Known for their seamless integration with e-commerce websites, the fastest growing social media platform is one of the best places to market your dropshipping business. What makes TikTok marketing so special is how effective both organic and paid advertising is on this platform. Unlike Facebook and Instagram, you can build brand awareness and generate revenues from impulse purchases with TikTok Dropshipping.

Dropshipping On TikTok

While dropshipping with TikTok is “user friendly” it certainly isn’t a free lunch. The greatest benefit of this business model is that a dropshipper can learn and integrate TikTok marketing strategies that business operators lack the time or energy for. Like affiliate marketing, in dropshipping, you dedicate most of your time to driving traffic to your products or website.

In any form of social media marketing, there will be a learning curve required. Success requires an upfront time and focus commitment, but once we lay the foundation, dropship marketing on TikTok becomes an automated process.

Creating Your TikTok Dropshipping Strategy

There are several considerations you need to walk through before you can find winning products to sell through TikTok.

TikTok User base

The most dominant age bracket for a TikTok user is between 20-29 years old. Understanding this statistic helps to determine which category of products to stay within.

Your Area of Expertise

While experienced marketers may sell any product they wish, newer marketers should focus on a product category that they understand. Finding your niche means looking for products that attract the TikTok user base but are distinct enough to stand out from the competition. Your expertise can help you accomplish both needs.

Finding Your Target Audience

While you may have expertise in a field, that doesn’t mean you exemplify the target audience. If you are a 40-year-old fitness influencer, your target audience might be 25-year-old females. Understanding your target audience will help you choose the right product (s) to promote.

Identifying Current Trends in Your Niche

Even if you are aiming for a pattern interrupt marketing approach that stimulates intrigue and interest, you still need to understand the trends in your niche. Returning to the fitness influencer example, they may notice how people are looking for weight loss tips where they can still consume alcohol. This type of information could lead to promoting a pre and post alcohol consumption supplement, mitigating the impact alcoholic calories have on the body.

You can use a tool such as Google trends to determine what is trending. Also, use your intuition by browsing through popular TikTok videos or search hashtags and find out what people are saying.

Where to Find A Winning Dropshipping Product

Dropified, of course! Our Shopify integration makes it easy to find the perfect product for your TIkTok dropshipping initiative. We give you access to platforms such as AliExpress, eBay, Etsy, and more! Finding the right product to promote with Dropified is as easy as click-connect.

Setting Up Your TikTok Dropshipping Store

For those not using TikTok, here’s how to get started with this social media platform.

1. Download the TikTok App on your phone.
2. Set up a TikTok Account with your email, password, and personal information.
3. Hit the edit profile button.
4. Walk through each step to fill out your company information.
5. Once finished, hit the three dots in the top right corner.
6. Then switch your personal account to a business account.
7. Choose your business category and hit save.

Once you have your account set up, it’s time to integrate your ecommerce platform. For this, you will need a Shopify store.

1. Sign up for a Shopify account.
2. Choose a name for your store.
3. Add your company information.
4. Choose a theme for your store.
5. Adjust the theme as needed.
6. Choose your official website URL.
7. Determine the payment methods you will accept.

Now you will need to add your first product to your Shopify online store. Here’s how to do that.

1. Click the add a product button.
2. Enter the complete product name.
3. Create a compelling product description.
4. Upload stock and custom images of the product name.
5. Set your price and, if applicable, a starting inventory.
6. Enter the weight of the product.
7. Add any variants, such as sizes and flavors.

That’s it! You’re now ready to receive customer orders on your website. But wait, there’s one more step. We need to connect your Shopify store to your TikTok account.

1. Type TikTok into the search bar in the Shopify App Store.
2. Install App.
3. Connect your TikTok for Business Account.
4. Connect your Ad Account.
5. Ensure Pixel is Active in TikTok Ads.

Organic Dropshipping On TikTok

Organic TikTok marketing isn’t just good for those starting with a limited marketing budget, every dropshipping business should use TikTok to communicate with users naturally. Social media gives brands the opportunity to create a more human relationship. This is especially true when talking about TikTok users.

Organic TikTok marketing gives you the ability to gain followers through video content. When your TikTok content is interesting, you can earn them as a follower. Then, over time, you can build a strategy to nurture the relationship to the point of earning their business.

Not all organic marketing is free. Once your brand is big enough, you can pay social media influencers to be in your TikTok videos and leverage their followers for a viral effect.

Running TikTok Ads For Dropshipping Products

Creating a TikTok ad isn’t just for established marketers with thousands of followers. The way they set TikTok up, new brands can use TikTok advertising to gain traction with their content.

You can manage ad campaigns within the TikTok ads manager. All you have to do is open the TikTok app on your phone and click the ads manager tab. From within the app, you can upload your content and segment your TikTok dropshipping ads to target an ideal group of TikTok users.

Here is a look at the options you have for TikTok advertising.

Brand Takeover Ads

They traditionally reserved brand Takeovers for brands with big budgets and lots of followers. While you may not be ready for this type of campaign, it is good to know about how they work.

Branded Hashtag Challenge

The Branded Hashtag Challenge is a feature built for TikTok that you can find on the discovery page. You can have both organic and sponsored Hashtag Challenges. These are great for getting a viral impact on your marketing efforts to fuel your TikTok dropshipping store.

In-Feed Ads

These in-feed ads resemble what you find on Instagram and Facebook stories. You can include a CTA making it perfect for promoting your dropshipping product. The videos are up to 15 seconds, which is just enough time to showcase your product.

Branded Effects

Marketing shouldn’t be boring and branded effects understand this truth. With TikTok branded effects, you can include stickers, filters, and effects on posts to promote a product or brand. This isn’t helpful for new companies, but once you get some traction, it can take your brand recognition further-faster.

TopView Ads

TopView ads are there to catch the attention of a TikTok user before they become distracted. The TopView ads display after 3-seconds from opening the app as an in-feed post. They display them at the top of the “for you to view” page.

While advertising on this platform is outperforming both Facebook and Instagram, not every ad will be a winner. Andrya Allen from The Nine, a TikTok ecommerce agency, has these tips for your dropshipping campaign.

1. Be a human with a face
2. Rely on captions
3. Reverse engineer trends
4. Show a slice of life
5. Use “user” generated content
6. Experiment with sounds
7. Surprise us

TikTok Dropshipping With Dropified

Ready to build your ecommerce dropshipping website? Dropified makes it easy for you to connect popular products with your Shopify website. Get started today with a free trial and see why thousands of customers depend on Dropified for their dropshipping business.

You don’t need to worry though, in this article, we’ll be discussing the different types of pricing strategies that you can use for your business. So, without further ado, let’s get straight right into the meat of the content. 

First up on the list is cost-based pricing. 

Cost-Based Pricing

This strategy is pretty much the most straightforward and common pricing strategy out there. It’s possibly the first strategy that people that are getting into a business think about. After all, it's an easy concept to grasp. You just add a fixed percentage and amount to the overall cost of your product to generate a profit. 

It’s easy, simple, and very convenient to calculate. It doesn’t take up much of one’s time, and it also is proven to work plenty of times. It’s a tried and true strategy, and many businesses at one point have tried it, thought about it, or even taken some ideas off of it. 

Take this Baja hoodie e-commerce shop as an example. 

Now, try to think about measuring its overall cost. You need to consider its production costs first, such as materials, labor, and other fixed costs that you might incur along the process. Let’s say the entire process costs around $60. You can start gaining a profit if you charge an extra $5, but that’s not going to cut it if you’re thinking of other external costs that you are incurring in running your business. 

Not to mention that you also have shipping costs or maybe even advertising costs to worry about since you’re an e-commerce business. The best course of action is to try and get at least 50% of the profit margin in order for cost-based pricing to be a viable strategy to use. 

Consumer-Based Pricing

Consumer-based pricing is another pricing strategy that works well for a lot of industries, such as SaaS startups. The reason for this? Simply because consumer-based pricing does not take into account expenses incurred through the production process. Instead, you try to price your product depending on the price that your consumers would be willing to pay. 

This takes advantage of the simple fact that if your market is willing to pay more for your service, why not charge them for that specific amount until you’ve reached the limit? Consumer-based pricing doesn’t care much for competitors with their prices; instead, you just want to worry about trying to optimize your product prices as best as possible along with maintaining the good perception of your consumers on your product’s or service’s value. 

However, there is one catch to this strategy, and it’s that you always need to continue developing and innovating. It doesn’t need to be exactly on your product or service. If you offer your audience convenience in the buying process or make communication lines much easier for them to handle, then you’re going to get the sales that you need. 

