In 2023, sales for eCommerce businesses have continued to skyrocket, thanks to our society’s love of online shopping and social media-driven purchasing habits, and these trends show no sign of slowing down any time soon. Unfortunately, for business owners, this data also means that new eCommerce stores are hitting the market nearly every day, making it even more difficult to boost your brand’s presence and stand out from the competition.
As for startup operations and entrepreneurs looking to cash in on the eCommerce business, the learning curve for creating strong marketing strategies has never been more steep. So, if you want to grow your brand without tanking your advertising budget in the process, you need a fine tuned approach to digital marketing that helps you hit your goals with precision rather than taking shots in the dark.
That sounds like a tall order, right?
Well, don’t panic. In this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating winning marketing strategies for your eCommerce startup and our top marketing tips for getting started fast.
Here’s what you can expect:
- How To Define Your eCommerce Marketing Goal
- eCommerce Merchandising: What It Is & Why You Need It
- Creating an eCommerce Marketing Plan: The Basics
- Facebook Marketing
- Google Ads
- How To Produce Ad Creatives That Sell
- Customer Personas
- Ad Angles
- Ad Formats
- Ad Creatives
- Ad Iterations
- Other Marketing Avenues To Explore
- Using A P&L To Gauge Your Goals
How To Define Your eCommerce Marketing Goal
Before you start building creative marketing campaigns, it’s crucial to clearly understand your long-term goals. No two online businesses are exactly alike, meaning your goals might not be the same as other brands in your niche industry. Knowing your end goal will help you craft a dynamic eCommerce marketing strategy that moves you closer to your “North Star,” or the primary objective that guides your business.
Let’s look at this with a few practical examples.
Say you’re an eCommerce startup whose North Star is profitability and achieving the highest growth possible. In this case, there’s one rule you need to follow in all of your marketing efforts:
Only spend money that makes money.
At its bare bones, profitability is the amount of financial gain you can make from any single expense for your eCommerce site. In other words, if this is your primary goal, you’ll need to be very strategic about the ways you spend money on your marketing channels. If you can master the art of only spending money that makes money, you’ll be guaranteed to win big.
With that in mind, the next step in this process involves asking yourself a few key questions about your online business.
“What are my targets?”
First, you need to have a clear understanding of your targets for growth. Basically, you need to know how much you want to boost profitability within a certain length of time. To do that, you’ll have to look at two important factors.
“What’s my profitability time window?”
This is the period of time over which you’ll be looking to drive sales. Now, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that their goal is to increase profitability 24/7/365, and while that might sound like a good idea in theory, it really isn’t practical in a business sense.
Instead, you have to narrow your scope down to a specified time window. Some of the best ways to do this include setting targets for 30-day, 60-day, or even year-long time windows. This makes it easier to hit your target and grow your business over the long run.
“How long is my cash conversion cycle?”
Next, you need to look at your eCommerce website’s cash conversion cycle. This is the time it takes to turn an investment into a profit for your business. For most eCommerce startups, this cycle will be around 60 days.
After you know what your cash conversion cycle looks like, you can start finding ways to reduce this period of time, leading to higher profits for your business. This includes things like:
- Taking out lower interest rates on any outstanding business debt.
- Reducing the costs associated with producing your goods.
- Finding more affordable partnerships with your vendors and merchants.
Simply put, the less money you spend on these expenses, the less time it will take you to turn each investment into a profit.
Pro-Tip: Use Your Time Window & Cash Conversion Cycle Together
Depending on your growth goals, it’s a good idea to set your time window to match your cash conversion cycle. This will make it easier to maximize your profits in a realistic time frame so that you can make your conversion cycle work for you, not against you.
eCommerce Merchandising: What It Is & Why You Need It
You might think that eCommerce marketing tactics only apply to your online marketing channels. However, the reality is that conversions and sales happen on your eCommerce site. That means having your website effectively merchandised can give you a huge advantage over the competition since most online retail stores neglect this aspect of running their business.
In essence, merchandising is how your store is arranged and how you display your products. For brick-and-mortar retailers, this means having their top-selling (a.k.a, the most profitable) products in the windows to lure potential customers into their store while moving less profitable items to the back where they’re less likely to steal attention.
In the world of eCommerce, these same strategies can be applied to your online store. To start, you’ll need to identify the products you really want to push versus the products that don’t earn you any money. From there, you can structure your online store in a way that puts the top products at the forefront and makes the others more difficult to find.
This might include strategies like:
- Creating hero banners for your best-selling products.
- Making dedicated product pages for your top sellers.
- Pushing less profitable items to the bottom of your page, forcing customers to scroll all the way down to find them.
