Looking for tips on how to set up marketing/advertisements

[lapinbleu007]

Hi guys, I am new to advertising. I was wondering about advertising on Google, Twitter, Tiktok, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook but I was wondering about your experience and what you need to do to get started.

I don’t have accounts on Pinterest and Tiktok and I only have my personal accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. What do you do to start out advertising on these social sites? Do you create professional accounts or do you use your own accounts? Are there any drawbacks from doing one or the other? Personally, I don’t like to mix my personal life with my site.

How about costs? I know that I can target people based on certain things like gender, age, location and so on and the ads can be for certain time periods. The longer one has a campaign running, the more it would cost.
With that said, what is the norm for starting out? I know this largely depends on my budget.

Are there any free ways to market our products besides search engines? I am very wary about advertising on Facebook these days. It seems that whenever someone posts a product on FB, it seems to be shot down quickly by nasty people. Instagram seems to do better at least because it doesn’t have a dislike emoticon feature. I’m not sure about the other markets.

Lastly, what is your advice when it comes to not responding right away for the comments on your ads? Does this matter? Do you actually need to log into each application to see the comments? This would be very cumbersome.

Thanks in advance and sorry for all the questions.

[Brendan-Optily]

Hi @lapinbleu007 , I live how open-ended your question is. This answer probably won’t give you all the answers you need but hopefully some guidance.

There are five key areas to think about when starting out.

1. Audience

Be clear on who are your customers. If you don’t know already you can dig I to your Google Analytics and you’ll get some insights there. Knowing who is your audience and their motivations to buy your product is the most important starting point for everything that follows. Try to understand their typical purchase journey. Where do they discover new products? Where do they research products? What is most important to them when buying froma new brand? Etc.

2. Your Message

How are you going to stand out from all the other merchants out there who are seeking to satisfy the same need as you? Storytelling remains really important as a way to develop a connection with customers. Tell your personal founder story and the story of your product. Be able to communicate that visually with video. Video is by far the most cost effective way for you to find customers who are likely to buy from you.

3. Placement

By this we mean which channel (Google, Facebook, TikTok etc), which part of that channel (reels, stories, feed etc) and which ad format should you use (video, static image, product ads). Different placements will work better depending on which stage of the customer journey you are supporting. For example, story ads in Instagram will be great for finding in-market consumers. Google Shopping ads will be great for converting them.

4. Product

Aligning your product promotion strategy with specific audiences will save you a lot of money. If a specific product doesn’t sell to certain audience cohorts, don’t waste money advertising your products to them. Segment your product catalog by category and into best sellers; then focus on what’s working for you right now. This will give you the highest returns and give you confidence to keep going.

5. Spend

This is the hardest part as it will feel like you’re wasting probably more than 90% of your budget. Most of your spend doesn’t deliver clicks or purchases. This is hard. Start with a small budget focused on the low hanging fruit and expand out from there. For example, remarket to shoppers who’ve visited your website in the past 7 days, giving them a strong offer if they convert today. Achieve success there and build out thereafter.

I know this might be a bit vague, but hopefully it gives you a steer on the various things you could think about before you get started.

It could be fun if you’d like to post any insights you have on your audience here and some key selling messages around your brand and products. Maybe the community can help you build out your ad strategy from there.

[lapinbleu007]

By looking at quite a few listings here, I found one market that would allow some products to be listed for free if we meet certain criteria. I’m talking about Google Listings. Basically, I want to try to get traffic coming to my shop organically and do very little paid advertisements as possible. If there is a will, there is a way.

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/promoting-marketing/create-marketing/google/google-listings?utm_campaign=Guru+Ask&utm_medium=Forums&utm_source=social

[lapinbleu007]

Hi Brendan, thanks a bunch for your reply. I thought about a few of your points before I started to build my shop. I’ve also reworked a lot the more and more I read peoples comments. Basically, I am looking to sell mostly unique off beat items that make people laugh. I look at some of things out there for sale and I want to do things a little differently. I just recently added support to have multiple languages. This would allow me to sell all across Europe. I’ve also worked a lot on my SEO to make things better for search engines. I’m also working on bringing videos on my store thanks to sites like placeit.

What you wrote makes a lot of sense when it comes to advertising. I need to add more videos on my site so I can sell to people using social sites like Instagram and the like. Before I go to this route, I want to see what can be done on the cheep. I used to work for a radio company and they were really into advertisement and the things they needed to do to push their customers products out there was crazy. It was also very costly. I don’t mind doing this on a regular basis as long as it pays off in the end and as I can work out my personal workflow.

Thanks again for your response.