It’s not much of a catch. However, in the long term, consumer-based pricing both provides you the profits that you need and the innovation that you will eventually have to strive for in order to be successful. 

Bundle Pricing

Bundled pricing is a favorite pricing strategy for a lot of e-commerce sites on the internet. You also often see it in real-life retail stores in malls or shops. It’s because it’s one of the most effective pricing strategies there is and mixed with the proper marketing techniques, it can generate a lot of interest for your products. 

Bundling products and services in a package and offering a discount to their overall price is a great way to attract a lot of attention due to the simple fact that people might be interested in just getting everything they need at once rather than trying to find one single item.

In the context of e-commerce, this only gets a lot better as you can do a lot of marketing alongside the bundled packages. You can do things such as outbound calling to existing clients through predictive dialers and offer them these bundled discounts. 

You can showcase infographics or photos of the bundled product and its associated accessories quite easily on your website or on other e-commerce sites. You can even send abandoned cart emails if there are customers that have seemingly forgotten about bundled packages in their carts on your online shop. 

Combine discounts, convenience, and quantity then you get a great combo that is quite hard to pass up by many wandering interested customers. 

Dynamic Pricing

As compared to cost-based pricing, dynamic pricing is the exact opposite. It’s a strategy that is all about being flexible and adaptable to different situations. In dynamic pricing, your prices should never be staying on one single price point for too long but instead should move depending on the constant changes of supply and demand. 

You can often see dynamic pricing change on food in particular due to the simple fact that there is a lot of demand there due to it being a necessary item for a lot of people, and supply for food is constantly changing because of weather, natural disasters, bad crop season, pests, and many more. 

In the world of e-commerce, the same can be said. If you are getting a lot of customers in a short period of time, then the only way to go is up and up for your prices. However, that’s not to say that there is also a bad side to this. Oftentimes due to price fluctuation, some consumers wouldn’t be willing to pay whenever the price is high and would prefer to wait things out. 

That’s going to affect your sales conversions in the long run. In a sense, you’re trading high price value sales for the sacrifice for a number of conversions that you ought to receive with a fixed price.  

Market-Based Pricing

Market-based, on the other hand, is a strategy where you take a look at your competitors for the prices that they put up for their products. It’s a lot like being a copycat, but instead of copying from your seatmate, you're taking into account a lot of other competitors and trying to see which one works best for your strategy. 

Considering the prices that your competitors have and just trying to gain the competitive edge by under-cutting them while still maintaining a profit is a great way to get a lot of attention in the market. However, it does carry some costs and questions as well as to why you cost less. 

That’s easily debunkable. If you can provide the necessary quality with the price points that you sell, then customers and consumers will be a lot more attentive to your brand name as you offer the same product as the rest, however at much more affordable prices.

Let’s take this e-commerce paddleboard store as an example. 

If they manage to keep their paddleboard prices low as compared to their competitors while at the same time keeping the quality, customization, and accessories associated with their products, then they are going to be a lot more competitive in their niche market as compared to their competitors because they’re just offering an overall better deal for the consumer. 

There are plenty of tools out there that you can use to easily track your competition, tools such as HubSpot sales hub are well-known for these types of in-depth research, and you can easily base your market-based pricing strategy through this. 

Premium Pricing

Premium pricing is the exact opposite of market-based pricing. On this strategy, you don’t try to undercut your competition but instead, try to push your prices over to the edge. You try to make your product look as expensive but at the same time at a premium quality as compared to others because of the price that you ask for. 

Premium pricing often markets itself in the context of things such as luxury, exclusiveness, and quality. There are companies that stand by these three things and do showcase to its market that it isn’t all talk but does instead offer authentic premium quality goods. 

Take, for example, this protein supplement e-commerce store. 

Their industry is quite special as it revolves around health, and often, people would be willing to pay a premium price for protein supplements that they believe would be of superior quality. It’s these types of products that most consumers are more concerned with the quality rather than the price because it’s often their health that is at stake. 

You can even offer quality discounts for premium pricing, such as military discounts that are often used by large companies to attract specific customers to their product lines. 

Premium pricing is a great strategy, only if you have the necessary resources to back it up. If you are proven to be a lot superior in terms of quality or you offer especially exclusive luxurious products, then you would be able to gain a lot of profit from consumers that are willing to pay the extra mile. 

However, if your brand name can’t catch up on the hype, then you’d be in a risky position that nobody might even be interested in buying your products or worse, consider your products to be a cash-grab or a scam. 

Before Executing Your Pricing Strategy – 

Once you’ve decided on what pricing strategy to execute for your business, you need a few more things to check and get ready before entirely investing in the dive. It’ll be bad if your initial change and momentum gain is abruptly brought to a halt by some factors that could have been prevented. 

Get Stocked!

First thing’s first, you need to always know the strong points and weak points of your business. If you lack the assets to back up your inventory stocks, then consider first getting an inventory management platform to prevent bottlenecking your sales line. After all, executing the right pricing strategy also needs the proper tools to back it up.

This not only prevents you from losing out on potential sales but you can also grow trust with your customers due to the simple fact that you can deliver what they ordered. The only worse thing than having bad prices is not having enough products to sell in the first place. 

Appeal To Your Target Niche 

After stocking up, make sure you have the necessary marketing capabilities to sell your products and their appealing price lists. Make your e-commerce store as appealing as possible to your target niche. In your website or in your social media pages, try to make as much buzz as possible and even try to appeal using aesthetic imagery and graphics.

Market as much as possible before implementing any new types of pricing strategies. If you don’t have the capacity to do any of these or if you’re just starting out then you don’t have to worry much about marketing new pricing strategies. Instead, just focus on marketing your brand and business first and establishing a foundation for your future business goals. 

Ready Your Website

The last thing that you need to do is to make sure that your website and other e-commerce platforms are all set and ready to go. This is the final crucial step that will decide your new pricing strategies and e-commerce store to be successful in the end. 

Nobody would be able to buy your products and services, let alone see them if you did not go through with your web designers on how ready and capable your website is to handle the traffic. 

Use UI research & analytics tools to make the best out of your website before the grand finale. Make sure as well to maximize and optimize your website as soon as possible. 

Not to say that traffic will start flowing in surges, but oftentimes, businesses make the mistake of not being ready for any uncommon contingencies such as introducing a product into the market and being an instant hit. Too many companies in the past have lost a lot of potential sales due to their initial momentum being stalled by overwhelming customers.

See What Works! 

After executing and getting the initial sales of your pricing strategy, it’s important to see what results did your company receive. At this stage, the only thing left to do is to ensure that everything goes smoothly and to check if and when the pricing strategy worked. It’s best to constantly monitor sales and marketing for a period of time to fully understand if the pricing strategy that you have chosen is working in your favor. 

This information would be all the more valuable for you if you ever decide to switch pricing strategies again or to even scale your current pricing strategy to the next level with your present business. After all, information does give better guidance in the decision-making processes of growth hacking your business to the next level with the pricing strategies that you have at hand. 

Key Takeaways: 

There are plenty of pricing strategies that you can choose for your business, and while some work best in certain conditions and while some do not, it goes without saying that pricing strategies are essential for the success of any e-commerce business that is looking to set its foot into the internet markets.

Author Bio

Burkhard Berger is the founder of Novum. You can follow him on his journey from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors on novumhq.com. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.

While dropshipping is great for keeping a low overhead, it cannot succeed to its fullest without solid digital marketing strategies. For people to notice your brand and become customers, there’s some work you need to do. You should think of marketing tactics. But which one to choose among the dozens of approaches?

We know the answer to this question. This post will focus on 3 known digital marketing strategies that still rock and will make your dropshipping store strive.

Challenges of dropshipping marketing 

Before diving into marketing practices, let's discuss why you need it. Being quite a well-known strategy, dropshipping has a few challenges to overcome. 

Competitive environment 

_{Source: Google Trends}

From the screenshot above, you see that high levels of competition are constantly growing in the dropshipping segment. Unless you have signed an agreement with the supplier for them to exclusively dropship certain goods, there will always be others selling the same things with sometimes a better price.

Relying solely on dropshipping means that retailers will always need to find ways to stand out in the competition and emphasize their own strong sizes.

When developing a marketing strategy, you need to look at your competitors, carefully analyze their metrics: pricing, conversion rates, customer reviews, and other e-commerce KPIs. As a result, knowing your competitors will allow you to start with the marketing efforts.

Keep in mind that except for brand promotion and customer engagement, you should be able to provide a high-quality customer experience and service.

