The Complete Guide To Marketing Channels

The best way to set your ecommerce business apart from the competition is with an excellent marketing strategy. This free eBook guides you through the top ecommerce marketing channels that every entrepreneur should know about.

Introduction

One of the best ways to set your ecommerce shop apart from your competitors is to learn how to effectively market your business. There are a lot of different ins and outs to each marketing channel, and the more you know the better you can tailor your approach to achieve your business’s goals.

This eBook lays out the nuances for getting started on today’s most widely used marketing platforms including: Facebook, Instagram, email, Reddit, Google Adwords, and Twitter. When combined with a bit of know-how and strategy, each can help you grow your online shop to new heights.  

Facebook Ads

A well placed Facebook Ad can attract your exact target or niche audience and, therefore, draw the right people to your site, ultimately helping you to generate more sales. Facebook records very detailed data about its users’ interests, demographics (age, gender), location, and behaviors, which allows you to harness the information to the benefit of your dropshipping ecommerce business.

For these reasons and more, Facebook Ads can yield a solid return on investment (ROI). It is also possible to test your ads in short daily increments to see whether it’s worth investing your time and money in them. This gives you a good amount of control over how your budget is getting used.  

We recommend starting your first ad campaign with this channel because it provides a great jumping off point for understanding how to utilize other ones down the line.

How It Works:

Facebook Ads operate on a bidding system where advertisers compete for space to display on a given page targeting a specific audience. In other words, there are two variables to factor in: audience and placement. You can bid based on different dimensions including cost per 1000 impressions and cost per click.

As for placement, start by choosing between Mobile and Desktop ads. Mobile ads have a higher click through rate (CTR) than their counterparts. Keep in mind, however, that they are only useful for your purposes if you have a mobile-friendly site. If your store operates on a Shopify theme, rest assured that it is already mobile-friendly.

Desktop ads come in two varieties: News Feed and Sidebar. According to data collected by AdEspresso, News Feed ads tend to get more engagement but require you to have a Facebook page. Meanwhile, Sidebar ads typically come with more limitations. It’s best to focus on one of these at a time because of Facebook’s auto-optimization settings, which will typically favor Mobile ads if you have these running simultaneously with another ad placements. Also note that while in general terms, it is possible to create Facebook Ads without a profile, you have less freedom in this scenario. For one, you can only display on the right hand column on Facebook, use a single image as your ad format, and use Traffic as your only advertising objective.

You may also want to consider disabling the audience network setting because, according to Oberlo blog contributor and Facebook ads aficionado, Adomas Baltagalvis, “they include third party apps and websites that are outside of Facebook and usually don’t generate the results you want. What’s worse, you can’t control the context of those websites, so your ad might be showing up to the right audience but on a very strange piece of content.” For now, we’ll just accept that this feature is still under development.

Making Your Campaign:

At this point in time, we’ll focus on News Feed and Mobile ads, which break into the following varieties: link, photo, page post ads, multi-product/carousel ads, and video ads.

Page Posts are essentially like a personal Facebook post in that they appear on a users’ newsfeed just as a friend’s status update would. Multi-product/carousel ads are a bit more dynamic in that they include multiple items and photos within a single advertisement. As the name suggests, video ads contain an automated video clip that plays in the newsfeed without sound unless a user deliberately clicks on it.

Set Your Objectives

For each ad type you can choose among 15 objectives including Clicks to Website, Page Post Engagement, and Website Conversions. The latter is best for generally upping the number of email signups and purchases related to your site. The beauty of Facebook Ads is that the platform will optimize your advertisements based on the objective you select, effectively showing it to users who are most likely to respond the way you want them to. Baltagalvis also notes, “if you’re promoting an online store, you’ll want to choose either the Send People To Your Website or the Increase Conversions objective because Facebook will optimize for ….website conversions [automatically].”

Choose Your Target Audience

The next thing to consider is your target audience.This may just be the most important aspect of Facebook advertising. Facebook Ads allows you to edit the demographic details of the people who will be exposed to your advertisement. You can adjust based on gender, location, age, language, interests, and more. We recommend making multiple specific ads rather than attempting to target different groups with the same one. Moreover, it’s best to avoid generic categories like nature, sports, or food. In the beginning, it’s crucial that you get to know your audience’s interests, but be sure not to make assumptions about their demographic characteristics.  

Of course, bear in mind that your approach will vary depending on what it is that you’re selling. For instance, if you are selling diet pills it’s advisable not to opt for categories like “medicine” or “pharmaceuticals.” In this case, we recommend narrowing in on more specific categories like “weight loss,” “diet,” and “dieting,” as well as relevant trending topics related to things like “teatox,” “garcinia cambogia,” and “green coffee beans.”

