When you’re in the world of e-commerce, marketing is important. Across all niches, competition is high, so you want to make sure you’re doing things that will bring customers to your site. Unfortunately, there are as many ways to market an online business as there are online businesses, so it can be hard to figure out which methods of marketing to use.
Based on my experiences, spotlight marketing has to be one of the most if not the most effective ways to market an e-commerce store. Spotlight marketing has proven to bring in customers from other websites and to make people eager to tell their friends and family members about my online store. Best of all, most online stores aren’t using spotlight marketing, so you’ll get a competitive advantage if you do.
The Power of Spotlight Marketing
Spotlight marketing is the only form of marketing that I use to get traffic to my blog. How well is it working? Well, I get roughly 10,000 to 35,000 unique visitors to my site every month.
Basically, spotlight marketing involves interviewing customers and industry influencers. Interviewing encourages sharing and also allows you to network. By giving shoppers and important people in your industry attention, you can build relationships that can be beneficial to you in the future.
Benefits of Spotlight Marketing
Spotlight marketing has a number of benefits, including:
- Easy content creation for your site. Interviews are an easy way to get unique content for your sight.
- Guaranteed sharing. Interviewees will go out and share the interview in order to promote themselves, driving traffic to your site.
- Backlinks. Backlinks can help to improve your standing with the search engines if they’re of good quality. There is a good chance that your interviewees will include links to your interview on their blogs or websites, giving you good quality backlinks.
- Building relationships. When you do a good interview, you’ll foster a relationship with the person. That person will become more likely to buy from you in the future or to recommend you to people that they know.
How to Choose Interviewees for Spotlight Marketing
To begin spotlight marketing, do the following:
- Ask yourself “If I could only have 1 customer who would I want that person to be?”
- Ask yourself “If I could only have 1000 customers who would I want them to be?”
The answers to these questions will help you begin to think about the kinds of people that you should approach and ask for interviews.
How to Interview
- Make a list of people to interview either on your own or with the help of a virtual assistant. Include email addresses on the list.
- Use Mail Merge or another mass email program to send a letter, introducing yourself and asking for an interview.
- Prepare a list of questions to send to people who accept your invitation to be interviewed. Make sure to keep your questions open ended to encourage conversation and avoid having to follow up for additional information. Email them to the interviewees and ask for pictures to be included.
- Either post the response verbatim or have a writer to turn the questions and answers into articles.
- Once the article is up, email the person and tell them. Then, ask them to share it with their network.
- Promote the content yourself on social media. Tag or link the person, so they can share it, too.
So there you have it–a quick introduction to spotlight marketing, a simple, yet powerful way to drive content to your blog and to make content marketing more profitable for you. If you want to learn more about spotlight marketing and get more detailed advice on how to complete each step I described, you can check out my complete course. The course even includes templates that you can use to make everything simple and professional. Here’s the link to check it out.