Target audience identification

With the competition comes another challenge, you need to identify your target audience and not try to attract all the buyer personas possible. For example, you are operating in the online clothing field or any other oversaturated segment. There are dozens of consumer types, and it's a real challenge to interact with all of them. That's why finding your own niche in a broader segment is a solid way to obtain identity and attract target customers.

Without understanding customer segments, their behavior, and communication preferences, it's also challenging to choose a correct dropshipping marketing strategy. In this way, focusing on a smaller segment of customers and leveraging a smaller number of marketing tactics may solve the challenge.

There are also two challenges that indirectly affect marketing efforts:

Budget restraints

Usually, to get a better profit, your store should have an increased sales volume. To increase sales, you'd probably require promotion, advertising, and acquisition tactics. These, in turn, need a budget. That's why the challenge of underfinancing can affect your marketing. 

Operations costs will always take a good chunk of the profit. To keep the balance with marketing expenditures, a detailed plan and roadmap to understand upcoming marketing spendings are a must. Otherwise, a decline in marketing budgeting is inevitable.

Suppliers factor

With dropshipping, there is always the need to rely on a number of suppliers who execute orders. Related failures can harm customer experience with your store. Imagine you have started a promotional campaign for a product, warm up your customers, but there is a manufacturing delay. Some customers will wait, some customers will turn from you. And the entire campaign with all the spending becomes useless.

It is essential to ensure there is always a Plan B for the situations when the supplier fails to operate as agreed.

Dropshipping digital marketing strategies to have

With all the existing dropshipping challenges, it still remains one of the effective e-commerce approaches with an expected 29% of annual market growth in the next 4 years.  

And while it might be hard to start with dropshipping marketing, your store needs it to bloom, develop, and withstand the competition.

Below, there are 3 digital marketing strategies that you should consider trying.

Content still works 

You're now reading this article on the Dropified blog. That's because people still read and like blogs. We find blogs valuable, trust them, and follow the things brands describe or advise.

_{Source: Dropified}

Launching a blog is a great and relatively inexpensive way to talk to your target audience. The major benefit of blogging is generating more website traffic and attracting new customers. 

With SEO magic, your blog can increase relevant, organic, and free traffic. You'll have a higher ranking, a bigger number of daily visitors and potential consumers. 

Keep in mind the following core principles of content marketing in 2021:

Only valuable content. A 500-word post about how cool your store is won't work anymore. People strive for valuable content. Product comparisons, posts about trends in your niche, practical tips, personal stories, roundups with expert quotes are the content you should produce. Blogging is about providing value foremost and not about just advertising yourself.

Consistency in posting. No need to post something every day. But try to post on a somewhat regular basis. You'll need to have a content calendar, think of a blog post series describing an area in detail. Never forget about one essential point: quality over quantity.

Various types of content. Content marketing is not about blogging exclusively. People like visual content, so think of making infographics, product reviews with high-quality images. Landing pages for special offers or occasions are a good way to experiment with a more promotional type of content. Creating a podcast series can be a good move as well. 

Besides, starting a newsletter, as a combination of email and content marketing, where you can share your store news, best blog posts are a way to distribute your content and engage without much effort.

In general, volumes of content production depend on your goals and, of course, resources. Starting a blog and focusing on textual content empowered by some original visuals is not that expensive to experiment with. You have an option to hire freelance writers and designers, use AI copy services, and post on your own.

Social media is worth trying 

Social media presents a good opportunity to spread the word about your dropshipping store. Setting up accounts, showcasing products you have, replying to comments, addressing questions, building trust – through social media, you will have all the means to engage with your target audience. 

Additionally, with such an abundance of different social media platforms, you can choose the ones that will suit you best. In the post-Covid environment, Instagram, for example, has increased its advertising potential due to 43% growth in visits. Needless to mention, TikTok bloomed.

_{Source: Wishpond}

But with the various social media platforms, the question arises: which one should I choose? According to the Oberlo research, Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram are among the most promising social media sites to grow your business. 

Undoubtedly, a selection of which social media to try depends on your niche and target audience. However, Facebook and Instagram work well. If you want to boost your brand’s presence and get noticed, ads on Facebook and Instagram can help you do that.

You can also experiment with non-obvious social media channels like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, or Telegram.

Overall, social media is good because it's focused on customer engagement and fast promotion delivery. You have an opportunity to create different types of content: textual posts, videos, stories, images, carousel posts, etc. The main disadvantage is that it's a trend-oriented, pretty expensive full-time activity. It gets harder to engage customers using the same patterns.

Video marketing is a new black 

To buy a product, you need to see it from different angles – it's much better than reading reviews. No wonder that 90% of people are ready to complete a purchase after seeing a product review video. 

_{Source: Grey Sky Films}

It is easier for consumers to get a sense of the item, and for you to present your store and goods in a visually appealing way.

For a dropshipping store, videos can make a huge difference and help it withstand massive competition with similar brands. You can start with product reviews, short how-to videos, or a video series. Each and every video you publish can be distributed via YouTube, shared as a blog post, shared on social media as a part of your video marketing strategy. 

Another great way to use videos is to cooperate with influencers, experts who are working in a similar niche and ask them to review the products you offer. People have a natural sense of trust and developed empathy towards those they have been watching for a while and will gladly try a new product advised by a trusted person. You might even consider sending an influencer some products for giveaways to their audience to create some buzz as well. 

When you can show your potential consumers explicit videos of your products, the latter might become the needed conversion point that results in sales and becomes that advantage for your brand to differentiate from others. 

Even though having a video marketing strategy is worth it, the process of creating videos is usually not fast and requires resources. 

Conclusion

If you want to get your dropshipping store noticed, digital marketing is your go-to strategy. Among several approaches, the three mentioned above are must-haves. They are relatively easy to implement, they can be interested and mutually empowered, and they show good results.

It would be nice to check your thoughts and the strategies you use. Share them in the comments section.

Author Bio

Dmytro Zaichenko is a Marketing Specialist at Coupler.io, a data importing and synchronizing service. He has 6+ years of experience in content making. Apart from writing, he's passionate about networking and the NBA. 

Given that most consumers are already desensitized to these types of marketing strategies, more businesses are looking for a different approach. They need something fresh to scale their business. 

One marketing strategy that can help with all of these needs is called inbound marketing. The strategies used here don’t force the brand to be in front of the customer’s face. But rather, these are strategies that attract customers to look into the business and search more about the brand. 

If you’ve been looking for a different approach for your marketing strategies, consider knowing more about inbound marketing. Below are different activities you can do when it comes to this type of marketing.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Some say that inbound marketing is a sure way to improve the current state of your business. When it is partnered with other softwares like growth hacking tools, it’s a pair that’s a match made in heaven. Utilizing both things allows your business to grow at a rapid pace.

But what exactly is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of making your customers find your company. It’s the opposite of outbound marketing wherein you put your brand out there through billboard ads, event sponsorships, print marketing, TV ads, etc.

The process involved in inbound marketing is all about showing your value to your customers and prospects. By giving value, you attract customers to know more about your business. You intrigue them on what your brand is all about. 

On top of creating valuable content, businesses also make sure that these campaigns and strategies are tailored to their audience – it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Personalization gives out a higher conversion and click-through rate. This type of content is known to have better metrics and is capable of hitting marketing KPIs. 

Now that you know what inbound marketing is, it’s time to go deeper into the topic. Let’s discuss the different inbound marketing strategies that you can do right now.

9 Inbound Marketing Strategies

1. Share Your Story

Nothing draws people more than a well-told story. As mentioned, inbound marketing is all about attracting your audience. And a way to do this is by telling your brand’s story. 

There’s a reason why companies share their “why” to the public so that they can attract consumers that support and believe in their cause.

Nike’s reason is to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. Tesla's goal is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.

Once people know what your business or brand stands for, they’ll be more inclined to purchase from you if they support your beliefs.

2. Be Social In The Digital Space

Whenever you see someone that’s friendly, kind, and smart at a conference, it’s impossible to resist the feeling of making acquaintances with the person. You see no risk in being friends with the guy. 

This is exactly the persona you want your business to be seen in the online world. So how can you show that you’re friendly, kind, and smart? You can do so on social media platforms. Be friendly to your audience, cater to their needs, and add value to them.

Once they see these characteristics, they’ll be drawn towards your profile and proceed to your website to know more about you.

Some big companies value this aspect so much that they invest in a social media engagement tool to make sure they’re on top of every response or comment they get. 