Unless you plan on spending hundreds a day on your ad campaign, using broad tactics will likely never work. As a general rule of thumb, try to opt for more specific categories like audience size when choosing between different interests. The optimal audience size for the purposes of an ecommerce shop is around 500,000. When seeking to understand who your target audience is and where to reach them, the following seven question methodology will help to keep you on track in understanding the audience you want to target:

1. Who are the authority figures, thought leaders, or big brands in your niche?
2. Which books, magazines, and newspapers does your ideal customer read?
3. Which events do they attend?
4. Which websites do they frequent?
5. Where do they live?
6. Which tools do they use?
7. What is completely unique about this group?

Once you’ve launched your ads, be sure to utilize the Audience Insights tool to explore which target groups are right for your purposes. It will also help you further discern the target audience’s interest areas, behavior on Facebook, and demographics. The Narrow Interests feature will also allow you to reach target groups by tacking on additional interests to the ones you have set in your detailed targeting section.

Create Your Ad

There are a few different ways to create your ad, including Boost Your Post, Power Editor, and the Ads Manager.

1. Boost Your Post is easiest but has the fewest targeting options
2. Power Editor is the most advanced but typically too complicated for anyone just starting out with Facebook Ads
3. Ads Manager falls somewhere in between, which is why we’ll be sticking to it in this eBook.

For our purposes, let’s stick to the Ads Manager as it is the most commonly used option.

To start, simply log on to your Facebook account, go into your Settings, and select the Ads Manager button on the lower right-hand side of the screen. Set up your ad account, and then you’ll be prompted to fill in your business information and ad preferences. You can also designate other people to have access to the ad settings from this section.

Note that campaigns are broken down into individual ad sets, allowing you to adjust different components of your campaign.

This phase of the process is also when it’s time to upload up to six product photos or video content and to design your headlines as well as your post text. Be sure to enter a newsfeed link description here, too. This way, the audience can navigate back to your site. Lastly, select a call-to-action (CTA) button at the bottom of the ad menu.

Note: the Carousel option is ideal for promoting multiple products that fall within the same category, while the Page Post option is better for singular items.

For those looking to get a bit more advanced, Power Editor isn’t out of the realm of possibility, though it usually takes a bit of practice to master. Dedicating some time and effort to the task will put more customizable features at your fingertips.

For more detailed information on launching your first campaign, check out our video tutorial.

Decide Your Budget

Next, it’s time to fill in your billing information and to set your budget. There is no golden rule about how much money you should or shouldn’t spend on your Facebook Ads campaign, as the process involves a good deal of trial and error while you figure out which advertisements are most suitable for a given product. Just about every source will tell you a different suggested budget but we recommend simply going with the amount that you’re comfortable spending given your means. To start out, stick with the default automated bidding option as well instead of trying to do this manually.

Further, while some might advise you to orient your budgeting decisions around cost per click (CPC), this metric is actually not the best assessment of the true success of your ads. Therefore, we recommend focusing on click through rate (CTR) and cost per action (CPA) instead. This is because the number of people who click an ad does not necessarily have much bearing on your sales, while CTR and CPA are more directly linked to the number of sales you make. Your real aim, after all, is getting conversions from your ads, not mere clicks.

Your ad campaign will run continuously by default, and we suggest leaving it this way until you can make data driven decisions about the performance of the ad after it’s been displayed for at least a few days.

Measuring Success:

Finally, after you’ve begun running your ads, be sure to check back in every couple of days to assess how well they’re are doing. Don’t hesitate to shut down ads that aren’t performing as well so that you can invest more into what’s actually serving you. Do this by checking Facebook Ad reports and entering the seed audience you are interested in analyzing. At a glance, it can be difficult to tell whether your ads are performing ‘well’ or not, so we suggest determining this metric by comparing them to each other. As a rule of thumb, aim to achieve at least 1% click-through rate on Desktop and News Feed ads and at least 2% on Mobile News Feed ads.

Dimensions worth considering are conversions (how many people took your desired action), reach (how many have been exposed to your ad), cost (per action or conversion)*, frequency (how often your ad is shown to a given Facebook user), and click-through rate (what proportion of people clicked on your ad). Pay attention to the images you use as well, as this often serves as another big determining factor of ad performance. It’s also worthwhile to explore the Breakdown dropdown menu in order to assess how your ads are performing based on various demographic characteristics.

*Note: for the cost per action/conversion metrics you’ll need to implement the Facebook pixel feature. Find detailed instructions for doing so here.

Helpful Resources:

Why You’re NOT Wasting Money on Facebook Ads

An Introduction to Facebook Ads for Ecommerce

Powerful Facebook Marketing Tips From Respected Marketers

Seven-Figure Dropshipper Paul Lee’s Facebook Ads Formula

The Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Advertising (April, 2017)

Instagram

While Facebook is often presented as the go-to for ecommerce entrepreneurs looking to advertise their products, Instagram is definitely on the rise as one of the trendiest and most important marketing channels out there. Instagram is a social network dedicated to the sharing of photo and video content.

