Consumer Electronics Marketing: Tips for E-commerce Brands

Running a consumer electronics e-commerce store is difficult. Not only do you need to nail down your pricing strategy, but you also need to work out exactly what marketing strategy you’re going to use too to keep up your online sales at a good level.

Your marketing budget isn’t unlimited, and in many cases, you might have to pick between a number of different marketing strategies. However, having a broad understanding of them all will help you narrow down which will best benefit your business. Especially when the entire market is so saturated, you might find it difficult learning to stand out by spreading yourself too thin.

In this blog post, we’re going to look at a range of different marketing tips for the e-commerce consumer electronics industry.

To get a greater understanding of how you can apply these tips to your own electronics e-commerce brand, we’re going to take a deep dive look into success stories from consumer electronics sellers. Let’s go with one of the best practices – Fitbit’s marketing.

Fitbit is a piece of wearable technology that connects to an app on your phone or tablet and measures data such as the number of steps walked, heart rate, quality of sleep, steps climbed, and other personal metrics.

Let’s dive in!

Understand your audience

All things aside, even with the greatest marketing campaign in the world, if you don’t know your audience, it won’t gain traction and you won’t get your ideas in front of the people that truly matter: your audience.

The best way for you to understand your audience is to study them. Where do they hang out? What do they want out of life? More importantly than that, though, you need to understand how using your product will make them feel.

When you have a thorough understanding of this, you’ll be able to tailor your content and make more personalization on various channels (more on that later) to exactly the type of content they’d be interested in.

Fitbit does this very well in a number of ways. First of all, they understand the type of person who purchases a Fitbit.

They in some way or another want to get healthier. They know this because someone who buys a Fitbit is interested in tracking any or many of the metrics offered by the device.

Because of this, Fitbit uses their blog to create content their audience would enjoy. Fitbit doesn’t track how many push-ups a user can do but understands that users who care about getting fit, might want to know the proper techniques.

So even though this type of content isn’t directly encouraging someone to buy a Fitbit, it encourages those who already have one to become advocates for the company. It gives customers a reason to return back to the site and interact with the content long after they’ve made their purchase.

Through the use of video marketing, Fitbit tries to show potential new customers who haven’t yet made the plunge to buying a Fitbit, exactly how they would feel wearing one.

Finally, Fitbit understands that investing in yourself and your wellbeing is a huge investment. Nevermind the cost of actually buying a Fitbit. So cleverly partnering with brands like “Pure Gym” to provide competitions is a sure-fire way to keep their customers interested even after they’ve bought their Fitbit.

Not only does Fitbit understand its customers, they understand that if you want to build a long-lasting brand, but you also cannot create a commodity product and the marketing process cannot stop once someone has hit purchase.

By continually creating engaging content their audience likes, Fitbit manages to stay at the forefront of people’s minds and so when people think “fitness tracker” they also think: Fitbit.

Question: What are you doing to get to know your audience better?

Social media

It should come as no surprise to you that social media is important for any ecommerce store, especially electronics. Your customers want to see you present on as many social channels as you can afford to manage.

Fitbit as a company is a huge company and can afford to be present on a number of social channels, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Each channel has a different use case and in this section, we’re going to break down Fitbit’s social strategy and analyze why they use each channel.

Fitbit’s video marketing strategy

We mentioned earlier that Fitbit has a really strong understanding of its customers, what their customers want to achieve and how their product will make their customers feel.

Their Youtube channel is a great example of this.

They produce a number of different videos all around the theme of “finding your fit”.

Videos range in length from 30 seconds to 3 minutes with each feeling more like a short movie than an advertisement.

What consumers might not realize is Fitbit uses their Youtube channel to sell their product, however, it’s cleverly disguised through storytelling. Each video tells a story of ordinary to phenomenal people using the Fitbit and how it’s changed their lives.

You see people improving their diabetes simply by tracking their fitness stats, you see athletes winning medals by gaining a better understanding of their overall health.

Videos like these answers the question of “why”.

So when it does come to making a purchase, you’re already halfway to being sold. It’s no longer a case of “do I want this product?” but “do I want to feel the way the people in the video felt?”

In most cases, the answer is “yes”.

Social marketing strategy for consumer electricals

Up to 24% of consumers who use social media use it to look up products and channels before they make an electronic purchase. For users who use social media more than 13.5 hours a week, 65% of them check social channels before buying a consumer electrical good.