Not only does this help boost sales by pushing your most profitable products, but it also creates a better customer experience by making it easier for them to find the products they already know and love.
Pro-Tip: How To Know Which Products To Push
Now, if you’re a brand new eCommerce startup, you might find it difficult to identify which products to push in your store. In that case, we recommend taking an SKU-based approach to eCommerce merchandising. This uses data from your social media marketing channels and Shopify metrics to determine which SKUs produce the biggest results for your brand.
You can learn more about this process in our in-depth guide: [link]
Creating an eCommerce Marketing Plan: The Basics
Once you’ve identified your targets and the products you want to promote, you can start building a specially tailored eCommerce marketing plan around these items. These days, there are a lot of social media platforms and marketing channels available for eCommerce businesses, like TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube. But for brands who are just starting to build traction, we suggest focusing on the two biggest advertising platforms, Facebook and Google. Both of these platforms have a strong track record for eCommerce success and come with tons of metrics you can use to optimize your results.
Facebook Marketing
Even with the rise in popularity of other social media platforms, Facebook remains the leader when it comes to eCommerce marketing. However, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be strategic in the way you approach your marketing efforts on this platform. Many businesses make the mistake of funneling too much money into ineffective ad campaigns on Facebook, causing them to run out of funds before they can yield the desired results.
To avoid these pitfalls, there are some important steps you need to take:
Use Cost Caps
Cost caps are among the best features available to brands on Facebook ads. This manual bidding tool allows you to specify how much of your advertising dollars Facebook can spend on any particular campaign based on your metrics, allowing you to optimize your ad spend and protect your budget.
Without cost caps, Facebook operates using an automation system that pushes dollars into each marketing campaign regardless of its ROAS. Even though this is an easier option, it leaves you with no control over where your ad dollars are going.
Alternatively, manual bidding gives you full control over how your money gets spent. For example, suppose you tell Facebook that you only want to spend money on marketing campaigns that are generating a specific ROAS. In that case, the platform will move more money into campaigns that meet your targets and away from those that aren’t. Ultimately, this gives you the freedom to maximize your investments and increase your conversion rates just by taking advantage of this tool.
Set CACs
Another tool you can utilize on Facebook is setting a particular CAC or cost to acquire customers, which measures the amount of money it takes to acquire one new customer for each ad you run on Facebook. Obviously, acquiring new customers is incredibly important for new eCommerce brands that don’t have a large customer base just yet. So, we recommend setting a CAC limit for your marketing campaigns on the platform. This keeps you from spending too much on ads with a high CAC and allows you to focus more on ads that produce high-quality leads without excessive costs.
Generate More Data
Source :- https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/help/770303663944673
Now, you’ll need to remember that Facebook is a data-driven platform, which means that the
more information you have in your Facebook ad account, the more you’ll able to use these tools to your advantage. If you’re limiting your manual bidding efforts through cost caps and CAC limits, you might notice that Facebook stops pushing your campaigns entirely. That’s because the platform simply doesn’t have enough data to make good use of your funds. In that case, we’d suggest opening your cost caps for a limited period of time, allowing Facebook to run enough ads to collect the data needed to use manual bidding effectively.
Our motto when dealing with Facebook marketing is that no spend is always better than a bad spend. That means that you’re always better off saving your money than wasting it on campaigns that aren’t producing results.
If you want more insight on how to get the most out of your Facebook marketing strategies, check out our guide .
Google Ads
While Google is a bidding-driven platform like Facebook, it operates slightly differently. Instead of focusing on marketing campaigns, Google is fueled by organic search engine optimization or SEO. Basically, you’ll be bidding on keywords in the hopes of boosting your eCommerce website higher up in the rankings.
For new businesses, we always suggest starting with branded keywords rather than more general ones. This includes your brand name and other variations that include the types of products you’re selling.
For example, one of our most notable clients is a mushroom tea brand called Dirtea. When we first started working with them, we focused on bidding on the keywords Dirtea, Dirtea mushroom coffee, and Dirtea mushroom tea. In doing so, we were able to build their customer base by pushing shoppers who might have already heard of the brand directly to their website. This is a great approach for brands that have already made some sales but are still working on establishing consistent customer loyalty.
If you want to take your Google strategy one step further, there are a few other options you can put your advertising dollars into.
- Search: Text-based keywords that boost your brand’s ranking in organic search engine results.
- Shopping: Ads for specific products that show up in the Google shopping tab.
- Display: Visual ads that appear on websites with relevant content to your brand.
- Video: Long-form video content from YouTube that appears in your brand’s search results.
- Discovery: Reaching new customers by appearing in their feeds on YouTube, email promotions, and other social media tabs.