The market is still relatively unsaturated in comparison to social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, so it’s a great time to take advantage of this resource. What’s more is that as of 2017, 70% of Instagram users have sought out a company through this platform, and 62% follow at least one company’s profile. Instagram marketing is a great way to get in touch with your customers through visually stimulating content. More than 700+ million people are on Instagram, and it has one of the highest levels of engagement between users and brands. The visual focus makes this a great creative way to promote the products in your shop and solidify your brand in the minds of your customers. Below are some things to be mindful of when using Instagram for business. 

How It Works:

Aside from posting visually pleasing content, you can also boost engagement by featuring customers in your feed, hosting giveaways, and encouraging your community to utilize hashtags related to your business.

Instagram also invites the opportunity to reach your target audiences in organic ways via influencer marketing. Before Instagram Ads became an option in 2015, influencer marketing reigned supreme as the primary way to advertise products on this social media platform. While the number of options for advertising on Instagram has increased, influencer marketing still provides a seamless way to reach your target audience. That said, it often requires that you have some startup capital or products to give away for free in return for a shoutout on said influencer’s account. Not to mention, you relinquish a good deal of control once the product is in the hands of your selected influencer.

Meanwhile, Instagram Ads are quickly gaining momentum as an alternative to influencer marketing. From the Facebook Ad settings, you can sync your Instagram account, which will cause the same advertisements to show up on this platform as well. Plus, being that Facebook now owns Instagram, Instagram’s own ads system operates quite similarly, which means that it has been proven to work and that it is easy to extend your marketing campaigns to this venue.

Making Your Campaign:

Keep in mind that one of the key considerations to make before getting started with Instagram advertising is to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly since the vast majority of traffic generated from Instagram will be from mobile users.

Build a Following Organically

You may also want to make an Instagram account to benefit from the advertising opportunities that exist from building a community organically on this platform. Fill in the profile information and update your feed often with photos that utilize hashtags. Engage with other accounts and with customers by liking and commenting photos on a regular basis. Be sure to link your Instagram to your website.

Paid Advertising on Instagram

To get started with using paid ads on Instagram, you simply need a Facebook account from which you can add Instagram to your Business Manager. From here, the ad creation process is very similar to what you’d find on Facebook. Start by linking your Instagram account to your Facebook page in the Facebook Ad settings by navigating to the Instagram Ads section via the menu on the left-hand side of the page. Next, all you have to do is select “Add an Account.”

Bear in mind that there are currently 4 options for advertising on Instagram: photo, video, carousel, and stories.

From here, follow the prompts to enter your account information. Once you’ve laid this groundwork, you’re ready to create your campaign. Again, this process is essentially the same as it is for Facebook Ads.  

Set Your Objectives

First, select your marketing objective from the following options:

• • • Brand awareness
    • Local awareness
    • Reach
    • Traffic
    • Engagement
    • App installs
    • Video views
    • Lead generation

• Conversions

• Product catalog sales
• Store visits*

(Note that the bolded options *require Facebook Pixel.)

(Most likely you’ll want to use the conversion options as your objective because these are most closely connected to driving sales.)

From here, you can choose which types of conversions you are specifically aiming for. (ex: Purchase)

Choose Your Target Audience

Next, it’s time to select your target audience. This portion is almost identical to Facebook. Of course, it’s also possible to set a custom audience based on people that have already interacted with your brand, via your website, Facebook account, subscribing to your email list, etc. Select your custom audience here if you prefer to reach out to this group.

Create Your Ad

Now, just like with Facebook, it’s time to decide your ad’s placement on the Instagram platform. Choose between Feed or Stories.

Decide Your Budget

To finalize the creation of your Instagram Ad, set your budget and schedule your posts. Like Facebook Ads, in the beginning, we recommend starting out with a lower budget as you assess which ads are performing best. Hit continue and select the formatting you’d like your ads to have. Choose from carousel, single image, single video, slideshow or canvas (allows you to mix photo and video content).

Measuring Success:

Keeping track of how well each ad is doing is easy with the help of the Ads Manager tools.

Helpful Resources:

Instagram Marketing Tips to Shoot Up Your Sales

How to Use Instagram for Your Dropshipping Business

A Step-by-Step Guide to Advertising on Instagram

Infographic: How to get Your First 1,000 Followers on Instagram

The Exact Formula For Growing Your Personal Brand on Instagram (With Examples)

7 Ways to Turn Instagram Into an Ecommerce Purchasing Powerhouse

Instagram Ads: How to Successfully Sell Your Products

The Beginner’s Guide to Advertising on Instagram

Instagram Marketing Strategy: All The Secrets You Need to Know About

Instagram Posts: 10 Unique Ideas That Help Convert Cold Traffic

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the fundamental channels for keeping engaged with people who have already expressed interest in your brand. You are able to reach out directly to these individuals with updates and sales that can encourage them to revisit your site and make additional purchases. After all, it is far cheaper to generate sales from existing customers than from new ones. There are myriad approaches to email marketing, and equally many reasons for contacting those on your mailing list. For example, you can send an automated email to people who have abandoned their shopping carts on your site, or even launch a drip campaign, delivering tailored content directly to your customers’ inboxes.

