How to Be Good at Marketing Your eCommerce Store
If you’re not a natural-born marketer, the task of successfully advertising your ecommerce store may be daunting. There are a lot of skills involved that, if they don’t come naturally, can seem impossible to acquire. However, advertising your business is mostly about knowing your strengths, understanding your product, and appealing to your audience. With these tips, even the most nervous, least advertising-oriented business owner can learn how to be good at marketing:
- Know your audiences
- Hone your writing skills
- Include pictures
- Use technology
- Test your campaigns
- Spend money
- Study your data
- Always keep learning
Know Your Audience
The purpose of marketing is to turn consumers into paying customers. In order to do this successfully, your ads have to appeal to their interests. For example, if you run an artisanal butcher shop but you advertise in channels popular with vegetarians, you aren’t appealing to audience interests. The better you know who your desired audience is, the better you can advertise to them. Start with gathering quantitative data such as age, gender, geographic area, income, education level, and more. This will provide a solid knowledgebase around which to structure your marketing efforts. Improve your knowledge further by actually talking to customers. Send out surveys, hold focus groups, and more. Learn about their interests and hobbies, political orientations, preferred methods of communication, etc. Tailoring your ad campaigns to specific audiences rather than creating generic ones is the first step to success.
How to Be Good at Marketing: Hone Your Writing Skills
Not everyone is the next William Shakespeare but, when it comes to marketing, you don’t have to be. In fact, writing clearly is far more important than being poetic. In the world of business, advertising requires a lot of copy. It will be included in your visual ads, social media posts, email campaigns, and more. In every medium, your writing needs to be clear, understandable, and free from grammar and spelling mistakes. If writing is your downfall, taking a class or two can make you much better at it. In addition, as with most skills, practice makes perfect. The more you write and re-write your marketing content, the better it will be. At the very least, learn the difference between “your,” and “you’re,” and find someone to proofread for you.
Include Pictures and Videos
For those budding marketers who absolutely despise writing, you’re in luck. Although learning how to write well will improve the quality of your overall ad campaign, some of the best ads are visual-oriented instead. It’s estimated that when a relevant image is paired with information (information about your business, perhaps?), 65 percent of people remember the information three days later. By comparison, if people hear information but have no visual association with it, only 10 percent remember. When learning how to be good at marketing, teach yourself when a simple visual (photo or video) will be more impactful than a block of text. In many cases, images are able to tell a better story, catch the eye of audiences faster, and increase conversions.
Use Technology
A common misconception held by business owners is that marketing takes a lot of time to do successfully. This belief holds many entrepreneurs back from learning how to be good at marketing at all. However, thanks to the power of technology, most tasks related to advertising can be simplified to take almost no time at all. Gone are the days of designing ads from scratch. Online tools like Canva offer templates to make design work a breeze. Stock photo galleries, like iStock, make it easy to gather copyright-free images. And scheduling apps like Buffer make it easy to spend an hour prepping all of your social media content for the week, rather than spending hours a day doing it by hand.
Test Your Campaigns
When creating an advertising campaign, marketers must make assumptions based on their audience, no matter how well they think they know the audience. Even with all the data in the world, real people are unpredictable and can’t be quantified. Because of this, every time you plan a marketing campaign, you should test it on real members of your target audience. Something you thought was a surefire hit might fall flat, be unknowingly offensive, or have a different meaning in pop culture, sending you back to the drawing board. It’s always best to test your campaign on a small, private group before spending time and money taking it public, only for it to fail.
Spend Money
You may have heard of the old phrase, “you have to spend money to make money.” In the realm of marketing, it’s true. Now, not all businesses have the luxury of spending a million dollars on an ad campaign. However, even a $20 investment into your campaign can make it go a lot further than it would with no money. With $20, you can increase the reach of your posts on social media. You can print flyers on nicer quality paper. You can pay for the rights to a stock song to make your marketing video more emotional. Spend within your means and get creative. A little bit can be stretched a long way.
Study Your Data
Will all of your marketing campaigns be roaring successes? Probably not. But you can sort the wins from the losses, and avoid repeating losses, by collecting and studying data from every campaign. Gather quantitative information like post engagements, link clicks, referral page numbers, bounce rates, related sales, and more. Also collect qualitative data by asking customers to fill out surveys about where they saw your campaign, what caught their eye about it, and more.
Always Keep Learning
The world of marketing is constantly adapting and evolving. Make sure you do the same. Keep up to date on the most popular social media platforms, advertising techniques, and more.
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