choose the product and display it at a suitable price and in a way that suits your target audience and market it professionally, then you will have created a successful e-store marketing by all standards and will achieve good profits. You can change the data of the marketing mix according to the specifications of the category you are targeting with your product. The main factor in this equation is analyzing the information you have collected through the previous stages, and use it to provide the needs of customers.


5- Social media platforms suitable for your online store

If you are an online store owner, your online store marketing will most likely be limited to well-known social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other modern platforms. You should only determine which of the modern platforms suits you according to the study and analysis you previously conducted about your target audience and other competing online stores.


Now, we will present to you the best methods for marketing an online store at the present time, which the largest online stores rely on:



A- Social media : Marketers all over the world, regardless of the fields they work in, cannot do without social media platforms, because they are considered noisy online communities and through which they can reach the largest number of audiences and interact with them directly and know their needs in order to work on them.


B - Email Marketing : This type of marketing is often used after the initial stage and collecting data from potential customers who have been selected from the general public, and they are informed in a successive and organized manner of all developments in your online store. Previous customers are also targeted by email marketing in an attempt to convince them to buy again. This method of marketing an online store via email

contributes to increasing the number of sales and gaining new customers in your store.


C - Marketing an online store with content : This type of marketing is widely used by global brands and major stores, where they create valuable written content or create videos on various social media.


D - Using SEO to improve search engines: You should not miss the opportunity to have your website or store appear in search engines by relying on keywords that belong to your field and have a lot of search and medium or low competition. This will contribute to your store receiving many visits from targeted customers for free.


6- Managing the marketing budget

You should allocate a specific budget when developing your online store marketing strategy. This budget should be managed rationally and thoughtfully so that you select the necessary platforms and tools to build your store. You should also avoid distributing the budget on all social media platforms at once in order to achieve great results. The exact opposite may happen and you will lose your money if you do not choose the right places to put your budget, especially if it is limited.


7- Set clear goals in parallel with time.

When you implement an e-store marketing strategy, you must set realistic goals in line with the time factor, which will enable you to know the extent of the profitability of your store and the strategy you have adopted. You can also modify the components of the strategy you have implemented according to the developments you will reach to improve the results of e-store marketing in the best possible way.


The stages that we explained in today's post constitute a clear roadmap for anyone who wants to enter the world of making money from the Internet, especially e-commerce. It is certain that following the stages that were explained to market an online store will inevitably lead to making a profit from the Internet and achieving satisfactory profits. We hope that you liked today's article.

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