marketing strategy tips.

This is one that you can't miss if you have an ecommerce store.

Check it out.

Hi, I'm JB with Marketing 360, and we help small businesses

grow with our marketing and design, talent and technology,

through our number one marketing platform, Marketing 360.

We call marketing and design "Mad," and we love Mad.

And hopefully these videos will help you fall in love with Mad

too.

So make sure to follow us to learn tips, tricks,

and strategies to grow your business and fuel your brand.

ECommerce marketing can be super complicated.

There's just so many different things that you can do.

And so in this video, I'm going to break down 12 tips

that we recommend you really focus on first.

If you dial these in, you're going to be successful online.

So let's jump right in.

Tip number one is use a good shopping cart.

There's three shopping carts that we work with clients all

the time that we really love.

And so check these out if you're not already on these carts--

Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce.

These three carts are really good from a perspective of SEO,

design, and also paid search--

so running paid ads, even on social.

It has everything you need to scale your business.

It also has a support team to back you up

when you need the help.

So check out one of those carts if you don't already have them.

Tip number two, spend a tremendous amount

of time optimizing your product pages with

regards to SEO and design.

So what I mean by that is SEO would be a good product

title, OK?

Don't just call it something that only you would know.

Call it something within the title

that people are actually searching online.

So do some keyword research, figure out what people are

searching for-- your products--

and make that part of your product title.

Also, include that in the description of the product.

Write a good description.

Remember, this is your 24/7 salesperson.

Your product page never calls in sick.

It works through the weekends and the holidays.

Every time somebody visits your product page,

they want your perfect sales pitch,

so put some time into that.

Also, product photography, hugely important.

Make sure that photography is really, really clean, smooth,

and a nice design, and professional.

And also, if you can do a product video,

this is massively valuable.

Make sure you invest in doing some product videos to explain

your products in more details.

Final tips here, make sure you have trust badges on the page.

Make sure it says things like you

have fast shipping, free shipping, all of that,

if you have that.

And also, get reviews of your products.

You want to have reviews on your product pages.

Studies show if you have reviews on your product pages, that

can increase your conversion rate significantly, up to 400%,

by having product reviews.

So make sure that you get product reviews on your page.

Tip number three is a little more advanced

with regards to SEO, but it's making

sure you have schema markup on your product pages.

What this means is when somebody searches on Google,

right there on the Google search page--

before they even go to your website--

they're going to see what Google calls product rich cards, which

is going to show your product image and some information

right there on the search page.

This is going to give you an advantage over your competitors

and make you a little more visible organically to people

as they're searching on things like Google.

So here's a quick tip.

If you just Google search "schema markup testing tool,"

it'll take you to a testing tool.

You can just put your product page URL in there,

and it'll tell you if you have the proper schema markup

or not.

If not, there's some warnings and some tips

there on how to make sure you add that.

But if you use one of those carts, BigCommerce, Shopify,

or WooCommerce, they typically have good schema markup

out the gate, and so you can just kind of build upon that.

Tip number four is to optimize your product feed

via Google Merchant Center.

Google Merchant Center is what you're

going to use to run Google Shopping ads, which

we'll get to later, but the product feed

is hugely important.

You're going to want to make sure you have

good information in there with regards to your product

title, the description, the keywords, those sorts of things

so that you're showing up when people

are searching on Google Shopping when you're running your ads.

You don't want to be not in the game when somebody is looking

for your product because your product feed is not

very well optimized.

Tip number five is running Google Shopping ads.

Google Shopping is very, very popular.

People go to Google.

They'll search something like pink shoes,

they'll click the shopping tab, those are all ads.

So if you want to be in that shopping tab, which we highly

recommend, you're going to want to make sure that you are

running Google Shopping ads.

So invest in running product ads.

And then here's a tip, optimize your product ads

based on results.

So if you have ecommerce tracking set up,

you can see the revenue generated from each product.

You can really see your ROI, per product, on your product ads.

What you want to do is as time goes by,

turn off the ads that aren't doing as well,

the products that aren't doing as well,

and increase the budget on the products that are doing well.

