What Marketing Channels should a newbie focus on?

[Anton_Chan]

Hi,

I just launched my site: www.kokonaut.com

And I'm pretty overwhelmed with the amount of Marketing I will have to do with selling my product.

Should I focus on Facebook, Google, and Reddit ads or just one or two?

Facebook doesn't have SEO correct? So it's mainly just paid ads? Google on the other hand, I should spend some time focusing on Organic Traffic?

Thanks!

Anton.

[Andrew34]

Hi Anton,

Interesting product!

The best way to think of this is that you are aiming for “digital word of mouth”. 

To get started, the key is to identify the influential people and organisations relevant to your product and get them to spread the word about you. You can do this by phone, email, forums, social media groups, Reddit or even target them with Facebook ads. The best way to reach such people depends on who they are.

If your product is interesting and you approached the right people, people will start to talk about it. Then you can use social advertising to “fan the flames”. On the other hand, if no-one is all that interested, maybe you need to re-think the product.

So, this action will drive interested traffic to your site. You should have already registered your own domain and made sure your copy is as effective as possible.  The next step is lead capture and learning more about your audience. It’s vital here to get email signups and make sure you set up Google Analytics and the Facebook pixel. This data is key for retargeting (if you skip this step your ads will be too expensive and ineffective because you won’t be targeting the right people). 

Regarding the Google question. SEO is a long term ploy (12 months plus) that you run alongside a content marketing strategy. People generally search on Google when they have strong buying intent, i.e. they are already aware of your product. So in your case, it’s better to focus just on getting some initial traffic as I outlined above. A little later, you may find that people have further questions about the product. So then you go and create content around that and people read it and link to it. At some point Google will figure out that your page is highly relevant to a particular audience. This in turn will drive organic traffic and at this point you might want to optimise this a bit. 

As you’ve realized (!) it’s a huge subject and this is just the bare bones. But I hope at least it gives you some idea that there’s a clear path through the jungle if you don’t get distracted by the noise of all the hawkers in the online marketing community :-) ...

[Anh_Nguyen1]

I suggest that you go with content/blog first. Why? The reason is:

• Content is good for SEO.
• Useful content is easier to be accepted on the Facebook group, Community, Forum so that you can pull traffic from these place.
• Good Content can go viral

In the end, start with blog post help you to get low-cost traffic. My suggested strategy for you is that, for example, you are selling man's shoes, you can write a content about how to choose good shoes for a gentleman. Then you can share it in a man's group on Facebook, Reddit or even set Facebook ads for the blog post. In that blog post, you can mention your product somehow.

Before pulling traffic to your site, I think you should improve your site up a little bit. I suggest you add a customer reviews section to your landing page, it will be much better. It's good for you to spend something learn about elements that can make a site sell better.

If a huge traffic came to your site but it was not convincing enough to convert visitors into customers, it would be a big waste.

[Benjamin_H_1]

In addition to all of the mentioned already, I recommend setting up Google Analytics with ecommerce tracking. I noticed you don't have it installed on your site. It's free and will allow you to see website data in a different way along with the revenue and traffic each channel is bringing to your site. This will give you hard data to make better decisions on where to invest your advertising dollars.

Additionally, you can setup a variety of goals that can be secondary considerations beyond just revenue.

[Jason27]

Facebook is the obvious main choice. It offers very powerful ad targetting features. You can simply boost your posts and quickly reach thousands of people. Btw, take a look at using this really cool app: once installed it will help you drive way more traffic from those boosted Facebook posts!  https://apps.shopify.com/botified-facebook-private-replies

[Pollen]

Hey Anton, 

I've seen this question come up a lot and here are my recommendations:

• Since you're selling a consumer product, Facebook and Instagram are your best channels. Facebook advertising helps, but I'll get to that further below
• Definitely look up subreddits on Reddit that match your specific audience. It may not be the largest audience, but they'll likely be highly engaged
• Twitter is basically an afterthought at this point. There's so many bots and not a lot of engagement. If you're going to post on Twitter just copy your Facebook updates and don't put too much time into tweets
• Engage with others through Facebook groups. Instead of just saying, "Try my product. It's so awesome," try solving their questions and offer your product as a way to solve their issues
• Blog. Blog. Blog. Write blog posts (at least 700 words) specifically talking about issues and topics in your niche
• Take advantage of Facebook advertising. You'll have to do a little bit of the heavy lifting in the beginning while you're waiting on sales. But once you make a few sales, use tools like Lookalike Audiences to target people similar to your current customers. It takes some analysis skills, but Shopify apps come in handy like Pollen (http://gopollen.com) which handle the heavy lifting for you

Hope this helps! 

[rito]

Hi Anton,

If you're looking for a cost-effective way to quality traffic to your store, check out the free Ads app - https://apps.shopify.com/ads

Cheers,

Ryoma

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[Jesse_Hunter]

The product looks cool, but I noticed on your main page, the mobile phone example image is blurry and very low res. With a product at this price point and in the tech space, you'll really want to correct that. 

[Jason22]

Anton,

I think the good and proven channel is SEO. Start writing the content as soon as you can. Educate the market. It's the time consuming but definitely worth it. You can learn more from Moz website with ONsite SEO https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-site-seo

[Brendon_Rell]

One thing to think about is marketing to existing customers once you get some momentum in your store. Transaction emails (store emails & receipts) have really, really high open rates - introducing marketing in those emails can go a long way in keeping your store busy!