Marketing Tips

[Down]

Hey all,

Wanted to share a few things I've learned regarding marketing as a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

Before you rush to buy ads and acquire traffic -Try to use as many free tools as possible to create your web presence and run your BI, to list some of them: Canva, Hotjar, MOZ, MarvelApp, Google Trends, Medium, Groups, Forums, Google Analytics, Similarweb

Now that you're all set to start your paid marketing campaign remember the most important thing -Be patient and optimize based on data, not hunchs. Running an ad campaign is like stock trading, don't put all your eggs in one basket, try various ad creative, content, LP's, messages, audiences etc.. Not every channel works for everyone, so try to understand where your users are most likely to engage, put your self in their shoes.

Now regarding the campaign itself :

1. Set Business Objectives : (Increase brand awareness, Increase sales, Increase customer retention, Reduce cost per lead, Reduce cost per acquisition, etc...)

2. After you set the business objective – define your goals: for example: if your business objective is to increase sales than think of the goals you need to achieve like: Increase the conversion rate on my website, Reduce cart abandonment, Increase average order size, Explore new market etc...

3. Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI) - you want them to be measurable so you'll know if the campaign achieved its purpose. Let's take reduce cart abandonment as an example: determine your current cart abandonment say it's 80% ( average is 74% I think) then Set KPI’s ( I want to reduce my cart abandonment from 80% to 75%), beforehand make sure that you find the leaky spots -  and fix them - Make navigation from shop to cart convenient, add reassuring trust elements (SSL, Q&A, Return policy, Trustpilot etc..)

Ask yourself who want what I have to offer (yes I know that everyone will want what you have to offer as it so amazing, but try to divide them to those who are actively looking for your product/service, they need it so bad that all you need to do is present it to them, those who are looking for similar stuff, they need it but they have alternative and those whom you'll need to convince that they'll need it.

Once you'll do that it will be easier for you to decide on which channel to promote your offer and what is the message. for the first kind of people explore where they're talking about it (mostly search ads are the best way to go) for the second type, ask yourself what is the most unique about my offer (USP), why someone would buy from me and not from the other guy, price, convenience, trust, customer service, shipping, easy to use, etc...

these people need some more time to decide, so be patient and convince them - find out where they are exploring their alternative: competitor BI.

Now for the boring/functional part:

When you run ads online you have two main options: Programmatic and Direct Ad Buying - Direct buying occurs when you buy impressions in bulk. Programmatic buying occurs when a DSP automatically and instantaneously place ads on publishers’ sites after evaluating the quality of individual impressions from the best bidder.... 🙂

Which means: It’s about serving relevant advertising to the right person at the right time.

So when working on programmatic media buy (FB, Google, and a lot of other display DSP's ) you need to identify the right audience, which means building user persona: depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. so how'll you find the right user persona: think who involved in the decision making process regarding your product or service than start to:

Talk With Your Customers

Sample Multiple Data Streams

Facebook Audience Insights

Clearly Define Each Persona's Pain Points

Craft A Psychographic Profile

Focus On The Most Important Persona

After you've built your ideal user persona: ask yourself what is the value I'll bring them - explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation - your customers are usually interested in your company product/service because they have a problem that needs solving

Delivers specific benefits - how do you make your customers feel?

Tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition.

Remember your ad is not a billboard: narrowly target your audience and write to them. To be effective in advertising in the online ecosystem, you must write as you’re writing to one person—and one person alone.

This person, your target, is the one you need to convey. Just as though you were an in-person salesperson, you need to focus all your attention on this person and their needs. Everything in your ad needs to lead to a clear action - stay focused with one call-to-action

Use simple language that’s easy to understand

What you’re offering

How it benefits them

What to do next

Be upfront about the prices- if you’re selling a physical product, people want to know how much it costs

KISS- Keep It Simple Stupid

Choosing a channel :

Advertising is an art, not a science

What works for one product or service may not work for you or the next one

There are many different variables that can affect the results of an advertising campaign—from ad copy to the weather

Test the effectiveness of your message in each media to find the best vehicle for promoting your product - do so by :

Audience research - In which channel can I reach my target audience at a moment when they will pay attention and care about my story?

Where is my competitor's advertising?

Always be testing - The only way is to test things yourself. Run low-cost experiments to test how your customers engage on a new media platform

Neglected channels -Sending letters could generate a much higher return on marketing investment than doing email marketing.

Cross-channel ...

Use images carefully- humans are social, and we’re wired to look where other humans are looking. so if you'll put an image of a person looking at the audience the audience will look back at him and not at your message and call to action.

Track every step of the way and optimize based on data

Hope you find it useful, also created a spreadsheet with some of the tools and platforms that helped me start and scale

Good luck

[JamesHotson]

This is some great advice! Two of my favorite resources:

1) Medium: Complete Guide to eCommerce Lifecycle Marketing 

2) Foundr: Why Personalization is Key to eCommerce Success 

You can add RetentionScience.com to your list of marketing automation solutions!

[denisehilton]

Do not underestimate the power of Social media as well. For creating your online presence it's always important to participate on Social media platforms. The best way to start is inviting your own friends to engage with your brand.

[MithilThakkar]

Hey Down,

Thanks for sharing your valuable lessons. When I opened the excel, I could see at least 5 users viewing it. 🙂 

The excel is really helpful since it provides an end-to-end view on what are different tools which one can implement to run a successful SaaS business. Would you consider predicting churning customers using tools like Datoin be helpful? 

Cheers,

[HelenHel]

Thank you for great tips!

[amarmajhu]

Follow these instructions for better result :
Listen to your customer, Market your product before it's ready. Sell the benefit, not a comparison. Advertise from multiple angles.Give customers a place to talk to/about you. 

[Andrew0883]

Useful article, thanks for it. I've been using email marketing for years, but now I want to try another strategy. My co-worker advised me to try SMS marketing and even recommended service. Has anyone know about  testelium functions?

[Amit_Roznak1]

Hi,

Interesting food for thought! A few notes though:

• When I viewed your google doc it didn't have any tools or platforms listed, just 2 notes- if you would let me know when it is corrected or if it is an error on my part, that would be appreciated!

• You did not mention organic traffic that comes from SEO - this is a free way to drive traffic to your site by naturally increasing your ranking on engines like Google. This also increases the functionality of your site helping to keep customers within your sales funnel. Using a Free store analyzer like ours at AdScale would fit well to address this issue, and maybe even included in the previous point ;).

• Using AI driven advertising systems, like ours and many of the others available on the Shopify App store, can make a significant difference in effectively applying much of what you mentioned as well as more while avoiding much of the tedious tasks involved like syncing across advertising platforms (Google, Facebook, etc...) and specializing in ads when you want to specialize in having dinner with the family. Mind you, it is quite rewarding to do it yourself, but with AI becoming more common place, a different skill set is necessary to compete with a machine.

I hope I've added a bit without taking away from the solid work you put in. Great job adding value to the community here!

[Propelguru]

Depended on your business, there are great marketing tips that you can go for of which some of them are mentioned below - 

• Content is the king, and you need to create engaging and relevant content, and also you need to post content regularly.

• Don’t fear spending money as the more money you spend, the better testing you can have, but make sure the money you are paying should be on the relevant cause, at least.

• Choose your target audience wisely, and give your all to engage the target audience so that you can at least have the business from your target audience.

If you are looking for a digital marketing company that can help you establish your business, you can contact Propel Guru, a digital marketing and sales agency.