Do you have all the right products on offer but not enough people to sell to? Welcome to marketing 101. You can make all the right products with high-quality ingredients and delicious flavors, but without people visiting your store and making purchases, you will never have a successful food and beverage eCommerce store.
In order to get traffic to your food and beverage eCommerce website, you need to implement marketing tactics that work coherently with your particular niche. It’s important that your marketing strategy is planned out beforehand to ensure all the pieces of the puzzle fit together seamlessly. Here’s how you can attract more customers to your eCommerce website for food and beverage.
Have A Killer Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing offers you a way to provide customers with valuable information that is niche relevant but doesn’t necessarily push the customer to make a sale. Why would you do this? One of the biggest advantages of content marketing is building trust with the customer and ensuring you appear as an authority in the food and beverage niche.
What would this look like for an eCommerce store in the food and beverage industry? Your content marketing strategy should stretch across multiple platforms, ones that are hyper-suited to the food and beverage industry. These are some of the platforms you should consider using:
- Blog – Using a blog on your own eCommerce store drives visitors to your very own site, which could convert into a sale. It’s important to keep your website content up-to-date, so releasing at least 2 – 4 high-quality blog posts a month is advised.
- Instagram – This is a highly visual platform but it integrates nicely with eCommerce and even has its own eCommerce integration that allows you to sell products directly from the Instagram app. If you are able to create recipes or other food-related content on a regular basis, then Instagram is a great platform for content marketing.
- Pinterest – This is another highly-visual platform, so if you can create mouth wateringly delicious eats that keep visitors coming back, then this can be a powerful tool to drive traffic to your website.
- Facebook – This tool is widely underestimated and can be a great social media platform for content marketing and even advertising (with the use of the Facebook Pixel). But you can also get creative with your content marketing, creating Facebook groups for people with similar interests to share their knowledge. Having your own Facebook group also sets you up to be an authority in your niche.
What Kind Of Content Should You Be Creating?
The kind of content you should be creating will be highly specific to the kinds of food and beverage you are selling. Most food and beverage eCommerce stores get away with posting things like recipes and food challenges in order to get the attention of an audience that would actually be interested in their particular product.
SEO Optimize Your Website
If you didn’t build your website with SEO in mind, then it might be time to get a professional in to take a look. While blog content helps to boost SEO rankings, if there is something technically wrong with your website that is preventing your website from being crawled, then no amount of content marketing will make a difference. Have a professional SEO audit your website to find out if your site is in great SEO health.
A large part of SEO is wanting to rank for the right keywords, so ensure that your homepage and product pages are all optimized for the keywords that people would search for when looking for your product.
It’s also important to note that you should aim to rank both locally, regionally, and internationally (if your food and beverage eCommerce store ships internationally). If you only ship locally, then focus all your attention on local keywords specific to your area so that you attract the right audience.
Set up Google My Business in the specific area where you would like to rank so that you can start appearing in searches that end in “near me” for those that are located close by. This can be a huge win and drive large amounts of targeted traffic to your website.
If you have yet to set up your food and beverage eCommerce store, then ensure you get off on the right foot, by choosing the right integrated eCommerce platform.
Have An Online Presence
Much the same way that content marketing increases trust with your potential customers, having an online presence does the same thing. If someone wants to find out whether or not an eCommerce store is reputable, they look at reviews, but they also look at how often a website is posting online.
If you have a presence on multiple platforms and are posting on a regular basis, your business looks more professional than it would if you simply posted every so often. It’s important to note that you may need a marketing team to handle all of this, but if you’re starting out small, there’s still a way for you to do it.
You’ll just need to start out small by having a strong presence on just a few social platforms, once your business has started to grow, you can consider expanding to other platforms.
Invest In Multichannel Marketing
Investing in multichannel marketing means reaching your customers through more than just your website. When you engage in any kind of social media marketing, this is considered multichannel marketing, but that’s not where the opportunities stop.
Multichannel marketing includes reaching your customers on different devices (so ensuring that your eCommerce store is mobile-friendly), as well as having different marketing tactics such as SMS, email, and other direct messaging services.
It’s this kind of multichannel marketing that creates many different touch points with your customer and builds an increase in trust. It also gives customers more ways to connect with your brand, and the more they connect, the closer they get to edging their way down the sales funnel to making a purchase.
Create An Exceptional Client Experience
If clients have a great experience on your website, they are likely to spend a good deal of time browsing through your products because it’s an enjoyable and seamless experience. The longer they spend on your website, the better it is for your SEO, and the higher your pages will start to rank in Google.
If buyers are enjoying their customer experience, and you provide them with great customer service and high-quality products, then you could have a customer for life. If people have a great online experience with your food and beverage eCommerce store and your prices are competitive, they’re unlikely to go anywhere else for the products that you offer.
Creating a great customer experience should always be top of mind when running a food and beverage eCommerce store (or any eCommerce store for that matter of fact).