Look at how Key West Aloe puts in the effort to respond to every comment in their posts:

Notice how it’s not an automated response. It’s personalized and in context to what their audience is saying. 

3. Create Value-Packed Blog Contents

A way to add value to your audience is to share information through written content. All sizes of businesses do this because it’s one way to teach their audience, share their products, and display their expertise.

If blogs weren’t helpful, big companies like Amazon, Tesla, and Microsoft wouldn’t have spent time and effort in doing this activity. But that is simply not the case. Blogs benefit e-commerce stores no matter the size.

Blogging is an avenue for brands to educate their audience. It’s also a way to share updates and announcements. 

Showmojo, a self-showing rental property platform, uses its blog page to announce its products and promotions. It also has blog posts that inform and educate its audiences.

An additional tip to create a value-packed blog is to include images. This makes the overall content engaging and easy to read.  You can insert tables, diagrams, and even infographics.

Look at how e-commerceCEO’s blog on How To Sell Amazon. Not only is it teaching its audience a detailed way on how to do something but their overall content is engaging as well. It used diagrams, quotes, screenshots, and graphs.

Remember, one of the most important benefits of blogging is creating content that can improve the lives of your audience. The most engaging blogs are topics that can help with their business and personal development.

4. Guest Blogging

We believe that guest blogging is one of the top inbound marketing strategies out there. 

Guest blogging is a way for bloggers to display their knowledge and skill in front of a whole new audience. It’s a way to show your value to different sets of people. 

Once you’ve created a great post and people see value from it, it can start a whole new inbound traffic for your website.

A guest blog if created properly can attract motivated leads, qualified traffic, increase brand visibility, and build authority for your business.

5. Use Infographics

As effective as blogs can be, some people just don’t have the time to read a whole article. If you believe your audience is in the same group, you can use infographics.

Infographics combine both the graphic elements and the written part of the content. It allows businesses to present big ideas in small spaces. Infographics condense information into one image that makes it visually appealing to see. 

It’s an advantage to use infographics because it’s one of the best ways to affect learning and information the most. According to Forbes, it’s the first among powerpoints, articles with images, and blog posts.

So if you want to show value or present a unique idea to your customers and prospects, using infographics is one of the best ways of doing so. If you don’t know how to create such images, don’t settle. Instead, consider hiring freelance graphic designers to cater to your idea.

Take a look at how Spores explained its tokenomics (a topic that’s new to many) to its audience using a single infographic:

Another example is how MannequinMall used an infographic to make the topic of dressing mannequins interesting:

Rather than discussing each point in a blog form, they used colorful graphics to engage the audience as they read the whole thing. Plus, each point only comes with a short description – they didn’t settle with long paragraphs. This made the whole infographic and the whole content easy to read.

6. Use The Virality Potential Of Videos

If there’s one content that has the highest potential to go viral, it’s video content. That’s why a lot of businesses outsource videographers just to have video content released. To some, they do it on their own since there’s many free online video maker software out there.

Videos are much more engaging than an image and a set of paragraphs. Businesses can express themselves more in a video than in any other format. They also make product videos to really highlight the best features of their item.

But not every video is created equally. The length for it to be engaging and received well by people will depend on the market. To some businesses, their audience likes 1 minute or less videos. As for others, their audience likes a longer format. 

So if you’re unfamiliar with what your customers like, it’s time to do some testing on your end. See what kind of videos they engage in the most. If you’ve seen the metrics, stick to what’s working and has the most engagements.

Once you’ve determined the perfect video length for your audience, it’s time to experiment on what type of video content do they like the most – do they love tutorials, how-to guides, or one-minute explanations?

Video content though isn’t just limited to advertisements – webinars and online conferences with customers also fall under this category.

7. Influencer Marketing

Most brands don’t realize just how influential these influencers are. Some of these influencers have successfully built a solid fan base that is really loyal to them. That’s why some businesses always allocate a budget for influencer marketing. 

Inbound marketing plus influencer marketing is such a great combination to have that research shows 86% of marketers use this strategy.

The reason why this combination works is that audiences don’t feel like they’re being sold to when they hear it from their favorite influencer. 

It’s natural for a business to market their products but most of the time, consumers believe that they’re marketing it for their own financial good. But if it comes from a person that they look up to, it feels more of a recommendation than an effort to sell them.

The payment structure could differ per business. A brand can approach an influencer and talk about being an affiliate of their business. Wherein they’ll introduce a referral program or an affiliate structure that works for both parties.

8. Give Freebies

Aside from giving out valuable content like blogs and videos, another option for you to do is to give out free digital resources. 

Consumers are naturally drawn to free things. That’s why we have free tastes in groceries and free promos in shopping malls. 

By giving out free digital products, not only do you get attention but you also give them a sneak peek of what your business is about. 

If you’re a personal brand that teaches SEO marketing, you can give out a free PDF of your books. If they like the product, they’ll be searching for more resources coming from you. That’s where you can introduce your other books or services.

But freebies aren’t limited to digital products, giving your clients free consultation or an hour of your time will be greatly appreciated. 

By giving out free things, you’re not forcing your business on your customers. It’s the consumers that are naturally coming to you. And if they like what they’ve received, they’ll surely come back for more.

9. Search Engine Optimize Everything

What better way to end an inbound marketing strategy section than making everything search engine optimized. 

A strategy that’s used by many to not be intrusive is to show up on search engines. Whenever your target audience is searching for keywords that relate to your business, you want your website or page to be on the first page of Google.

It’s no secret that ranking on Google is a hard feat to achieve but it’s not impossible. A way to increase your chances of ranking is to optimize everything you produce online. 

From your blog posts to video content, you need to make sure that they are optimized. Here are a few ways to do so:

• Make original content
• Picking the right keywords
• Add meta descriptions
• Insert meta tags
• Add relevant links
• Construct attention-grabbing titles
• Use headings properly
• Include call-to-actions
• Make it engaging
• Promote the content

5 Problems That Inbound Marketing Solves

Now that you know the best strategies under inbound marketing, it’s time to further convince you what this marketing does to your business problems.

Most people think that outbound strategies are the only way to see real conversions but allow me to reveal 5 problems that inbound marketing solves:

1. Driving traffic to your business

We all want traffic going to our business. Traffic means more people get to see our products which results in a higher chance of converting a sale. 

When you optimize every content you put out there, you increase the chances of getting seen organically without spending a single dime on promotion or advertisements.

Getting more traffic is one of the problems solved by inbound marketing. When you’re not trying to forcefully push your brand to be seen, consumers will naturally check your brand out.

2. Brand awareness

When you bring value to your audience, it’s natural for them to share your content especially when they see it as helpful for others. 

That’s one of the benefits of putting time into your content. The greater the quality is, the more people appreciate it and share it with others. 

Plus, with the added effort of optimizing your content, you increase the chance of ranking in Google or other search engines. Just being on the first page allows people all over the world to know your brand. 

3. Customer retention

When you take care of your audience, the more loyal they will be. By giving valuable information that can improve their lives and business, they won’t look for any other business anymore. 

If you give them free digital resources because they need them, they’ll greatly appreciate the gesture and will continue transacting with your business.

Looking after your audience through the content you produce will give great results both short and long term.

4. Conversion rates

Do you know what makes people buy? It’s convincing them that your product solves their problem. But the “convincing” part shouldn’t come in the form of sales pitches or the act of using predictive dialers. Instead, approach your customers like a friend. Converse with them in the same manner as well.

This strategy is the foundation of many inbound strategies like conversational commerce and personalized marketing. 

Ultimately, when you see them as a friend rather than customers, your marketing campaigns will see improved results and a better conversion rate.

5. Increased sales

All of the things mentioned above only point to one direction – an increase in sales. More traffic to the business increases brand awareness, more customers being loyal, and a high conversion rate leads to more sales. 

Conclusion

The inbound marketing strategies mentioned here attract customers for the reason that it doesn’t feel like they’re being sold to. The strategies here are educational, engaging, and sought out by consumers themselves. 

When inbound marketing is done right with the proper effort and time allocated to it, the strategies can ultimately bring you more sales and can grow your business exponentially. 

Author Bio

Burkhard Berger is the founder of awesomex. You can follow him on his journey from 0 to 100,000 monthly visitors on www.awesomex.com. His articles include some of the best growth hacking strategies and digital scaling tactics that he has learned from his own successes and failures.

First off, I'd like to point out that dropshipping as an online business has been around longer than Facebook so that should be your first indicator to the answer to that question. However, it would be disingenuous to not at least acknowledge the fact that Facebook Ads have certainly made it much easier for people wanting to run a dropshipping business to get their products in front of the right people. 