[Brendan-Optily]

Go ahead and list your products on Google Shopping for free. That’s definitely a very good first step.

If you have even a small bit of available funds, set up a PMAX (Performance Max) campaign in Google Ads.

This is a new type of campaign that we’ve seen really strong results from across the board.

Performance Max uses machine learning models to optimize bids and placements to drive conversions or conversion value. You provide important inputs like audience signals (including your customer data), and high quality text, images, and video that can significantly improve your campaign performance. You can also provide important inputs about what types of conversions are most valuable to you.

As I say, start small and once things start to work, then you can scale up.

[lapinbleu007]

Hi, thanks so much for your response. I really appreaciate it.

[lapinbleu007]

So, I am working on configuring the Google Merchant Center for my products. I’m having a few issues with it.

I am wondering about creating ads when it comes to using fulfillment centers. I am only going to use fulfillment centers to send out my products. In other words, I will never be using my own adresses. It seems that these management systems require you to enter physical adresses so that shipping can be calculated. I am not sure why they need all that since it’s already something that is calculated on my store. Why do we need to enter this stuff again?

The same goes for tax rates. I would prefer that this information is only managed by Shopify so that I don’t have to enter it again.

Also, do you need to upload high quality images in these programs for every product as well? It seems that Google doesn’t like my optimised images that happen to look good on my site.

Thanks guys

[Brendan-Optily]

Seems a little off that you’d need to input all that info. Perhaps double-check that you’re not automatically opted in for Buy with Google feature.

It’s looks like only a small number of your images are a problem. That can happen. Perhaps check the quality of those specific images or see what might be the difference between the problematic ones and the okay ones.

If the problems with the feed from Shopify don’t get resolved (which can happen) we often see people use third party apps to fix the issues.

[flareAI]

Hello @lapinbleu007 ,

This is flareAI: your Fully Automated Free Sales Machine. I hope you’re having a good day. We are helping Shopify Merchants grow their store presence in Google and other major sales channels and $5+ million in sales from Google Search, on autopilot.

If my suggestions is helpful to you, please let me know by giving a like or marking it as a solution.

It is better to keep your personal and business social media accounts different.

As you are new in advertising, I advice you to start with a low budget and analyze the day by day performance of the ad campaigns. You have to trial and error and adjust your campaigns accordingly. Optimizing the campaigns and keywords will generate better conversions at a lower budget.

Once you start getting sales you can spending somewhere between 10%-20% of your revenue on advertising in order to grow.

As you are a beginner, make the optimization for your store to get organic traffic and sales also. Ecommerce on Google Search is greater than all paid channels and social media combined.

You can add your products to Google’s Free Product Listing. Free listings allow customers to see product results from your store across Google. For this, you just need to add a Google Merchant Center account for FREE. This Google documentation will guide you to set up Free product listing.

I am sharing you the documentations regarding how to start Facebook and Instagram channels for your store. You can go through those and get some understanding.

Marketing on Facebook
FB ads for beginners
Instagram ads for beginners
Instagram Shopping

Did you know? Ecommerce on Google Search is greater than all paid channels and social media combined. We created flareAI to grow your store on Google, the world’s biggest and most trusted FREE sales channel. As a Google partner, flareAI will submit your products to Google and other free channels on a daily basis. Once your product is found on Google, you don’t need to do a thing. Customers will keep finding your product day after day. flareAI will help to scale your site sustainably at NO Agency fees, NO Pay-per-click, NO paid marketplaces. With flareAI, your store can access the Google Search and 20+ free sales channels.

I hope that the above list’s tips will help you.

Gina
flareAI

[lapinbleu007]

Hi Gina, thanks so much. I’ve been looking for solutions to help me advertise my products on free or next to free platforms before I move further. Having a solution that will allow me to push to multiple platforms is very helpful. I have a regular job and so the more I can do to automate these tedious tasks the better.

[lapinbleu007]

Thanks for your reply. Yeah, it is strange that only a small number of images had that issue. Some of my images come from placeit.net and they look good on my site and they are also compressed so they work. The other images are come from printful. I’ll figure it out.

[coffiend]

Once you acquired new store visitors with your marketing efforts, you’d also want to keep your existing customers engaged. This means regularly performing customer segmentation and preparing marketing campaigns for each of these segments. All of this can be quite overwhelming if this is your first time.
This is why I built Spreeflo as a Shopify app. Spreeflo looks at your customer segments and prepares hyper-personalised marketing emails for your customers. Every email is uniquely crafted for the customer. It’ll save you alot of time but also constantly be working in the background to help acquire new sales from your existing customers.