Consumers look to your social channels to help guide their decision-making process. They look to comments on social posts to help them come close to a decision about whether or not they’re going to buy the item.

So, for consumer electronics companies, participating in social media is paramount.

Social media isn’t all about writing funny posts and coming up with hashtags though. We’ve identified three core approaches to social media you can take for your electronics company:

Listen, teach, engage.

Social media, more than anything is a listening tool. It gives you an insight into your customers, your market, and your competitors. Taking some time to listen to what is being discussed over social media will provide you with ample opportunities to strategically navigate new areas for improvements within your own consumer electrical product.

When you’ve listened to the market, it’s time to start engaging. You should be responding to posts directed at you, and also using Twitter’s search feature to establish posts that aren’t directed at you but could be beneficial for your company to reply to.

A simple search of “fitness tracker recommends” on Twitter gave me this Tweet. You should use similar search terms on Twitter to find potential customers you can reach out to offering value.

But remember, when you do decide to engage, it’s an ongoing process. 84% of social media users using twitter expect a reply on the same day they sent their tweets.

Finally, when you’ve listened and engaged it’s time to educate. This is a chance for you to become an industry leader in the consumer electronics world. It’s a chance for you to educate your audience by producing and distributing top quality content across your social channels. For example.

Fitbit is a great example of a consumer electronics company using social media to widen their reach, improve their brand and sell more products. However, if you’re a smaller company, bootstrapped perhaps. Don’t try to be everywhere at once. Focus, first on nailing one social channel before you move onto the next. Trust us, your customers will thank you for it.

Customer-created content

They often say the best marketers of your product are your customers and this is true in the consumer electronics industry too where companies can make benefits from using their customers content to further explain why it’s a good idea to buy it.

Fitbit does this well.

In fact, a majority of their Instagram posts feature images of their actual customers using their products. When it comes to the electronics industry, your customers often want to know what they will feel like when they buy your product.

This works so well because it feels authentic. In the image above, you can see that Sarah is using Fitbit, she has a dog and together they run.

It’s something people can get on board with because it doesn’t feel contrived or fake. It’s real people using the products and remember:

People don’t buy from companies, they buy from people.

For this reason, using user-generated content (UGC) is a great way to showcase exactly that. So if your brand allows for user-generated content then it’s an approach you should take. Not only that but tagging your content with their social handles is a way to give back to the people who take the time to wax lyrical about your product. Customer service is marketing

You might not think it, but customer service falls into the same category as marketing.

In so far as that bad customer service creates a negative opinion about your brand and good customer service encourages others to scream and shout about your brand or product.

Fitbit uses their social channels as part of their customer service to continually wow their customers.

In the example below, a customer was struggling to pick between two different Fitbits. Fitbit was quick to respond to them, providing them with a link to further their research.

Staying on top of your customers in such a way is a sure-fire way of generating long-lasting fan-adoring customers.

But not all your feedback and customer service will be good.

In the above example, a customer was having issues with their Fitbit. Not something the company wants, I’m sure. But these things do happen. In these situations, it’s all about how you handle the issue. Most customers won’t mind if things stop working, or stop working as they should do, as long as the company is quick and proactive to get the issue sorted.

Electronic pricing strategy

We mentioned at the beginning of this post when it comes to selling electronic goods, you need to nail both your pricing and marketing strategy.

There is a wide range of pricing strategies you should know about but when it comes to consumer electronic goods, the best pricing approach you should consider is differing yourself from the market. When your brand becomes a brand and less of “a product” you are able to charge more.

Still unsure? Let’s look at an example.

This Fitbit is $298.95. For some, that would be far too expensive. But not for the 2,983 people who bought this item from Amazon and left a review.

Now compare that to this product:

Aesthetically it’s not all that different from the Fitbit and in terms of what features it includes, again not all that different. But there is a reason why Fitbit can charge $298.85 and still make sales despite this other company charging $10.99 for their fitness tracker.

In the consumer electronics world, your pricing matches your branding. It’s why companies like Apple can charge almost $1000 for a phone.

When your brand is solid, your prices will increase.

Consumer electronics industry marketing tips

Marketing in the consumer electronics industry is difficult. Especially with how saturated the market is and how many competitors are also vying for your audience’s attention.

If you want to stand out in this niche, you need to share your customer’s accomplishments and tailor the content to each platform to match the audience viewing it and the use-case. Very briefly, you need to modernize your marketing strategy.

What methods have you used to market your consumer electronics product? Or have you seen any? Leave a comment below.