Without a doubt the #1 reason everyone and their brother, their sister, their uncle and even their 2nd cousin twice removed are using and teaching Facebook Ads for dropshipping is because there really has been no other advertising platform with the same kind of precision targeting capabilities that Facebook offers. That’s why Facebook will most likely continue to reign as the king for traffic sources dropshippers prefer to use for years to come.

Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to do dropshipping without Facebook Ads and below I’m going to discuss some of the other potential traffic sources that dropshippers can utilize along with how to best utilize them for a dropshipping store. 

Google Ads

Apart from Facebook, Google Ads is probably where you are likely to see the most success as a dropshipping store. Google has a specific type of campaign type called “Google Shopping” that is a great fit for dropshipping stores that have an assortment of products offered on their site. 

It can be a bit of a beast to learn along with getting it setup and running properly so if you are interested in learning more I would highly recommend you check out the free resource below called “The Ultimate Guide to Google Shopping”.

Resource: The Ultimate Guide to Google Shopping

Google Ads is much more than just shopping campaigns though. You can also run Google Search, Google Display and Youtube campaigns as well. However these channels tend to better lend themselves to stores or funnels that focus primarily on just one product or a set of products that are closely related. 

Microsoft Advertising (Formerly Bing Ads)

This is Microsoft’s equivalent to Google Ads and they offer many of the same types of advertising options like Shopping and Search campaigns that run on the Bing and Yahoo search engines. Although, they do not have the same amount of traffic volumes Google does the combined reach of both Bing and Yahoo together can many times be more than people think. 

One great feature about Microsoft Advertising is that they are set up so similar to Google Ads that you can just import all the same campaigns with settings and targeting straight into the Microsoft platform and they are ready to go. 

This makes it a great traffic source to easily add into the mix once you have some Google campaigns that are performing well and you are looking for some additional channels to scale up your traffic and sales. 

Pinterest Ads

Pinterest can be a hidden goldmine for some e-commerce store owners and dropshippers and I have known people that have done quite well with it in the past. However, there are a few things about Pinterest that you really need to consider before giving it a try. 

Most importantly it’s worth mentioning that many e-commerce stores will have a tough time finding success on the Pinterest platform due to the nature of its users and how they use it. 

The demographics on Pinterest skew VERY heavily towards females and the majority age range tends to be on the younger side. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as many studies show that women generally have a higher purchase behavior online than men, but you need to be aware of this because if you do not have a store or products that cater to this audience you are going to have a tough time finding success here. 

The targeting capabilities on Pinterest are very much lacking compared to places like Facebook so those who find success here usually have products that have more mass appeal and larger margins to play with. 

Snapchat Ads

If you have an e-commerce store that caters to a young audience, Snapchat might be a good place for you to try. It is still relatively new to the advertising game and I have to admit that I have not met or known of anyone personally that is having success as a dropshipper on Snapchat Ads. However, like any new traffic source there is always potential and you can bet someone is going to figure it out. 

Conclusion

There are other notable traffic sources I could mention like Twitter Ads, Native Ad networks like Taboola and of course just growing your traffic organically on the search engines, but those are typically not sources that lend themselves well to dropshippers. 

Hopefully, in reading this I’ve helped you to see that dropshipping without Facebook Ads is indeed possible and in fact there is an entire world of traffic outside of Facebook that you can begin using to grow your dropshipping business. 

Which of these traffic sources will you try first?

Before we get into the ‘Pinterest eCommerce hacks’, let’s look at a few more statistics:

79.5% of Pinterest users are female,
70% of users use Pinterest to find accessories, watches, and jewelry,
52% of Pinterest users spent $500 or more on beauty products for over six months, and
60% of millennials use Pinterest to discover new products (Kleinerperkins, 2018).

Here’s a list of the most popular content on Pinterest:

• Travel
• Health and Wellness
• DIY Home Renovation Projects
• Women's Style
• Beauty
• Food and Drink
• Motivational Quotes

Additionally, providing educational content is particularly helpful on Pinterest. You might consider providing tips and insights along with your content to give viewers added value and new ideas.

Pinterest is also an excellent place for wedding brands and niche stores to really show off what makes them unique from other companies and brands.

Pinterest eCommerce Hacks And Tips For Effective Pinning

#1 Setup A Business Account

If you want to use Pinterest for your eCommerce business, you’re required to set up a business account and agree to Pinterest’s Business Terms of Service.

Here are the added benefits of setting up a business account:

• It’s free!
• Pinterest allows you to display your business name instead of your personal name, which makes you look more professional.
• Pinterest allows you to display “rich pins”, allowing you to show your branding, your blog post title and description, and more (discussed further below).
• Pinterest gives you access to promote your pins (advertising).
• Pinterest provides analytics so you can see how people are interacting with your pins and content.

You can get started with setting up a business account here. 

Tip: Let’s say your Pinterest Page is called “Joan’s Garden” and you plan to sell gardening decor as well as provide gardening tips. Be sure to use keywords in your bio name and description that describes those key things so people know who you are at a glance. 

Example: Joan’s Garden: Garden decor + tips to help beginner gardening enthusiasts.

#2 Link To Your Website And Verify Your Account

For a business account, it needs to be linked to your website. When you verify this, it allows you to show your website as a clickable link on your bio. This allows you to build trust with your followers and it also helps you to develop more page views.

#3 Post Pins Regularly

It’s important to know that Pinterest wants you to be consistent. When Pinterest’s algorithm sees that you are pinning on a consistent basis, AND that you are linking to high-quality, original content, Pinterest will start increasing your impressions (the total number of times your Pins were shown) so that your content is shown to users more often.

I’d recommend a minimum of 3-5 Pins each day if you’re just starting out – this is far more effective then adding a whole bunch of pins on one day and none on others. Once you’re up and running, most Pinterest gurus recommend you pin 10-25 Pins per day, however it’s also important to note that Pinterest’s Head of Product Marketing, Sarah Hoople Shere, states that it’s your first 5 pins that you save each day that will get the most reach. 

This can be overwhelming if you’re just starting out, especially if you don’t have a vast selection of content to link to. A great hack is to create 3 different Pins per article, and have each Pin focus on a different aspect of your article.

In addition, it’s recommended that you rePin (share) other people’s Pins to your boards as well. We’ll discuss this further down in the article, but as a general rule, gurus will say 20-30% of your Pins should be Pin’s from other people’s accounts. When you first start out, this percentage may be higher (50%+), and it is a great way to build traffic and interest to your own Pinterest page while you create your own content.

You also want to spread out when you post your Pins – don’t post them all at one time. But, rather than be tied down to your computer pinning your life away, I highly recommend you schedule your Pins. 

There are a number of options available for scheduling your Pins, here are a few popular scheduling tools:

• Pinterest offers its own free scheduling tool, which allows you to schedule up to 30 pins at a time.
• Hootsuite also allows you to post 30 Pins at a time for free, but it allows you to schedule posts across multiple social media platforms, not just Pinterest. So if you’re looking to schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well, this could be a good option for you. Hootsuite also has Paid plans if you need to schedule more than 30 posts at a time.
• Tailwind is a very popular scheduling tool used by many Pinterest gurus. Tailwind’s free trial allows you to try all of Tailwind features for free while scheduling up to 100 Pins on Pinterest and 30 posts on Instagram (no time limit for free trial). Paid Tailwind plans start as low as $9.99/ month following your free trial.

#4 Post Pins During Peak Times For Most Exposure

According to Fannit, the best times to Pin are between 8pm and 11pm EST, and between 2am and 4am EST.

Pinterest seems to have the most activity when users are sitting down during their free time in the evenings, so it’s recommended to post during those times, and avoid posting Pins when people are at work.

#5 Best Type Of Content To Pin

• Monday – Fitness / Health
• Tuesday – Gadgets / Technology
• Wednesday – Quotes
• Thursday – Outfits / Fashion
• Friday – Gifts / Humor
• Saturday – Travel
• Sunday – Food / Crafts

Remember, Pinterest’s algorithm is always looking for spam-free, high-quality content that is useful for its users, so be sure that you are providing relevant content that does not violate Pinterest’s guidelines. 