The beauty of email marketing is that you’ve already refined your audience to people who willingly gave you their emails out of interest in your business. It’s no wonder why email has the highest ROI of all marketing channels. Plus, almost 3 billion people worldwide have email accounts, which even surpasses the user base of Facebook. Email marketing’s click-through rates (CTR) are also substantially higher than those of Facebook or Twitter for example, averaging at around 3.42% when the latter’s are stuck wallowing below 0.2%. This is one of the most lucrative advertising channels with an extraordinarily high ROI when the right strategies are employed. Not to mention, it is one of the cheapest marketing options, and there are many free and easy tools and services available to help you stay organized including Constant Contact, MadMimi, and Campaign Monitor.

You have ownership over your email list in a way you do not on other platforms where you are merely a user with a profile, meaning it is a more robust channel where fewer factors are outside of your control, particularly your access to the audience you build since you can always store your email contacts onto your computer for safekeeping.

How It Works:

Once you’ve acquired someone’s email, you know you already have a foot in the door when it comes to generating conversions. They’ve subscribed to your email list because they were at least marginally interested in what you’re selling. This is a great thing, and it can help you to tailor your email marketing campaign strategies. That said, do keep an eye on your email list, assuring that those subscribed have been engaged with your brand within the past few months to ensure that the campaigns are as relevant to your audience as possible. This will improve your delivery rates, even if you are sending emails to less people. One great way to ensure this is by building the list of contacts that have subscribed to your newsletter.

The best email marketers know how to send compelling content at the right times with actionable messaging (especially in your subject lines), which ideally appeals to your customer’s emotions. According to Oberlo contributor, Raghav Haran, ask yourself the following questions when creating email marketing content, “What does your product allow your customer to do? How would they feel as they use it?”

Making Your Campaign:

Segment Your Audience

First off, sort your customers, known as “segmenting,” so that you can create more personalized email marketing campaigns that suit different sets of motives. Do this by first identifying the different stages in the lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with your shop, known as the “buyer’s journey.” Perhaps they subscribed because they are existing customers interested in receiving discounts or updates about new products to purchase. Maybe they were prospective customers who abandoned their carts before committing, or possibly they are first time buyers who you wish to reward with a product discount for recommending your shop to a friend. By figuring out these different groups, you’re better able to generate emails based on the behaviors you’d like them to perform.

Choose an Email Provider

From here, you can use email systems like Constant Contact to create multiple campaigns, which are based on the criteria you’ve identified. Segment different customers based on various factors including purchase history or point in time when the customer purchased last. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that using an email provider will improve your email bounce rate, deliverability, and mobile readiness. These systems automatically help you to format your emails so that you don’t have to worry about handling the design yourself or relying on the email clients themselves (ex: gmail, Yahoo), which don’t always get it right.

Writing Your Emails

There are many different varieties of emails used in this marketing channel, but some of the most popular are:

• Welcome emails
• Abandoned cart emails
• Win-back/reward emails
• Seasonal/promotiona/salel emails
• Triggered email series
• Transactional emails

The two most important things to keep in mind when crafting your emails are the subject line and the call-to-action button.

• • Subject lines are absolutely crucial to the success of your email marketing campaign. Most of us are subscribed to dozens of email lists, and it’s imperative that your emails stand out from the rest if you actually want people to open them. Apply the following helpful tips when writing yours:
    • Keep the subject heading under 50 characters so they don’t get cut off on mobile devices.
    • Draw the reader in with an enticing line (could be comical or mysterious).
    • Use actionable language in the subject line.
    • Add personalization tokens (include the name of the recipient, as this has been shown to boost click-through rates). Otherwise, send emails on birthdays or find other creative ways to make your emails tailored to customers as individuals.
    • Keep it from looking spammy (too many exclamation points, all caps, laying it on too thick with sales buzzwords).

• Regarding the Call-to-action button, make sure to include at least one or two large ones in the email. Chances are that people won’t take the time to read every word of your email. Therefore, the call to action button should be clear, interactive, and enticing. Definitely use action words, which could be as simple as “shop now,” “learn more,” “click here,” “see sale,” or something more tailored to your brand like “buy purple flower today” or “get 50% today only.”

 

Note that while fancy email formatting may make your messaging more visually compelling, data suggests that its impact on a successful email campaign is negligible when compared to the quality of the content itself. This means that you don’t need to get overly hung up on this aspect of your email marketing strategy, at least not when you’re just getting started out.  

Setting the Frequency of Your Emails

Lastly, it’s time to consider the frequency and timing of emails generated within a given campaign. It’s important to find that sweet spot where you’re not sending too few or too many emails within a given month.

Remember to keep in mind that the frequency of emails included in a campaign should take into account whether the audience is simultaneously receiving transactional and empty cart reminder emails from you. Also, note that holidays make great promotional opportunities.