How To Ensure You Are Creating A Great Customer Experience
To make sure you are providing an effortless experience for your customers, you should go through your website and place an order as any other customer would. Look at any problem areas along the way, if there is a step in the process that takes a long time, or isn’t functioning correctly, it’s likely a place where you will lose a lot of customers in the sales process.
Here are a couple of questions you should be asking yourself while auditing your own eCommerce store:
- Are there any buttons that are hard to find along the way?
- Is it clear what steps need to be taken in order to finalize the sale?
- Is the eCommerce store making personalized suggestions based on a customer’s previous searches and orders?
- Is the login process easy?
- Are customers required to login in order to make a purchase? – note that not all customers will want to go through this hassle and it could be where you are losing customers during the sales process.
- Have you offered multiple payment options?
- Have you offered the customer various delivery options at different price points?
- Are you offering the use of an eCommerce-integrated customer portal for after-sale satisfaction?
Make Use Of Customer Trends
Staying on top of customer trends in the world of eCommerce is a big deal. While these are continually changing, and it’s important to stay up-to-date, here are a couple of trends you should already be utilizing in your food and beverage eCommerce store.
- Provide a frictionless customer experience
- Offer immediate fulfillment of orders
- Enable omnichannel integration
- Automate B2B eCommerce transactions
- Accept diverse payment methods
- Deliver an “always-available” order status
- Create digital selling rooms
- Build and launch mobile commerce
- Avoid supply chain interruptions by planning ahead
- Enable first-party tracking
If you are making use of the latest food and beverage eCommerce trends then you’re well on your way to having a successful store. Be sure to keep up-to-date with the latest in eCommerce trends so that you are delivering only the best to your customers.
How Commercebuild Can Help You
We have helped countless clients gain market share with food and beverage eCommerce stores that convert. We help by providing simplified, out-of-the-box eCommerce solutions tailored to fit the rapidly evolving food and beverage industry.
We can help you with the following:
- Reduce Order Errors and Food Waste – Our food and beverage eCommerce solution integrates directly with your ERP software, helping to eliminate siloed data and ensure real-time inventory accuracy.
- Simplify Complex Logistics Processes – With all of the functionality you need out-of-the-box, commercebuild is designed to streamline the process of moving your food business online.
- Attract and Convert More Customers – Give your customers the frictionless, convenient buying experience they crave, without the complexity and costs.
If your business is not yet online, then we can help you from start to finish. Take advantage of online sales with an eCommerce system that connects with your backend software. This will allow you to easily update pricing and inventory data, expand your product offering, and make changes to regulations directly from your ERP system to your webstore.
With less admin time and always accurate data at your fingertips, you can be up and running quickly and start seeing improvements in process efficiency and sales, immediately. Due to the unique storage requirements and shelf life of food and beverage products, eCommerce is still new territory for most businesses.
To simplify the supply chain and order fulfillment process, Commercebuild provides an easy-to-use, centralized eCommerce platform that leverages the business logic you’ve already built into your ERP. That means that you can show real-time inventory levels and pricing in your webstore at all times.
With Commercebuild, you don’t just get a webstore – you get a revenue-producing shopping experience that makes buying easier for your customers and maintenance easier for your staff.
Built in the cloud, our SaaS eCommerce solution for the food and beverage industry is quick to implement, simple to learn, and drives exponential revenue growth in less than 60 days. Keen to give it a try? Give your customers the speed, convenience, and ease that keep them coming back for more of your products with Commercebuild. We can help you build a seamless customer experience that drives revenue growth and customer satisfaction.
Book a demo to see exactly how we can help your food and beverage website excel.
Get Traffic To Your Food & Beverage eCommerce Store
Getting traffic to your food and beverage eCommerce store is all about marketing and customer experience. You want to drive traffic to your eCommerce store, and get people to stay by providing the most seamless experience possible.
With Commercebuild, all of that becomes not only possible but easy with a built-for-you out-of-the-box solution to all your eCommerce business needs. Get in touch to find out more about our eCommerce solutions.
About commercebuild
commercebuild is the missing piece in transforming your ERP data into a truly personalized eCommerce experience. Flexible and frictionless, our turnkey eCommerce solution delivers 24/7 revenue opportunities to you and your customers. Quick to deploy and easy-to-use, we eliminate the need for middleware between the storefront and ERP data to enable seamless online buying and selling.
Our solutions can be live in 30-days and offer complete eCommerce capabilities at a price B2B and B2C businesses can afford.
Drive revenue growth for you, and your customers, while enjoying rapid ROI for both. Go head-to-head with the online retail giants of the world, and win. Experience a solution that integrates with your ERP data and provides automagical cross-sell and upsell opportunities to every customer on your site.
At the height of ecommerce growth, commercebuild offers scalable, reliable, and robust eCommerce solutions for everyone.
If your business is using Sage 300, Sage X3 or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERPs, commercebuild can build a ERP-driven B2B and B2C eCommerce webstore or Customer Portal.