Here are some examples of content you can create using the ‘types of content’ listed above: (also, don’t forget to include within your content images of your relevant products, and link to your product landing page)

Monday: Health / Fitness

• 5 Ways To Burn Calories While Gardening
• 3 Vegetables You Can Grow and Eat To Reduce Your Risk Of Heart Disease

Tuesday: Gadgets / Technology

• 3 Gardening Gadgets To Make Weeding Easier and Quicker
• 4 Ways You Can Use Technology For Watering Your Garden

Wednesday: Quotes

• “To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. – Audrey Hepburn” (write an article on the emotional benefits of gardening, and link the quote to it)

Thursday: Outfits / Fashion

• 3 Best Gardening Gloves To Use for Pruning Roses
• 3 Gardening Hats To Shade You From the Sun

Friday: Gifts / Humor

• 5 Gift Ideas for Gardening Enthusiasts
• 3 Gift Ideas for New Gardeners

Saturday: Travel

• 3 Gardens to Visit In “Your State”
• 7 Most Beautiful Gardens In the World

Sunday: Food / Crafts

• 3 DIY Christmas Floral Arrangements
• 5 Vegetables You Can Grow Indoors

It’s no secret that it takes quite a bit of effort to create high-quality content, but keep in mind that you are providing added value to your readers and potential customers – and this is what will set you apart from competitors in your niche.

Tips And Hacks For Pins That Get Noticed

Because Pinterest is a ‘visual’ search engine, you need to create Pins that stand out from everyone else's. Yes it’s great if your Pins are getting a lot of impressions, but it’s the ‘saves’ and ‘clicks’ that truly pave the way for successful Pins.

#1 Enable Rich Pins

Rich Pins are a Pin format that provides more context by showing extra information directly on the Pin.

How do you enable Rich Pins? If you have a WordPress site for your blog, you can set up Rich Pins in just a few minutes:

Step 1: Install The Yoast SEO Plugin

Once it’s installed, activate it. Next go to the Social tab in its settings, then to the Facebook tab. Make sure this tab is ON, and then make sure Add Open Graph meta data at the top is set to Enabled.

Step 2: Validate Your Rich Pins

This is a pretty simple process, go to the Rich Pin Validator, enter a URL from your site and then click the Validate button. You can then check the Rich Pin preview to see if it shows as expected.

Step 3: Apply for Rich Pins With Pinterest

If you see the green check and the “Your rich pins are approved and on Pinterest” message, do a happy dance, because you are all set up and ready to go. It will likely take a few days for your current Pins to populate the ‘Rich Pin’ information, so just be patient as Pinterest gathers the information.

(You can read more about Rich Pins here.)

#2 Provide Keyword Rich Board Titles, Pin Titles And Descriptions

Because Pinterest operates as a search engine, it’s important to include descriptive keywords in your Board names, Pin titles and Pin description. 

You’ll also want to include a call-to-action in your Pin descriptions so people know what you want them to do once they click on it. This is especially helpful for people who ‘repin’ and follow your link at a later time.

If you’re unsure of what keywords to use, try typing a few keywords into Pinterest's search bar and you’ll see a number of ideas for topics already being searched.

Another helpful tip is to use ‘numbers’ in your Pin and article/blog titles. 

For example, if you have an online store that sells gardening accessories, consider writing and linking to an article that talks about gift ideas for mothers. Get specific and have it read something like “5 Gift Ideas For Mothers Who Enjoy Gardening”, or “3 Gift Ideas For Moms Who Love Tulips”. 

Pinterest gurus say over and over that Pins that display numbers in the titles get more engagement than Pins that don’t.

#3 Use Proper Sizing For Creating Pins

If you’re creating your own Pins using Photoshop or something similar, you’ll want to use Pinterest’s recommended sizing.

• File type: PNG or JPEG
• Max file size: 32 MB
• Aspect ratio: We recommend using a 2:3 aspect ratio, or 1000 x 1500 pixels. Pins with an aspect ratio that's greater than 2:3 might get cut off in people's feeds

If you don’t have Photoshop, Canva is a very popular and highly recommended option. Canva has templates you can use, and the sizing is Pinterest friendly.

Some additional tips are:

• Keep important text in the top ⅓ of you Pin so that viewers can see right away what your Pin / content is about.
• Use high-quality, attractive imagery.

 If you don’t have your own images, you have a number of options:

Popular Free Stock Image Sites:

•  Pixabay.com
•  Pexels.com

Or you can explore this link:

• 21 Sites That Offer Free Images (2019)

Popular Paid Stock Image Sites:

• DepositPhotos.com
• iStockPhoto.com
• Dreamstime.com

Or you can explore this link:

• Best Stock Photo Sites

Tips And Hacks For Gaining Followers

According to Pinterest’s Head of Product Marketing, it’s better to have a low number of highly engaged followers than a large number of followers that rarely engage, so keep this in mind as you look for new followers.

#1 Follow Your Competitor’s Followers

You and your competitors share the same audience, so it stands to rule that there is a good chance those followers will follow you too!

For example, if your content is about gardening, do a Pinterest search for “gardening tips” and you’ll notice there is a ‘people’ category. Click on those suggestions.

From here, go to your competitor’s followers (currently under the ‘Community’ tab) and look through their followers and follow them. You’ll find that many of them are happy to follow you back.

#2 Share Other People’s Pins

Another way to gain traction and followers is to establish yourself as a source of high-quality, useful information. You can help establish this by sharing relevant Pins from others along with your own Pins. 

When you share other Pins that offer useful information that complements your own brand, you can drive traffic and increase your account’s engagement. This, in turn, increases the number of impressions (views) that your own Pins receive.

Many gurus will tell you that people who share only their own Pins never perform as well as those who incorporate Pins from others, and so, it’s recommended that you share relevant content from others.

Here’s how Pinterest’s algorithm works.

The Pinterest algorithm decides what content to show more of based on engagement. If the content you share is receiving lots of saves and clicks from others (engagement), this will boost your own account’s value, and Pinterest will be more likely to show even more of your Pins. 

With Pinterest, it’s not JUST about how many followers you have, it’s about the overall value of your account. The goal is to have Pinterest value your account as a good source of high quality, original content. This is what will build engagement, increase impressions, and bring more exposure to your website. 

#3 Use Hashtags In Your Pin Descriptions

Hashtags in Pinterest work the same way as they do on Instagram, Twitter, etc. by making it easier for people to find the content they are looking for.

For example, if a Pinterest user started a search using the hashtag #rosepruningtips, they would see all the ‘rose pruning tip’ related Pins.

Let’s say your gardening site is called “Joan’s Garden”. If you use your own branded hashtag #joansgarden along with other relevant and descriptive hashtags in your Pin descriptions, it means that a user could find all your content simply by clicking on your branded hashtag.

Note: It’s recommended that you add hashtags to the end of your Pin descriptions.

#4 Join A Group Board To Get Added Exposure

Group boards are a great way to increase traffic. A group board is owned by one person, but they allow other pinners to contribute to that board as well. You can request to join a group board by contacting the owner, and once accepted, they will send you an invite that allows you to post your own Pins to their board.

The bonus about pinning to group boards is that they already have followers and traffic. So as soon as you post your Pin to that board, you have instant exposure to anyone following that board.

So, how do you find group boards?

Go to PinGroupie and simply enter a keyword into the search bar (ie Gardening). You’ll find results for available group boards along with statistics on that board such as the number of followers, number of collaborators, and requirements/rules for joining the board as a contributor/ collaborator.

#5 Add Follow Buttons

Be sure to have the Pinterest ‘Pin It’ / “Follow” buttons your blog posts and pages. This allows readers to share your content with others by posting your articles to their own Pinterest Boards. This has the potential to create a massive increase in referral traffic back to your site!

To get started with adding buttons, go here. 

#6 Boost Your Pins By Promoting Them

Pinterest allows business accounts to promote their pins to attract a new audience. Promoted Pins are just regular Pins that you pay to be placed where people are most likely to see them help to increase audience engagement, conversions and traffic.

To learn more about Promoted Pins, click here.

In Conclusion

As you can see, Pinterest can be a pretty big undertaking, but it also can be one of the most rewarding methods of acquiring new exposure. And, if you’re already producing blog content, this is a cost-effective method of connecting your content and products to even more potential customers.

What are your thoughts and experiences with Pinterest? Do you use Pinterest to promote your website’s blog and products? What successful methods have you used? Do you have any added tips and hacks to share?

And that method is Email Marketing.

Yes, when done well, eCommerce email marketing is one of the best ways to consistently and dependably grow your business.

However, many people either don’t focus on email marketing and growing their list, or they know it’s important, but don’t know what to do to maximize their results.

With that in mind, here are 7 eCommerce email marketing tactics that are simple to implement and that can have a big impact on your bottom line.