Depending on how much you have to spend, you can take a more aggressive approach to Google advertising by using one, two, or even all of these options. The only drawback to this is that the ROAS significantly decreases each time you funnel money into one of these avenues, which means you’ll need to be extremely strategic as far as what you decide to utilize.
How To Build A Creative Strategy That Sells
When it comes to marketing campaigns, there are two main ad categories you’ll need creatives for, branded and performance. Branded ads are designed to boost your overall brand awareness within your target audience, whereas performance ads are made to convert sales. From an eCommerce marketing perspective, we strongly believe that focusing on performance ads is the only viable option, especially for startups.
Ultimately, there’s only one KPI or metric that matters when it comes to growing your business: the number of clicks that actually turn into sales. Without strong sales, your eCommerce brand can fall apart before you ever reach the brand awareness stage.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t slowly progress towards more branded ads in time. A good rule of thumb is to focus solely on performance until you reach the $10 million in revenue threshold. At that point, you’ll have enough resources at your disposal to grow your brand’s presence and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
Our Performance Ads Process:
Now, you could start running ads right away and relying solely on trial and error to boost sales. Still, we find that taking a systemic approach to producing ad creatives is the best way to generate results and multiply them again and again.
Here’s how it works:
Customer Personas
The more specific your customer avatar or persona is, the more of an impact you’ll be able to have in your target market. One of the easiest ways to gain insight into your customers’ lives is by using your existing email list to conduct customer reviews and interviews.
If you don’t already have subscribers in your email marketing list, you can also visit social media platforms that are popular with your target audience and engage with potential customers through these channels.
Either way, your goal should be to deeply understand your customer’s likes, dislikes, lifestyles, and, most importantly, why they need your product.
Marketing Angles
With the information gained from building your customer persona, you can start experimenting with different ad angles. Essentially, the ad angle is the primary selling point that you’re using to move your customer through the buying process.
One analogy that we often use is a customer buying drill. In this case, the customer isn’t buying a drill because they really want to have one. Instead, they buy it because they need to put a hole in their wall. So, some of the ad angles might be how easy it is to use or how precise the drilling capabilities are.
Whatever angle you choose, make sure that it reflects what your customer actually needs out of your product rather than the product itself.
Ad Formats
Next, you need to pick the right ad format to get your message across. Depending on your advertising platform, these formats include video ads, interactive ads, animated ads, infographics, and other dynamic visual styles.
Ad Creatives
Finally, you can start building ad creatives for your marketing campaigns. Ad creatives can take on many different styles, but all of them should include a clear ad angle, call to action, and should ultimately lead customers back to your landing page or eCommerce store to checkout.
If you need some help finding inspiration for your ad creatives, check out some of our favorite templates here:
Ad Iterations
Once your ads are running, you’ll be able to start collecting data on their performance, including click-through rates, conversion rates, and more. This allows you to create ad iterations or different versions of an ad that change just one element at a time.
For instance, if you have an ad creative that is receiving a lot of engagement but isn’t converting into sales, you could try running an iteration with a different CTA and determining which one performs better. Taking this approach to A/B testing gives you the power to produce ad creatives at scale, even if you don’t have a huge budget.
Other Marketing Avenues To Explore
Our creative process was designed around pay-per-click or PPC ads. However, there are other cost-effective marketing strategies you can take advantage of alongside traditional ad campaigns.
Content Marketing
Content marketing uses either user-generated content, UGC, or self-produced content to draw more potential customers to your brand. This includes things like blogs, podcasts, tutorials, product reviews, and other content your audience might find organically.
Influencer Marketing
If an influencer is relevant to your audience, you can collaborate with them on their social media account and attract attention from their followers. Just make sure that the influencers you choose to work with are a match for your brand.
Email Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the best ways to turn first-time visitors into loyal customers by building an ongoing relationship with them. You can also use email campaigns to run referral programs, offer VIP sales and other exclusive deals.
Using A PNL To Gauge Your Goals
With all of that done, you can start assessing your progress with the help of a PNL or profit and loss sheet. If you’ve never made a PNL sheet for your business, you can follow along with our easy-to-use template
PNL sheets are the ultimate tools when it comes to determining the success of your business and can help you answer some of your most burning questions, like:
“Is my pricing strategy effective?”
“Am I getting a good ROAS on my marketing campaigns?”
“Where can I maximize my earnings?”
These questions are the missing link between where your brand stands right now and where you want your profits to be.
Final Thoughts
Running an eCommerce brand on platforms like Shopify or Amazon can be overwhelming, especially for startups. Our team is here to help you meet your growth goals and take your profits to the next level. Connect with us today to learn more.