Measuring Success:

A good mailing service like Mad Mimi or Campaign Monitor have all info metrics you need in their dashboards, with customizable options to boot. Some metrics to watch are:

• Open rate (ave. % in the market 16.92%)
• Click rate (ave. % in the market 2.61%)
• Sales $ (ave. revenue per promotional email $ 0.02)
• Bounce rate (ave. % in the market 0.27%)
• Unsubscribe rate (ave. % in the market 0.21%)

Helpful Resources:

Email Marketing for Small Business: How to Get Started

What Is Email Marketing and Why Is It Important?

Email Marketing Strategies to Turn More Prospects Into Paying Customers

How to Get Your First 1000 Email Subscribers for Ecommerce
Email Marketing

Reddit

As the Internet becomes a more pervasive part of our lives, it means that online marketers must cater to the Internet ‘lifestyles’ and personas of their target audiences. There is an enormous opportunity for those who are willing to get creative beyond typical banner ad campaigns. Doing so will allow your ecommerce business to stand out while also attracting just the right traffic to your site. Reddit couldn’t be a more ideal environment for targeting a customer base that is specifically invested in the things you have to offer.

Reddit is a website that functions as a massive network of forums where feeds of discussion grow from posts centered on just about every topic under the sun. The threads typically stem from a question or link to another site, image, or video. With 71 billion page views annually, Reddit is certainly another untapped resource for getting noticed as an ecommerce business. It’s an especially excellent place to start for those who have just opened up shop and don’t yet have the biggest customer base or social media presence to draw upon. Reddit provides direct contact and exposure to audiences that have already been weeded out based on their interest in products like yours.

How It Works:

Using Reddit can easily backfire if you don’t do your research. Redditors are notorious for snuffing out ‘Reddit marketers’ and self-promoters. The Reddit site guidelines even state, “It’s perfectly fine to be a Redditor with a website, it’s not okay to be a website with a Reddit account.” Not only will posting blatant ads in Reddit feeds do nothing to increase traffic on your site, it could actually damage your credibility with any potential customers that view the feed.

That said, learning to successfully navigate this virtual terrain is still worth the payoffs. In fact, business strategist Ariel Rosenstein points out that, “According to research by Shopify, although Facebook drives more sales than any other social networking site, Reddit dominates electronics and appliances ecommerce, accounting for 31% of social media-referred electronics sales.” So how do you reap the benefits of Reddit marketing whilst also avoiding the pitfalls?

Making Your Campaign:

Like other forms of content marketing, you want your posts to be useful to your readers, and let’s be honest; simply self-promoting isn’t doing much for other Redditors. Being disciplined in keeping in line with typical Reddit etiquette is one of the keys to developing credibility as a regular user and not a marketer.

Act as If…
A key to getting this tactic to work is to act as if you are yourself are a seasoned Redditor. Don’t immediately jump into a feed ready to promote, even if you’re doing so through thoughtful content. People will check your post history to see if you just jump from feed to feed looking to attract attention to your site, and it won’t reflect well. Always be open about who you are. A simple way to do this is by choosing a username that accurately represents you and your brand.

Once you get your account set up, have fun with this part of the process and research relevant subreddits where people might be most interested in your ecommerce business. Note that this doesn’t have to be an all-consuming project, either. Just spending a few minutes of your day on Reddit will yield positive results.

Crafting a Post
The next step to successfully marketing through Reddit is to create your post. One approach is to simply fill in the gaps in existing subreddit conversation, proving your ecommerce site’s credibility by displaying that your own expertise on the subject. Do so by contributing useful advice and information about the topic at hand.

You can also take this strategy and start your own thread in the ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) section of the website. This is an excellent way to be transparent about your standpoint as the owner of an ecommerce business, portraying your partiality in a positive light. If, for instance, you sell beauty products, you could open up an AMA where people ask you questions about different brands of mascara. You could aid those interested in comparing prices, quality, and staying power of the various types available on the market. Here, it is appropriate to direct commenters to your site to purchase the mascaras discussed because you will have already won them over with your honesty and knowledge base about what you’re offering.

Another way to provide your fellow Redditors with something of value is to announce promo codes and sales through your Reddit posts. This technique also works best if you create your own thread rather than plugging your sale on existing subreddits, but it’s always a matter of using your judgment. On a logistical note, schedule your posts for peak traffic times. On Reddit these include Sunday evenings, and weekdays at 4pm EST.

Interacting on the Site
Aside from creating your own posts or contributing content to subreddits, there are other ways to solidify your persona and to draw more people to your site. Be sure to respond to other Redditor’s comments and questions regarding your posts. Even the criticisms you receive can serve as a great opportunity to display humility and receptivity to feedback. In addition, replying to people’s comments will compound the activity that your post is receiving.

Keep in mind that Reddit marketing actually works best if you’re willing to let sleeping dogs lie. The ideal scenario is that subredditors up-vote and share your posts for you. Who knows, maybe your content will even get featured on the site’s “front page” thanks to other Redditors.

