24x7 Marketing

March 21, 2010 · by Dale Traxler

Ya gotta love marketing to be an e-tailer today! If you don't love it, and I mean LOVE it, make sure you hire people who do, because its a non-stop activity in today's competitive online marketplaces, and absolutely critical to your success.

When we started the business 8 years ago, we worked hard to make the content of our sites useful and relevant to our market. We slowly learned about search engine optimization, spent about $15 per day on keywords in Googles new AdWords program. About 6 months into the business, we started up a newsletter which we published when we had time....once or twice a month. We had no 800 phone number, we encouraged email inquiries and discouraged phone orders and that was it.

We would be out of business in today's world if we only did those minimal activities. Many small eCommerce sites have limited resources and skills to aggressive market their sites to their target market. But, to ensure you long term success, you must invest as much sweat, energy, and resources as possible even if you don't have a large budget. Here's a list of marketing activities you should be doing along with a few tips on how to fit them into a smaller budget. I guess this is why companies end up with a marketing department and substantial budget as they grow!

Marketing on your Website

Yes, your website development is a "marketing tool". It's the first place your prospect lands from wherever they came from and it better communicate your message within a click or two, so invest in it every single day! If you have nothing to do at all, look at your website, you will always find something that can be improved.

• Develop rich content about your products. Post great images and descriptions of products along with other information your prospects might want to buy that product from you. Here's an example on one of our products.
• Optimize your content for Google Most of us only have resources to do a good job of search engine optimization (SEO) for one search platform, make sure its Google as they have 70% of the searches. Use metadata in your HTML, reinforce it with your H2 and H3 headings and in the product descriptions for your items. Focus on incoming links only from related sites. You own blog hosted on a 3rd party site is a good place to start.
• Build solid site navigation and search functionality Consumers really do like to have a hand navigating through your website. Give them a few ways to navigate to your products. We have several ways to get to most of our products - by the type of products, by how it might be used, by size, by gemstone. We also have "bestsellers" and "new product" categories.
• Use promotional banners. Got a new product or product line? Promote it on your homepage, in your shopping cart, etc. Get the word out.
• Add informational content. We regularly add beading tutorials, tips, and product information to our site. Our customers use it and we attract a lot of visitors from Google to our informational content.

Use Email Marketing Aggressively

Social media is all the buzz, but email still rocks. We have a higher conversion rate from email campaigns than any other activity. Our customers wait for our bi-weekly emails, then place orders even if they don't buy from the new promotion. They have us "trained", or maybe its the other way around....

• Build your list. Give customers plenty of places to opt in to your newsletters. The opt out rate is usually pretty low, so once you get a prospect in, you will likely have them for a while if you provide good content and don't become too repetitive and aggressive
• Segment your list. Something we need to do more of. Let your customers choose the content that's important to them.
• Send regular emails. How often? No clear answer there. We now send 2 per week featuring different stores/products. Every one of my major competitors sends out 2 or more emails per week now. I'm amazed our customers can take that punishment, but they seem to.
• Offer a deal!. Yes, you need to be creative here, but your customers are ALWAYS looking for a deal. Make them an offer every single time, even if your email is mostly informational rather than promotional.
• Don't manage your own list. Way too much overhead. We've used Constant Contact for almost 8 years at a very reasonable monthly cost.

Use Promotional Offers

We offer weekly specials on ChoiceJewelrySupplies.com and abeadstore.com. Our customers are always deal hunting. We also offer occasional deals on our blog, on Facebook, and in product inserts we include with shipped orders.

• Create a limited offer. We have far better success with a limited promotion on 30-100 products than we do on a "storewide offer". Better conversions and lower bounce rates.
• Mix it up. Its really hard, but we try to come up with an original offer most weeks. We find ourself repeating ourselves about 2-3 times a year, but spread it out.
• Use coupons. For all the same reasons coupons have always been used in retail.....

Use Pay Per Click Advertising

No matter how good you are at SEO, some keywords will be elusive. Also, some consumers actually prefer to use ads to natural search results, especially well writte ones that include content relevant to their search. PPC ads do require real $$$ and are a bit of a black hole for your time, but they work. We've increased our sales substantially over the last year as we've been more aggressive in this area.

• Choose a single network to get started. Don't try to be a master of Google, Yahoo, and Bing at the same time. Choose one and learn the basics. They are different, but the same.
• Target keywords that convert. Look at your analytics and see which keywords lead to sales. Target those words first. If you don't have solid analytics already, add Google Analytics immediately.
• Fix your budgets. An ad campaign can run amock very without constraints. Make sure to use daily campaign budgets and watch the results every single day. If you don't a few words may consume your entire budget. It's best to spread the wealth out.

Social Media

Use it. Jump into now if you have been waiting. We are having great success with building a fan base in Facebook and finally getting the more and more interactions. Twitter is developing more slowly, mostly because we don't have the resources to truly engage with our followers yet.

• Set up a Fan Page in Facebook. If you don't have a Facebook account, sign up and create a Fan page for your business. There are a lot of things you can do now to differentiate yourself on your Fan page. We've added an "About Us" promo, banner ads, a "mini store", and a feed to our blog on our Beaded Impressions Fan Page.
• Post regularly- Put us product information, ask questions, post links to interesting content, take a picture in your backyard whatever, just keep if fresh!
• Tweet promos, new products. We need to do more, but we do that automatically every time we post to our Facebook fan page. We have also used our Twitter Page to promote a beading contest and other activities.
• Set up your own blog. Ours is called DailyBeadBuzz.com. Use Wordpress, Tumblr, or any number of different blogging platforms. Brand it, and link it back to your website aggressively using content links. Add discussions. We have not had success with interactions there, but we do have a reasonable number of RSS subscribers and daily followers and a VERY HIGH conversion rate on products we feature in the blog. You can repurpose content on Facebook so you don't need to create new stuff all the time.

Obviously, there a lot of other types of marketing activities not mentioned here, but these are things that are working well for us. We'd like to start using video, get back into more targeted print advertising, use affiliates and much more. But, we are budget and resource constrained like many of you. If only we had more time and resources!

Category: Evolving eBiz | Tags: advertising, blogging, facebook, twitter, Search Engine Optimization, content, Email, social media, Marketing