1. The Welcome Series

Whenever anybody joins your email list for the first time, it’s critical that you send them a Welcome Email series so that you can begin building a relationship with them. 

Some people also refer to this initial email series as an Indoctrination series, because you ask them to take deeper steps into creating a lasting relationship with you.

For example, in this series of emails, you may:

• Tell them about you and/or your business…
• Ask them to engage with your social media properties by taking actions such as:
  • Like your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your YouTube channel, subscribe to your podcast, etc…
  • Whitelist your email address and/or drag any emails that hit your Promotional folders into your main inbox…
• Share some of your best content, including your most popular blog posts, podcasts, emails and more…
• Give them access to some of your best reports…                                    
• Put them into a high converting emails series…
• And much more…

Once they’ve been through your best content and hopefully have added you on your various social media platforms, then you move them to your main broadcast list.

2. Segment and Personalize

As you bring new email subscribers into your lists, it’s important to be able to segment them into various interests, purchases, actions and other segments.

You can do this by adding them to multiple lists the moment they enter your system and/or you can tag each subscriber with a relevant tag based on their actions.             

For example, once someone purchases something from your store:

• Add them to your Welcome Email Series (if it’s their first time on your list), then push them to your broadcast list once the series is over…
• Add them to your Buyers list…
• Tag them as a Buyer (add more specific tags if it makes sense, such as product category if you have a lot of categories)…                                                                                                     
• Tag them with Welcome Series (so that if they buy again, your system knows they’ve already been through the Welcome Series and does not send that series again)…
• Now, if you offer any lead magnets, special discounts for opting in or other ways to build your email list, you’ll want to put them on a related list or email series first, as well as give them a relevant tag, such as…
• Lead Magnet Name, VIP Discount, Coupon, etc based on what the optin offer was…

At the end of the day, the purpose is to categorize them in such a way that if you want to make special offers or send specific content to the right people on your list, you can do that with ease, instead of just blasting every email to everyone on your list.

When you're able to segment and specialize, you better engage your list according to what they are interested in, and you can get better results and conversion as a result.

3. Send Flash Sales

One of the best ways to drive sales in small, concerted batches is to use Flash Sales.                   

A Flash Sale is a very short sale, usually several hours to a few days in length, but with a bigger than usual discount price. 

For example, you may offer a special weekend Flash Sale that runs from Friday morning to Sunday night and you offer a larger than usual discount to really capture attention.

A special series like this might have 4 emails total:

• Friday morning – 72 Hour flash sale
• Saturday morning – Less than 48 hours left
• Sunday morning – Ends tonight
• Sunday night – End in less than X hours

If the sale is going really well, you can send out even more emails OR you can mail just to non-openers, especially if a particular email is getting a lot of sales. 

While Flash Sales can get a big bump in sales, it’s also important not to run them too often, or at least not for the same products if you run them more often.   

They key to running them more often is to vary up which products are on sale. At the end of the day, you’ll just need to monitor how your list resounds to these sales and adjust your promotions accordingly.

4. Reward Loyal Customers

A great way to drive more sales and higher cart values is to run special offers and make special reward experiences for your best customers.

Some great ways to reward loyal customers is to run campaigns like: 

• Early bird access to new and/or product lines…
• Special offers that regular customers and subscribers do not get access to…
• Freebies or other premiums that others do not get…

Bottom line, finding creative ways to show your best customers extra love will increase how much they buy from you and they will stick with you for a long time.

5. Mobile Responsive Emails

As more and more people use their phones for nearly everything they do, sending emails that are both desktop and mobile responsive is key to maximizing your sales. 

The good news is that most email marketing systems have been building in mobile-responsiveness into their design templates.

However, you still need to send a test email to make sure that your emails look good on email.

For example, many times images may look okay on your set up, but end up looking stretched or contort when re-sized for your inbox.

You may also find that going with larger fonts, such as 16 to 18 point font is more needed now for viewing on small screens.

The important point is to send test emails and make sure that they look good on mobile devices, especially for the top 3 email service providers who account for over 85% of all email users, which are Gmail (53%), Yahoo (18%) and Outlook (15%).

Sites like Litmus and Email On Acid will show you what your emails look like across all kinds of email and desktop browsers so you can be sure all of your users have the best email experiences.

6. Send an Abandoned Cart Email Series

One of the most powerful and profitable email campaigns you can send is an Abandoned Cart campaign.

The fact is, while more than 95% of all customers don’t buy from your site when they visit, studies show that as many as 75% of visitors put items in their shopping cart, but never buy.

That is a ton of money sitting in shopping carts that you’re missing out on.

If you’re running your store on a platform like Shopify, there are a lot of Cart Abandon plugins that can make following up and recovering those “lost” sales easy and really profitable.

This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to grow your sales, because these visitors came to your site, added items they liked, and left without purchasing for any number of reasons.

That makes them a lot more receptive to coming back and purchasing when you remind them of the items they liked.

So, if you’re not using a Cast Abandon plugin, be sure to add one right away and start using it.

7. Grow Your Email List

Even though it’s last on the list, this is the most important one on the list as it can be the most profitable strategy. That’s also why I’m surprised at the number of eCom store owners do not focus on growing their email lists.

So yes, while you should make sure to add every customer to an email list…

…you should also proactively build your email list with free subscribers, so that you can market to them by email to get future sales from them.

There are countless ways to entice your store visitors to give you their email address without buying. Here are some simple examples:

• Store Discounts: Send them a coupon to get a discount off of their first purchase…
• Newsletter: Send them newsletter updates related to your store theme…
• Free Report: Put together a free PDF they can download that has information / education about the products you sell…
• Gift Guide: Put together a free gift guide to show them how your products make great gifts and bundles for holidays, birthdays and other special occasions…
• …and much more.

The more you can tie your opt-in freebies to something they actually want and care about, the more subscribers you’ll get, and the more people you’ll have to put your offer in front of.

The Bottom Line On eCommerce Email Marketing

In the end, email marketing is a core strategy that all eCommerce business owners should invest a lot of time and attention to, because the ROI on email marketing is so big.

Even better, there are so many email tools, plugins, campaigns and templates out there to use and/or learn from that you no longer have an excuse not to be using and selling more with email marketing.

Black Friday is officially the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S. and it marks one of the largest sales periods in retail shopping each year.

While it is the day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday sales have expanded quite a bit to the days and weeks both prior to and following that Friday.

Because so many retailers participate now, and our email inboxes start bursting with special offers and discounts, savvy retailers have started offering discounts several days prior and even several days after most other retailers.

Here are the major dates to keep in mind as you prepare for the 2019 Black Friday season that the majority of e-commerce stores participate in so you can plan accordingly:

Thanksgiving Day: November 28

Black Friday: November 29

Cyber Monday: December 2

So, as Black Friday approaches, how can you best prepare to take advantage of the holiday buying spirit, without going crazy?

Here are 7 tips you can implement quickly and easily take your Black Friday marketing to the next level:

1. Plan Your Black Friday Marketing Strategy

Before you do anything else, you need to decide what days you’ll be participating in Black Friday.

• Are you going to offer discounts on Black Friday only? Or maybe Black Friday and Cyber Monday? 
• Will you run from Black Friday through Cyber Monday? 
• Will you try to get an early move by offering discounts prior to Black Friday… or go after late sales by offering discounts beyond Cyber Monday?

You need to think through and finalize your promotional dates first, because those dates will decide everything else you do from there.

2. Plan Your Offers

When it comes to Black Friday, your customers are looking for really good deals – the kind that only happen once per year. For many retailers, that means steeper discounts than they usually give.

Now, it’s easy to tell you to offer huge discounts, but for you as a business owner, you need to know what you can truly “give away” so that you can still make money. After all, you don’t want to give away a huge discount and end up losing money overall… unless you have deep pockets and know that you can make up the difference in the near future with additional promotions.

Most small e-commerce businesses can’t absorb losses, so you need to get creative with your offers.

Here are a few ideas to consider:

• Loss Leaders: Do you have some products that have really high margins? If so, how much can you discount them to sell them at break-even?
  
  The point here would be to offer popular products at a massive discount, then upsell your customers to more products where you actually make your money.
  
  Your huge discount captures attention, and your other products get added on to the order.

• Impulse Buys: Do you have some products that are more novel, fun, silly or already great deals that don’t cost a lot that people would buy on a whim? Those would make great products to feature, then you upsell to additional products before they check out.

• Bundle Deals: If you have a lot of complementary products, then bundling them all together into one deal is a great way to offer a discount deal, but move more products and make more money per transaction, especially if you can bundle in some high margin products that can make the bundle a good deal for your customer, yet still make you good money on each sale.