Measuring Success:

The final step to Reddit marketing is to figure out how best to assess whether you’re reaping the best possible results. Many pro Reddit marketers simply observe the correlations between the times they post to Reddit and the increase of traffic they receive on their sites. Better yet, you can often measure this in the number of people who sign up for your newsletter or even begin making purchases there.

Helpful Resources:

Cracking Reddit: How to Get Thousands of Visitors to Your Campaign with Reddit Marketing

The Marketer’s Guide to Reddit

10 actionable tips for using Reddit for marketing

Everything About Reddit Marketing in One Book

Google AdWords

Every second, Google receives 40k search queries, which totals at a staggering 1.2 trillion searches a year. Google Adwords is the search engine’s own advertising service for paid web traffic, which helps boost the number of visitors you get to your site at a faster rate. Essentially, with Adwords, you can pay money to have your site show up on a search engine results page (SERP) when a given user enters certain phrases and search queries into Google. By harnessing even a tiny fraction of this traffic, you can attract people to your website and ultimately generate more sales.

How It Works:

Choose between Search ads and Display ads. Search ads appear with a small ad icon on the searched page. These are competitive as the more you pay, the more likely your ad will appear at the top of the search results. Meanwhile, Display ads display banner positions on third party websites, which are participating in the Google Adsense program.

With Adword Bidding, you pay Google based on how many times your ad was clicked. When you set up your adwords campaign, you select the price range you are willing to pay per click. If you opt for the automated settings on adwords, this essentially means that Google will choose the bid amount that falls within the budget you set, and then through its algorithm, it maximizes the number of clicks you receive within your budget range based on where the ad is placed.

You will be competing with other advertisers who have selected the same keywords as you, so choose wisely! Luckily there are lots of tools including the Google Keyword Planner that can help you figure out which words to choose, finding a happy medium between relevant terms and not overly competitive ones.

Quality score is also something to keep in mind, which makes Google Adwords a bit more complex than a pure bidding model might be. This metric is based on click through rate and relevancy to the corresponding keywords. For example, A Nike Air ad better take you to a page actually selling Nike Airs!

Making Your Campaign:

Create an Adwords Account

The first step to creating an Adwords campaign is to set up your account. This step is as simple as setting up on any other platform. To begin, simply go to the Adwords page and hit the “Start Now” button in the bottom left corner. Follow the prompts and enter all relevant information. Take special care when it comes to setting up the budget, target audience, bid, and ad sections. Have no fear, however, as we will be covering these portions in detail as follows.

Set Your Budget

When it comes to setting up your budget, it’s up to you to assess how much to spend based on the financial resources you have to work with. That said, keep in mind that the industry benchmark for CPC pricing is around $0.88, and therefore you’ll want to allocate at least $5/day. That amount will still only a bit over 150 monthly views, which is peanuts! We suggest opting for $10/day, as this is probably a bit more reasonable if you want to make an impact on the amount of web traffic you receive. Note also that these numbers vary greatly depending on the country and market in question, and should not be taken too rigidly. In India, for example, the price for CPC might only be $0.01 while using the same KW in the USA could be $1.00. Thus, it’s best to do your own research on this when deciding how much money should be allocated to your Google Adwords campaign.

Choose Your Target Audience

To identify your target audience, you need to segment things based on various factors. The first of which is country, and most experts suggest choosing a single country per ad campaign in order to make it more personalized to that market. Next, we recommend focusing your attention on the Search Network option under the Networks section. 

Keyword Research Part 1

Plug in 15-20 keywords that are relevant to the products you’re looking to sell. Note that with all these areas, you can always go back and adjust them later.  Before we continue, let’s explore the different keyword matching options in a bit more detail. You can also find the full list here.

In the most general sense, note that you can choose between broad, phrase, and exact keyword matches, depending on how narrow you want to go with your ad targeting. Broad matches will show searches with related words and phrases. For instance, if your keyword is “women’s running shoes,” broad match will also include searches with a variation like “ladies’ jogging sneakers.” Because you’re casting a wider net with broad keyword matches, which is the default setting in Adwords, you’ll typically get more traffic with this option.

Consider using exact matches when you wish to hone in on a specific audience that might be more likely to make a purchase. This is the optimal choice if your budget is tight. For the most part, we suggest advertisers stick with broad matches unless you have a particular reason to zero in on a smaller audience. That’s because according to the Google Adwords website with broad matches, “So that you don’t miss out on potential customers, we’ll show you ads for close variations of your phrase and exact match keywords to maximize the potential for your ads to show on relevant searches. Close variations include misspellings, singular forms, plural forms, acronyms, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), abbreviations, and accents. So there’s no need to separately add close variations as keywords.”

Phrase match falls somewhere in between the two. Phrases will match any query with the exact phrase itself but could include broader searches. For instance, if you enter “women’s running shoes,” phrase match will also include options like “red women’s running shoes,” or “women’s running shoes Adidas,” which will broaden your search whilst still keeping your exact keywords in tact.

