Marketing…What’s the Big Idea Anyway?

I’m sure now that you have a nice-looking site, you’re wondering why the customers are not just rolling in. In reality, most websites rarely have any traffic at first unless it’s already a known brand. But in most cases, we are building everything from the ground up.

So although the products may be of great quality, the website looks nice, and the prices are affordable; nobody knows that yet….If you think about it, there is a sea of thousands of businesses out there, not even counting local businesses and start-ups all the way to the Big Boys like Amazon. So right now we are a little fish in a huge ocean.

This is You. Say Hi!

So really, even having more than 100 views at this point is an achievement, with absolutely no promotion done. This is probably traffic from immediate friends and family who have got the message through your own announcement if you think about it.

But the goal ideally, is to not just have views, but actual conversions, or $$$. That’s the whole reason why we do this. It’s what keeps the lights on. You can’t pay your rent with views. We all know this much, but a lot of times we think about E-Commerce as a one-and-done type thing…You know, “If You Build It (A Great Website), They Will Come.”

 But the opposite is true in reality…A great website is not enough. Marketing has to be the next step to really put power to this awesome machine we built, which is the website. The great thing is, that there are so many ways to market a brand. Of course, there are conventional means like print ads, radio, TV, etc. But there are much more creative ways such as tapping into the audiences you have already built or building without thinking on social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.

There is also leveraging your contacts and mailing lists and finding some creative ways to interact with them to move them from just contacts to customers and referrals. However, the first step that I always suggest is optimizing the site for search engines, integrating it with the Facebook & Instagram so that users can purchase directly, and working on some content to send out to the mailing lists.

But really the final and ongoing stage is setting a monthly marketing budget that will be used to drive your site in front of customers. With PPC marketing what you put in is what you get out… So for example, if you would like to see $1,000 per month in sales, about 30% of that would need to be set for the marketing budget, or $300 per month. Then you would deduct manufacturing/production costs to cover the order, so lets say maybe 40%, or $400. Then that would leave you the other 30% in profit or $300 out of that $1,000.

Now obviously these percentages may be different based on your actual margin that you are getting when you deduct the price your selling from how much it costs to make. But still the point is thriving businesses always have a portion of their income dedicated to keeping the marketing wheel spinning constantly. As you start to build your brand, it becomes easier and easier to get sales while spending less on marketing. So to get the same results, that original 30% of the budget for marketing may go down to 20%, leaving you 10% more profit. Or you can be more aggressive and reinvest that extra 10% into more marketing to bring in even more sales, lets say $1,500 a month.