This is going to really increase your return

on investment over time.

Tip number six is run dynamic retargeting campaigns

off of your Google Shopping ads and your website visitors

so that people that go to your website and they

browse maybe two, three products, as they're

surfing the internet after that on the Google Display Network--

which has thousands of websites online--

they're going to see banner ads for your brand actually showing

the specific products that they looked at.

So it's a very, very relevant.

This stays top of mind and it kind of just

wears them down until they are ready to buy those products.

They click it, and they purchase on your website.

Also, you can run retargeting on Facebook and Instagram as well.

So if somebody comes to your site, they look around

and they don't do anything, that night when they're

on Facebook kind of looking through their feed, all

of a sudden they'll see an ad for your brand.

This is bringing you back to the top of their mind.

They're like, hey, I didn't have time earlier to put my credit

card in there because I was getting interrupted, but hey,

I do right now on this commercial that's on TV,

so I'm going to buy right now.

So by doing retargeting in a dynamic way,

you're going to bring a lot more sales back to your business.

Tip number seven is to make sure that you're running

Facebook and Instagram ads.

These are huge channels today.

People are on Facebook all the time

so you're going to want to target people on Facebook.

And the targeting is so intense that you can get right

in front of the person that would

be perfect for your product.

So one example like that is, let's

say, that you sell gymnastics equipment to kids, maybe

to girls, in particular.

You could actually target mothers

that make over $50,000 a year that have daughters

that are in gymnastics.

How targeted is that?

If these mothers see these ads, they can afford it, right?

They're making enough money to afford it.

They have daughters in gymnastics.

It just only makes sense.

They're going to like your product

and they're going to understand your brand,

and they're going to eventually buy from you.

So make sure you take advantage of Facebook and Instagram ads.

Those two channels are big breadwinners

for ecommerce stores today.

Tip number eight, invest in your social media organically.

Whether you need to do this yourself or hire somebody

or hire another company, you need

to make sure you have an organic presence on social media.

What that means is you're posting content,

you're engaging on social media.

So not paid ads, but just being involved, being

a part of social media today.

By doing this, this is going to be building your brand

following organically.

So eventually you have 10,000 followers, 100,000 followers.

The more followers you have as you're posting content,

building this awareness, you're only going to get more sales.

Tip number nine is to automate your email marketing.

Email marketing is hugely important.

A lot of ecommerce stores fall short because they

spend a lot of money to get that customer

to make that first purchase, but they

don't re-market to those people via email marketing

and other channels to get them to come back and make

future purchases.

If you could just get each of your customers

to make one more purchase than they normally do,

think about what that does to your revenue.

So with email marketing, it allows us an automated way

to make that happen.

So here's an example, you could set up an automated campaign

for holidays.

You just set this up at the beginning

of the year for the whole year, with promotions

on all these different holidays that automatically get sent

to all of your past customers.

So that's one example.

There's tons of other examples.

Like sending them automated emails

to capture reviews for your products

is another way to build product review content in an automated

way.

If you're creative with your email marketing

and you automate it, this is going

to scale your business so that you

can increase your sales overall and increase

your return on investment on your marketing dollars.

Tip number 10 is invest in SMS marketing.

SMS marketing is text message marketing.

The reason why that's important is because only about 20%

of people will typically open up your emails, sometimes even

less.

And they also won't open it up in real time.

There's a lag there, right?

But with text messages, it's almost 100%

of people open the text message.

And most of them are within a five-minute window.

So that can be really powerful on slow sales days,

on end of the month, times when you need to clear out

old inventory, stuff like that.

So build a VIP text message marketing campaign.

And one way to do this is put a banner

on your site that says, hey, for VIP deals,

text something like hot deals to 39970

to opt in and get an immediate 20% coupon right now.

By doing that, it gets people to opt in to get that coupon,

but now they're in that list for future VIP deals

that you can tap into when you need to.

Tip number 11 is to use a CRM.

So many ecommerce stores don't really have a CRM.

They're actually using the backend of their cart