We also recommend sticking with the “Set to Bid” option under Adwords rather than attempting to manually manage them at this stage in the game. For now, just add some text as a placeholder in the “Text Ad” box. We will return to this later.

Then, enter your payment info, and voila! You’re well on your way to generating your first AdWords campaign.

Keyword Research Part 2

Now that things are set up and operational, it’s time to solidify your keywords by doing a bit of good old-fashioned research. Before you do that, however, take some time to thoroughly brainstorm relevant keywords and jot them down on a piece of paper. The reason we are waiting until after your profile is set up is because you must be signed up on AdWords before you can access Google’s Keyword Planner. The items on your list will serve as the variables that you will be testing in the keyword planner. Plug in your keywords and hit the “Get Ideas” button.

Don’t shy away from starting with the “Ad Group Ideas” tab, which details the most popular combinations of keywords as well as the most relevant ones related to those you entered. After having a look around here, switch back to the “Keyword Ideas” tab, and hit “Add All” followed by “Download.” Once you’ve done that, open excel to assess the keywords based on the number of searches per month. It may seem like a no-brainer to simply choose the top searched keywords, but not so fast. Realistically, you want to select words that fall within your budget, so opt for some of the terms ranked a little bit further down on your list. Remember to stick with the broad match option for the beginning and experiment with the other types of keyword matches later on. Try to keep each ad group down to 20 keywords or less.

Create Your Ad

Use these guidelines to inform the wording you choose to use in your ads as you write them.

• Headline (25 characters only, make them count!)
• Display URL (utilize keywords)
• Text (2 lines, 35 characters each)
• Call-to-action (use actionable language)

Once you’ve managed to get someone to click on your ad, it’s utterly crucial that you put some thought into the landing page where they will be directed. Always, always, always, opt for your product page and not your homepage in this regard. Also, be sure to mimic the keywords used in your ad on the landing page so that the purpose of being redirected here is completely clear to the prospective buyer. The call to action button should be equally direct and intuitive. Keep it simple, with the obvious the purpose focused on buying, as we’ve seen with other marketing channels like email.

Decide Your Budget

While earlier when setting up your Adwords account you entered in your billing information, now it’s time to set your budget for real. Do this by deciding your maximum cost per click (CPC), which should be based on your average gross profit as well as your conversion rate. Essentially, you’ll want to make your CPC lower than your actual profit so you’ll actually generate some income in the end and not just funnel all of your earnings back into your ads.

Measuring Success:

Wait about a week or until you have around 1000 impressions, and then assess your results based on the metrics listed in the Adwords dashboard. You can analyze based on entire campaigns, focus on individual ads, or even zero in on the performance of a specific keywords. The beauty of Google Adwords is in the transparency of the data surrounding each keyword. For example, you can track the exact keywords’ impacts on your revenues as well as the particular kinds of engagement each one is getting. As you can see in the table below, the campaign overview lists many different statistics for understanding how each keyword is performing. As with Facebook Ads, we suggest paying special attention to click-through rate (CTR) and cost per action (CPA).

Helpful Resources:

Google Adwords Tutorial: A Step-by-Step Guide to Your First Campaign

Anyone Can Advertise on Google AdWords and Here’s How

What is Google AdWords and how does it work?

Keyword Research

7 Ways to Write Super-Effective AdWords Ads (with Real Examples)

11 Successful AdWords Ads and Why They Crush the Competition

How to Write the Highest-Performing AdWords Ads, Ever

Twitter

With more than 330 million monthly users, Twitter is undoubtedly one of the most popular social media platforms out there, and any ecommerce entrepreneur would benefit from at least considering it as a marketing channel.

It is excellent for driving engagement and advertising promotional offers. The democratic model itself makes it easy to speak directly with customers and to network your brand. According to Dominique Jackson from Sprout Social, “Twitter thrives off communication.”

How It Works:

There are two main ways to approach marketing on Twitter:

• Organic interactions/community building
• Paid ads

Organic Interaction/Community Building

This tactic involves growing your following and engaging with users in ways that help promote your products and your brand through your presence and activity on the platform. The best way to utilize Twitter as a marketing channel in this regard is by engaging customers in Twitter chats. We cannot stress enough the importance of genuine interaction. The key is to differentiate yourself by offering other members of the conversation useful information, much as you would with Reddit marketing. Jackson goes on to advise, “Your Tweets shouldn’t consist of only headlines with a link, inspirational quotes, or funny statements. They should open the door for communication and conversation.”

Paid Advertising

Paid advertising on Twitter is also growing in prominence. It functions similarly to the paid ads systems on Facebook and Instagram. Twitter ads are optimized as they are on other channels so that they appear to relevant audiences. There are three main types:

• Promoted Tweets
• Promoted accounts
• Promoted trends  

In the following sections, we will cover useful tips and tricks for basing your Twitter ads campaigns around both.

