We love Facebook and Instagram marketing, it’s honestly one of the best ways of generating new customers and keeping in touch with past customers. But it’s not the holy grail of marketing.
Unfortunately, we’ve seen too many businesses lately but too much of their business in Facebook so that when an ad account goes down, Facebook temporarily stops working for them, or costs start creeping up – it puts the whole business at risk.
So, I’m going to outline some of my other favourite ways to market your business. Everyone always says to just focus on one thing and get really good at it. Unfortunately, in the world of marketing – you want to make sure you have several streams of good quality traffic – which is why hiring assistance can be a huge help!
Let’s get into it!
Email Marketing:
A nice easy one. Email marketing is often under utilised or abused – very rarely do businesses get the mix right here. Have a listen to our podcast episode on email marketing with Klaviyo expert Brynley King here. There are two parts to getting this right – driving new sign ups and sending effective emails and utilising automations.
You want to make sure you’re sending relevant emails with excellent content, not just for the sake of sending 4 emails a week.
Google Ads:
Google Ads are fantastic for products that people are actively searching for. It can be a little harder in the fashion space as competition is SO HIGH. However, if you have a product that’s searchable ie. 100% cotton shorts, blood orange scented candle, llama pot plant – it’s worth giving it a go. Google Ads are also phenomenal for retargeting and pair really well with your Facebook strategy.
I am obsessed with Pinterest as a consumer. For businesses, I love it for traffic – either organic or paid. I find it doesn’t tend to convert to sales as well as some of the other methods, but it is amazing for traffic and can be great at building a brand. It works brilliantly in conjunction with other methods like your email marketing, Facebook ads and Google retargeting.
You need to ensure you have beautiful imagery and if you’re going to use paid ads, you need to ensure you have a solid organic strategy as well. It also requires a lot of creative content which is something to consider.
Tiktok
While everyone thinks TikTok is for the younger generations nearly 50% of it’s users are over the age of 30 – so it really is a market to explore.
Costs are incredibly low right now, which makes it an excellent platform to try out, the only thing you have to keep in mind, make content that matches the platform. You can’t use other content here. It needs to look native to the app which can be a little scary when you’re used to highly polished media.
Influencers
We love a good influencer campaign, they can work so well. They are also incredibly difficult to get right, and most of the time you can’t expect an instant return from day one. Think of this more as a long term journey to build a relationship rather than a once off quick marketing fix.
Things to consider, finding someone who resonates with your brand, preferably one with great engagement of people asking ‘where did you get that’ rather than just ‘heart emojis’, and don’t be afraid to test a few different influencers. You’ll also get more for your dollar if you actually pay rather than just rely on ‘in exchange of product’ type deals.
Competitions
I’m not a competitions expert, for that you’ll need to speak to Suki Van K – you can check out the podcast episode we did with her here. But a competition is an amazing way to build your email list, drive brand awareness and if done well, drive sales. You just need to be very careful about the prize on offer so you only attract ideal customers – no iPads – you’ll just end up with prize pigs instead of potential customers.
Word of mouth
Can you build in more strategies to drive word of mouth referrals? One of our favourite campaigns we’ve seen clients roll out is to ask people to tag your store in their posts on Instagram and Facebook – with a winner drawn each month. It’s a great way to encourage engagement and to increase your word of mouth.
It’s also imperative to have a good review platform on your site, whether it’s the basic Shopify plugin or something more advanced like Okendo! You can use that UGC to help promote your business and encourage that word of mouth.
Sharing posts people have shared about your business on socials is also a great way to encourage interaction! People love to see their content shared and acknowledged.
Wholesale and distributors
This is certainly not something we are experts in, but something some of our clients utilise. Can you wholesale your product or find distributors? It can be a great way to boost sales, although can take more work upfront.
Increase your return purchase rate and average order value
Lastly, one of the best things you can do to increase sales is to increase the number of times people come back to purchase from you and increase the order value when they do. Whether it’s packaging products to increase the number of products ordered, offering incentives to buy more than one product, or creating upsell and bonus products to be purchased on check out – all these can increase your average order value.
To increase the number of times someone purchases from you requires a little more work behind the scenes, you need to have exceptional customer service, a brand people love and are at least a little loyal to, and product that can be repurchased, or new releases that inspire.
So where do you start?
We’ve obviously covered a lot in this article, and while I’m not saying you should go out and implement all of these ideas immediately, it’s worth considering which you can start to add to the mix.
You don’t want to wait till you NEED another marketing strategy to be trying to implement it as it takes time to build these things.
