Digital Marketing Agency

Written by: Guadalupe Stanley

It’s no secret that online shopping is a fun and convenient way for people to purchase everything from décor to tech gadgets and beyond. And while there are plenty of big corporations offering products, more buyers than ever are ready to support small businesses.

Make sure you’re one of them by dedicating a little extra time to your online presence. The five steps below can expand your circle of customers beyond supportive family and friends, allowing you to reach people who genuinely appreciate what you have to offer.

Start a blog for extra information

Many fledgling small businesses rely on offline networking. You may talk to friends about what you have to offer, or you might carry around business cards to hand out at functions. These are great starting points.

However, most people will want a lot more information before they buy. Don’t assume everyone will want you to just tell them the benefits face-to-face – especially if they’re in a rush.

Start an online blog so potential customers have time to learn about your product or service. Make posts about yourself, your business, and your specialty to establish trust at their pace.

Rely on email marketing

A blog is also the perfect place to capture email addresses. Email marketing can be incredibly effective, and business owners usually feel more comfortable with it. After all, you know that anyone who gives you their email address expects you to reach out.

A free service like Sendinblue makes it easy to handle email marketing.

You can use templates to create sales messaging or newsletters, then have the service send out coordinated email blasts. It’s the perfect way to stay in touch, share new releases, and promote upcoming sales.

Make your brand memorable

When you’re ready to embark on promoting your business, it’s important to have a clear brand. What does this mean?

For one thing, it means you have a clear image. Using the same color palette and logo (check out this free tool if you don’t have one yet) will help you be recognized across platforms.

You can also decide the kind of language and tone you want to use in your writing. Is your business serious and straightforward, or do you need to be trendy and approachable? Figure this out early on for consistency.

Set up social media profiles

If you haven’t already, it’s time to set up social media profiles. This doesn’t mean using your personal Facebook account to sell – it means setting up pages just for your business.

Most online stores should be active on at least three social platforms. There are probably far more choices than you realize. But choosing three or more of the top sites will expand your reach and help customers discover you.

As a rule of thumb, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram are the best places to start.

Participate in your niche

Finally, make sure you connect with others in your niche. Use your business’s social profile to connect directly with potential customers.

You can (and should) follow your competition or brands you admire.

Sharing resources from respected names will show your customers that you’re in-touch, credible, and ready to help. And when you can, don’t be afraid to pitch in your own thoughts and products.

 This is all you need to begin growing your ecommerce store in 2021. And best of all, none of them require you to cut into your profits for growth. Instead, you’ll rely on your own words and simple actions to find success.

Whether you have 10 regular customers or 100, using these steps will help you climb closer to your goals than ever before.

This is part 1 of how to successfully create a PPC campaign. In order to make easier for novices we mainly concentrate on Google Adwords. This chapter describes all the PPC terms you should know before diving in to latter chapters.

PPC (pay per click) or CPC (cost per click) –is contextual advertising that is targeted either by a prospect searching for keywords within your campaign or visiting pages with a relevant content to your campaign. Advertiser pays when a prospect clicks on the advertisement.

Click through Rate (CTR) -ratio of clicks on an ad to impressions of the ad. Higher CTR rate means that advertising campaign is highly targeted and can lower your CPC costs within ad networks such as AdWords

Conversion-term used to describe an action needed to be performed by a visitor to achieve website’s final goal. Examples of conversion can be: registration, completed sale, information request. Good SEO companies will use the amount of Conversions as a key performance indicator

Conversion Rate –is a percentage of website’s visitors either paid or organic that perform the action defined as a conversion. Most of the tracking systems like Google Analytics and Google AdWords allow you to track your conversion rate, by setting appropriate goals

Conversion Optimization –set of techniques used to increase conversion rate. Techniques can include: creating more targeted ads, creating more targeted content, creation of customized landing pages, usability tweaks and creation of strong call to action

Cost Per Acquistion (CPA) –also known as Cost Per Action. A ration total cost to bring a traffic to the website to the amount of conversions. For example if you spent $100 on AdWords campaign and two people converted from the campaign, your CPA will be $50

Click Fraud – is illegal technique to manipulate CPC by either competitors or publishers to increase their revenue. It is estimated that at least 5% of any CPC campaign is click fraud. A good SEO company will try to monitor these clicks and file for refund

Quality Score-an arbitrary score from 1-10 given by AdWords to determine the relevancy of your advertising campaign. The higher the score is the lower amount an advertiser pays for a click. All of our advertisers have a Quality Score 7-10

Keyword relevancy – Every campaign starts with keyword research and success of the campaign depends on it. It is a rookie mistake to try and stuff couple of thousand somewhat relevant keywords in one AdGroup. In reality successful campaigns have up to 25 highly relevant and well searched keywords in one AdGroup

Ad Relevancy – Once relevant keywords are found and broken up in small groups a highly targeted ad needs to be attached to every group. Again it is a rookie mistake to use same ads for each group. Successful ad will include keywords inside it and will have a strong call to action

Landing Page- Google goes as far as checking your website in order to determine how relevant your ad campaign is. One of the common mistakes is to point advertising campaign to a home page. Targeted landing page for each AdGroup allows an advertiser not only to optimize their conversion rare, but also to maximize their Quality Score.

Related:

Part 2. Quality Score Factors