Making Your Campaign:

Organic Interaction/Community Building

Experts regard organic interaction and community building as yet another untapped marketing resource. One underutilized way to approach more organic Twitter marketing strategy is to join Twitter chats relevant to your industry or to start your own based on the niche products you are selling.  It’s a great way to engage with Twitter users who are actually active and interested in what you’re doing. Fill missing niches in your industry by starting your own Twitter chat as well. In this context, be sure not to simply self promote. Instead, add valuable insight and value added content to the conversation. Build your credibility by showing your expertise and that you have something useful to offer other users. Do so by posing AMA style posts with questions, and be sure to follow up with people who post to your thread or respond to your Tweets. This is an excellent way to build relationships and credibility with other users in an authentic way.

As we’ve noted with previous marketing channels (e.g. email marketing), it’s better to have a smaller audience that is actually engaged than a larger one that isn’t. You may even want to keep a list of these people and continue to like/retweet their content and interact with them in the future. This is the key to building your audience.

As for crafting the Tweets themselves, opt for infographics (Canva), images, or videos rather than simple text, and when retweeting links add a bit of commentary. Also, be sure not to underestimate the importance of timing in strategizing your approach to using Twitter to organically build a community. Have special Tweets and content planned ahead for different days. Scheduling your twitter posts using helpful tools like OwnTheMoment and ViralPost (helps you to determine when to Tweet. Take advantage of trending hashtags, and engage via promotional content/encourage retweeting.

Paid Advertising on Twitter

As noted above, Twitter’s paid advertising system works similarly to those of other marketing channels. One you’ve set up your account, take the following steps to prepare your ads campaign.

Set Your Objectives

The first step to starting your campaign is setting your objectives. The beauty of Twitter advertising is that you only have to pay for metrics of your choosing. Select from the list of objectives which ones are most relevant to your desired outcomes.

This means, for example, that if you only select website conversions as your campaign objective, then you will only pay when this metric increases, even if you are simultaneously getting a lot of likes and shares on your content. This allows your campaigns to be customizable based on your needs.

Choose Your Target Audience

Select your target audience based on the following categories:  

• Language
• • • Gender
    • Interest
    • Followers
    • Device
    • Behavior
    • Tailored audience
    • Keyword
    • Geography

Target by keywords, interests, or demographics and then select from accounts with followers who are engaged with similar topics and who display similar behaviors as the followers of the accounts that pop up in the search results.

Note here that it’s best not to be afraid to get your hands dirty and test out different things as you go along. Remember not to make assumptions about your audience until after you’ve run your ads and have data to understand which demographics are responding best.

After you’ve launched your campaign you can always go back and edit the parameters of your target audience by navigating to the Edit Campaign section on the dashboard.

Decide Your Budget

Twitter also works on a bidding system, where you can choose whether your campaign runs on a continual basis or on a specific timeframe where you select from the following pacing options:

• • • Total (optional)
    • Daily max (ads stop being displayed once the budget has been spent)
      • Daily max is then broken down into two parts: standard delivery (default) and accelerated delivery.
      • With standard delivery, ads are displayed on an even keel throughout the day.
    • Accelerated delivery, on the other hand, is designed so that you max out on your budget as soon as possible. This option is good for more time sensitive ads that are based on limited time promotions or related to specific events like holidays. For this option, you will need to choose your start and end dates.

You’ll also want to consider what you’d like your maximum bid amount to be. This will help to set the ceiling of the price per engagement so that Twitter will allot the most possible impressions within your budget range. Check out the platform’s suggested bid tool if you’re not sure where to start. You can use the bulk edit feature to adjust your bid settings, timeframe, and budget after your ads have been launched. Alternatively, you can always stick with the default automatic bid option where Twitter will optimize your budget for the best results based on the objectives you set.

Measuring Success:

Using the campaign dashboard, check the following metrics:

Meta (across all campaigns)

• • Impressions
  • Results
  • Engagement rate
  • Cost per result

Segment by

• • Objects
  • Campaign
  • Individual tweets
  • Targeting criteria
  • monitor campaigns

Helpful Resources:

The Crazy Egg Guide to Twitter Marketing

The Complete Guide to Twitter Marketing

Twitter Ads campaign types

Advertising on Twitter

How Twitter Ads work

Conclusion

Congratulations! Now that you’ve finished this eBook, you have the tools you need to assess which marketing channels are best for your business. It’s time for you to get your hands dirty and to do some experimenting. Let the marketing tips presented here be your guide, and remember the following rules of thumb.

Focus on extrapolating different strategies from across the channels for marking online. For instance, learn performance metrics and analysis via Facebook marketing as these carry over to other channels.

Target a smaller, more refined audience rather than striving for a larger one with people who have little interest in what you’re doing. Offer value-added content over pure, unfettered self-promotion.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to test the waters and try new approaches to marketing, but always do your best to make data-driven decisions. A great marketing campaign is a key to making your business stand out from your competitors, and we’re sure you have what it takes!

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