Do you guys are established businessmen who are just starting an eShop ? What if you are fresh (of course know the tricks) and start an eShop ? How will you advertise your new eShop ? What are the best ways of promotion ?
Hi Meetdilip, A basic starter advice is to head to forums in respective niches and offer your service. Do not put in sharply as you may get flagged as spam like Xrummers etc. Good Day, Commoner
What products do you offer on your website. If you advertise banners OR ads relevant to your products, it will come handy.
Think of who your perfect customer is. Who needs what you have to offer. Then, advertise where these customers would be located, or get some posts up on forums where they might be located. Google Adwords and Facebook Ads can help, but only if you know where your customers are at and what they are looking for. Then you can target the ads to them. Track everything you try and see what works. If something is not working, then change the strategy. Also, look at similar sites and see if you can figure out how they are getting customers. Lynn
Nice strategy @Lynn C . It was a general question. Someone I know is planning to start an eShop. He is yet to decide what all products to be included. Thanks others as well. Let us have more ideas so that starters can find this thread and get more help.
Its all about the planning. As a bright mind once said - failing to plan is planning to fail! Having a well-structured business plan will severely help to focus the marketing effort for any business, not just eShops. And as @Lynn C mentioned knowing your target audience is pivotal, because going with all guns-out on all fields just won't do it. Age, gender, geolocation, they can all influence success - Twitter is great for US audience, G+ is useful for business contacts, Pinterest helps with visual brands and encompasses a large women/mother auditorium etc. Researching your competition also does a great deal - you see their weak points, you get a better idea of how the market is shared and where you can find your place... truth be told this is quite a vast question to be answered with just a few lines
It depends upon your products and area or location you are targeting. Beside, some marketing strategies need to be followed in order to promote your products. Social media has been much successful to advertise products.
I think there are several things to consider, but the primary one is don't assume that just because you have the audience you can successfully sell to them. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink - especially if the water is polluted. Design and presentation of products is absolutely key. It doesn't matter if you can advertise to get a thousand people a day if you're not selling enough to them to cover your costs. Once you have the presentation down (something you'll always need to monitor and improve upon too, by the way), then you can perhaps look for locations where your target demographic meets. I would offer a word of caution here though, just because a forum is packed with people you believe would be interested in your products, doesn't mean that a paid ad there will guarantee you sales. If you find the perfect forum to advertise through, look at the geography of the members, and then consider your delivery. I have seen this with clients before. They buy a great ad on a forum because there's thousands of potential buyers there, but they didn't consider that 90% of them are in the US, when their site is based in the UK. The postage costs makes cart abandonment skyrocket and suddenly your £100 PM ad on the forum is only getting you £50 profit. You really need to drill down to find your "perfect buyer", create an image of who they are, what they do for a living, what hobbies they have, what gender they might be... then find out where they are, and target your advertising to them specifically in every way possible. (Edited to add) Also, really focus on your competition and see what you can do differently to out-rank them. Do they add 100 word product descriptions? Then you write 200 words. Do they add product reviews for every third item of stock? Then you add one for every item. Do they offer discount codes for newsletter subscribers? Then you add discount codes and a free low-cost product. One of the best ways we help our clients to beat the competition is by adding personality and humor to the content we create. This not only increases the engagement with your audience (while your competitors are just adding boring, droning descriptions) it also increases the chances that someone will want to share it with their friends to make them smile.
I agree that this is a big question. If you can keep asking the questions: Who am I selling to? How do I reach them? What do they really need? And you can then start to figure out the answers about platforms and marketing. One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of IM and eCommerce people make, is to jump into a niche without having thought through who really needs something, and, how they will be reached, and how they will actually buy what you have to sell. Again, research and thought can solve a lot of problems up front. ~Lynn
Here's a list of things you can do to start marketing your e-commerce store online. Advertising is a short-term solution but a great way to get some quick traffic at first. After that you get to the long term stuff - social media, content and so on. This takes time but gets you free traffic. Advertising Google Ads - Here's a quick start guide to setting up Google AdWords. It will get you some quick sales if you do it right. Facebook Ads - Great for building up a Facebook following. I'll be writing a quick start guide for this soon. Promoted Tweets - Paid tweets on Twitter Banners - Search for popular sites and blogs related to your niche and advertise on their banners. Social Media Facebook Page - Facebook is the best social network for engagement IMO. Your posts are more likely to be seen. Twitter - Twitter works if you have a lot of followers so you need to build up a following. Or you can partner with influencers and run giveaways and contests. Youtube - Video marketing is HUGE. LinkedIn - Great for B2B marketing (which you should do) Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr - Image sharing networks are popular and are great for e-commerce stores to share product images. Content Marketing Start a blog - I see you've already done this. But keep posting regularly and promote your posts on social media. Guest Post - Find relevant blogs and sites and guest post on them E-mail list - E-mail is the best form of direct marketing hands down. Promotions Giveaways/Contests - Work with related businesses (beer companies, etc.) and promote your store by offering a giveaway or a contest to win your products. Discounts - Holiday discounts, flash sales, new product launch discounts, and so on are quick ways to make sales. Collaborate Affiliate - Recruit affiliates to sell your products. Find influencers who can make a big impact Wholesale - Contact related businesses (beer companies, etc) and hustle. Dropship - See above. If said businesses don't have warehouses, offer to dropship for them. PR Product Reviews - Find popular bloggers and get product reviews from them. HARO - Help A Reporter Out. Google it.
I can see some superb knowledge sharing is happening here. There is one more thing which needs to be taken care during theses activities. That is Reputation management, while building up the web presence we should take care of reputation building exercise as well, as many of the eshops are successfully ranking top, but in some of the operational activities they can't satisfy the customers and visitors starts pushing complaints on the forums and social platforms, while in such case if you have built a good reputation on the web, then such results take some time to come on the top in SERP's and during this you get a chance to resolve the issues of the customers.
Before u implement all the advises from above, be sure that u have a very good conversion tracking tool so u will see wich advertising option is bring u money and wich doesn`t. I recommend piwik because it`s independend. But be sure that u need a conversion and funnel tracking so you can correctly measure adverstising ( paid or not ) and ROI.
It is not as simple as how do I market my website. As a few people have already said, you need to make sure you completely understand your target customer. What do they like, where do they hang out, what problem does your product solve, and why should they buy it from you? Believe me I have spent thousands on marketing and then sat around wondering why it didn't pay off. After that you can use tools like Adwords, Facebook, and other smaller sites that attract your target customer. Again like said above, make sure you have tracking software like Google Analytics setup so you know where people are coming from and why. I have spent hours with Google Analytics tracking the behavior flows of my customers to make sure they take the write path to the checkout. Plus you can also see where customers might be having trouble with your store if the bounce rate is very high. One of the best marketing tools I have used once you start getting customers though is just good old customer service. Tons of our repeat customers have said that they came back because they would get answers to their questions in minutes and could call our number anytime. Plus this has also lead to larger sales via upselling over the phone. In addition, simply admitting when you mess up. For instance one of our customers ordered a small sample of our products and the shipping address was typed in wrong on our backend. It took four weeks for the samples to arrive instead of a couple days. Long story short he was furious and said he would never do business with us again. Instead of blaming the supplier, we apologized dearly for the mistake, told him we wanted to earn his business back, gave the gentleman a 10% discount on his order, and I told him I would personally make sure that the warehouse shipped the product overnight. The gentleman called us up a week later, told us he loved the product, and that he would not shop anywhere else. Do you think he tells his friends now about how we screwed up his samples or treated him like a king? In the end, you have to know your customers inside and out and treat them with respect.
I'm a big advocate of blogging and content creation when it comes to a cost-effective way to market something online. Starting a blog and using social media alongside it is a great way to spread the word about your shop, drive traffic, and build authority behind your brand. Think of it this way: start a blog that your ideal customer would read every day. Think about their lifestyle and NOT about your shop. Publish, create, and curate information that your idea customer would find helpful, informative, educational, and entertaining. Reflect this content on your other sites, but avoid pushing the same posts with the same copy to different social channels at the same time (this looks kinda lazy). If you can get a good content marketing system going, you'll be able to build trust and authority within your niche. People that are interested in the type of things you're selling will be coming to your blog and site even when they're not necessarily interested in buying things, because you're serving up great content on a regular basis. This makes you a trusted source of authoritative information, and puts you on the top of potential customers' minds when they ARE ready to pull the trigger and make a purchase. Also, Google loves this type of thing. Informative content regularly published on your website will help your SEO situation like nobody's business. Hope this helps!
I agree with this. Just make sure you do not overvalue Google as a traffic source, because it is just that... a traffic source. I have seen tons of ecommerce stores fail very quickly by thinking that its Google or nothing. Our store did not even look at SEO until month three, and we have done over $1,000 in sales!
To be well versed with the e-marketing tactics; plays an important role in making your mark and having the competitive advantage for your e-store setup. Dropped in to say that its just not about the promotion of a product or a service anymore, its rather way beyond and stretched to the relationship building with the end customers/users of the store to actually give a tough competition to others in same domain online with increased conversion rates and ROI. Lets begin with the info from horse's mouth and make it little specific here. To market your e-store, firstly benchmark the tactics used by your competitors with some effective add-ons like: 1. Making your e-Store not only mobile friendly but fully Responsive and Mobile Optimized. 2. Get the niche segment for marketing, new stores focus on traditional SEO(Search Engine Optimization) in limited geographical areas and combine that with the bombastic marketing techs of Social Media as compared to the big vendors out there. 3. Be ready to adopt the latest Google Algorithms, stating the rules regarding SEO tactics including Link Building and Rich content specific to the web stores etc. 4. Keep a check on the loading time of the sites, faster sites leads to more traffic and thereby conversions, hire the tech professionals for the same. 5. Next its crucial to consider the advantages of going live with the Multi-channel Sales. eBay and Amazon are amongst the top marketplaces that retailers might expand on to in this year creating the opportunity to dramatically increase the traffic exposure, and hence the sales 6. Well Planned E-mailing and Blogging Campaigns can also act as the land; from where the store owners can harvest the strongest customer relationships which can thereby lead them to be the repetitive customers to the store, and raise the traffic and hence the sales. Blogs can also raise the visibility and can also act as the strongest SEO tactic; if we add the SEO friendly content to it. 7. Also the PPC(Pay/cost per click) campaigns can add an advantage. Which can simply be defined as amount spent to get your advertisement on other sites(affiliated sites-similar domain sites preferably) clicked. 8. And at last would like to mention about the extensions like Google Analytics and Adwords which are used to keep a track on the traffic and conversions at length. HOPE THIS WOULD BE OF GREAT HELP!!
Instead of a general response, let me be use some examples to illustrate what I mean. This is a screenshot from our Google Analytics dashboard showing what generates the most revenue. While you can see that Google is responsible for 60% of our revenue between organic and paid traffic, the other 40% is generated from other websites. More specifically, just under 30% of our revenue has come from advertising that we have done with related shopping sites. Like I said before, I see way too many new websites focus on just organic traffic from Google expecting to become a millionaire overnight. In reality though organic traffic is going to take an immense amount of time and effort. All too often newer e-commerce businesses go broke trying to get just that traffic. I know this because I used to do it too! So my advice again is FOCUS ON YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE. Find where they hang out, what they like to do, and what they like to do on the Internet. That is where you want to advertise initially. Then as the organic traffic starts flowing in, you can start to scale back your paid advertising based on what goals you want to achieve. DON'T MISS 30% OF YOUR REVENUE CHASING DREAMS! Best Regards, Nick
Also, worth adding is the importance of conversion. I think this has only been touched upon a couple of times in this thread, which seems to be focused on marketing -- which is a good thing! Marketing is critical. But you definitely want to make sure that your site converts. As someone mentioned up above, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." You've got to make sure that your site is built out in a way that convinces people that they want to buy your products! Make it so that folks feel silly for NOT buying your products! Magnetic product descriptions, as mentioned above, can really help out with this. A dash of humor and originality easily sets you apart from the crowd, and ups your site's sharability factor, which is a huge thing when it comes to building your brand's authority, growing your sales, and driving more traffic to your website. Design, however, is another hugely important aspect of your website's ability to convert. Make sure that you're using a lot of comfy breathing room, and be SURE that your site is fully-responsive. No mobile version. No dedicated app. These days, people (and -- more importantly -- Google) want to see a website that only needs to be accessed ONE way, but will deliver the content in a way that's optimized for the device reading it. (You can tell which websites are fully responsive by playing with your browser window size, for those that don't want to mess with a phone or tablet. Shrink a website window down to a narrow, vertical window -- something that approximates the size and shape of a mobile phone screen. If all the information and content automatically reorganizes itself, then the site is responsive. The BEST responsive site designs find a way to include ALL of the content and functionality that was presented in the original site, without getting too cluttered or busy or messy. Hope this helps!!
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