3. Plan Your Email Strategy

Once you know what dates you are planning to run your Black Friday marketing on, you can begin to plan out your email marketing.

Smart retailers are beginning to send out pre-Black Friday email campaigns with teaser emails, building up excitement and giving previews of what might be on discount.

Some savvy retailers try to stand out from the Black Friday offer glut by offering steep discounts PRIOR to Black Friday, so their campaigns need to be thought through even earlier…

….while other retailers have begun extending their discounts beyond Cyber Monday to pick up those last-minute sales.

Whichever promotional plans you decided on during your strategy session in point 1 need to be laid out here.

Here are some email campaign ideas to consider as you lay out your promotional strategies:

• Black Friday Build Up
• Teaser emails with sales previews
• Countdown emails building excitement as the sale approaches
• Coupon Code emails to save for when your “doors” open
• Pre Black Friday sales offers to get started early
• Black Friday “Doors are Open” emails to officially launch your sales
• Pre Cyber Monday emails to tease more sales
• Cyber Monday “Doors are Open” emails
• Post Cyber Monday “last Minute Deals” to take advantage of late buyers and less email glut

You should also plan out what you’ll be offering to highlight and draw more buyers.

• Will you be offering Free Shipping after a certain dollar amount reached?
• Do you offer any kind of Buy X Get Y deals?
• Are you sending out Coupon Codes or are you building your discounts into each product?
• Do you have special discounts for certain customers based on how much they’ve spent with you? Maybe VIP customers get a higher percentage off than regular customers?
• Do they get a free gift with the purchase of certain items or amount spent?

There are any number of offers you can run, you just need to know your numbers to make sure you offer a great deal AND make money.

4. Make Sure Your Site Is Optimized For Mobile

According to a recent study by Forbes, mobile devices accounted for 67% of all digital traffic on Black Friday 2018, up from 61% the previous year.

That is a huge amount of traffic, so if your site is NOT optimized for mobile, then you are costing yourself a ton of money in lost sales. 

And we’re not talking about being mobile-friendly. Being mobile optimized means that their mobile experience is designed, not just to look okay on mobile, but to actually be designed with mobile customers in mind.

That means product pages that look great on a phone and order forms that are designed for phones and tablets that you don’t have to pinch or expand and open up mobile keyboards, dials for dates and cities, and can even scan your credit card info using your phone's camera.

There is a lot of money at play here, so make sure you do whatever you can to capture those mobile customers.                             

5. Use Personalization

The more you can personalize a customers experience, the better. There are quite a number of Personalization Apps that can plug into your store that can do things like:

• Welcome back a returning customer on your site using their name
• Using their geographic location in features such as “Free Shipping to Orlando when you spend over $35”
• Having a loyalty program that rewards customers for being long-term customers.
• Customizing potential discounts based on actions they take, For example, If they get free shipping at $35 and they only have $25 in their cart, having a banner notification letting them know that if they add $10 more dollars, they can get Free Shipping.
• Email follow-ups offering related products to what they’ve purchased to get additional sales.

There are dozens of ways you can create more warm, personal experiences for your customers, so take some time to explore the various personalization apps that are available for your store platform. 

6. Use Social Proof

We are all social creatures and we are informed and persuaded a lot by the actions of our friends, colleagues and society.

As a result, having a lot of social proof built into your store can help to boost sales and conversions quite a bit.

There are several easy ways to offer social proof:

• Ratings: Whether it’s a star rating or a numeric rating, this is a great way to show quickly and visually how popular different products are.

• Reviews: People love to read about other customer’s first hand experiences with products. While they love to see a ton of great reviews, many will go straight to the negative reviews to see if there are glaring problems, or small issues they’re okay with taking a chance on.

• Sales Notifications: If you’ve ever been to an e-commerce site and saw a small popup come up and it says something like “Kevin M from Cincinnati just purchased”, they you saw a Social Proof app in action. As they continue to show new people buying, it’s easy to get swayed that this site is popular and the products are good.

7. Rescue Abandoned Carts

While this could have appeared in the Email section, this area is extremely important and there is a ton of money here where it needs to be its own focused section.

The fact is, 95% and even higher people visit your site and never buy, but a large majority of them (some studies show as high as 75%) add products to their carts, then never complete their orders. That is a lot of abandoned sales you’re missing out on.

That’s why you need a Cart Abandon plugin and a strong Cart Abandon email sequence to get back those potential sales.

The good news is that there are a lot of eCom store plugins that make this process easy and can personalize the followup email messages so that the products they originally selected are waiting for them, ready to be purchased.

If you do nothing else on this list, do this step, because Black Friday or not, having a solid Cart Abandon followup will make you a lot of money that you’d have lost otherwise.

So there you have it, 7 quick and easy ways to get ready for the annual Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales push. The more you can plan and prepare, the better off you’ll be and the more money you’ll make.

Then, once the holiday rush is over, make sure you analyze what went well and what didn’t go as well as you’d have hoped.

• Did you spot any trends?
• What can you do better next time?
• What ways can you capitalize on your sales and new customers to keep the sales going?

Here’s to your success – and Happy Holidays!

Don’t get me wrong Facebook is an amazing traffic source and one that is not going to be going away anytime soon, however it is certainly NOT the only game in town and depending on the type of e-commerce store you are running and the products being sold, places like Google Ads can oftentimes drive better results. So let’s dive into how to effectively use Google Ads for dropshipping.

If you’ve never used Google Ads before it is important that you understand there is going to be a pretty big learning curve. Compared to Facebook, in my opinion the Google Ads platform is much more robust. Largely due to the ability to access many different channels. 

From a single Google Ads account you can create advertisements that run on Google Search, the Google Display Network (GDN), Youtube Ads, Google Shopping Campaigns and even Gmail Campaigns that show up only in people’s inboxes. 

If you’re like most people you probably felt your anxiety kicking in as you read that last sentence, but have no fear. Below I’m going to outline several strategies that’ll put you on the right track for using Google Ads for dropshipping effectively.

Getting Started With Google Ads For Dropshipping

Before getting started on Google Ads it’s vitally important that you first set up and install the Google Remarketing pixel on your website. You are also going to want to have Conversion Tracking setup as well. 

I’m not going to go in-depth on how to do these things as it’s beyond the scope of this article but here are some links from Google’s own help center on the subject if you do not have this already setup. 

Tag your site for remarketing

Set up conversion tracking for your website

It’s also crucial that after you setup the Google Remarketing tag on your site that you create the necessary remarketing lists/audiences in the Google Audience Manager. 

Here’s a quick video I made outlining the Google Audience Manager and creating the proper Remarketing Lists.  

1. Google Shopping

For dropshippers and e-commerce stores specifically, Google has a specific campaign type called Google Shopping. In my opinion this is probably the easiest and quickest type of campaign to get started with if you own an e-commerce store with lots of different products in it. 

In order to get started using it you’ll need to first set up a Google Merchant Center account and create categorized product feeds for all the items on your store. The beauty of Google Shopping campaigns is that you don’t have to create any ads as Google just pulls the data (image and headline) needed straight from the actual product listing in your Merchant Center account. 

When Google serves the ad to a potential customer they will look like this…

As far as setting up the campaign there are several different ways you can target them, but getting started I’d recommend you start by going after remarketing lists first and foremost. By only running shopping campaigns to people who have previously visited your site you’ll have a much greater chance of getting people who visited but left without purchasing to come back and finish what they started. 

It’s not uncommon at all for someone to visit your site, browse around but then leave and head over to Google to do some research first before making a buying decision. Running your shopping campaigns to your remarketing lists ensures you stay top-of-mind for your potential customers. Those who do see you again and click to revisit will be much more likely to buy this time around. 

Of course there is much, much more you can do with Google Shopping campaigns, but that could be an entire article or series of articles just on its own. I wanted to give you a simple yet effective strategy to get going and start seeing some results quickly. 

If you’d like to really go deep into all that you can do with Google Shopping campaigns I’d suggest you check this out… 

The Complete Google Shopping Ads Guide For 2019

2. Branded Search Campaigns

Another simple yet very effective type of Google Ads campaign you should be running is a Branded Search Campaign. This is a campaign where you literally bid on your own Branded terms. Things like your company / website name and variations of it. 

For example, let’s say your site’s name was “Awesome Blue Widgets”. At the very least you would want to bid on the following search terms:

Awesome Blue Widgets

Awesome Blue Widgets Reviews

There are other variations you could add in there over time but by bidding on those in Broad Match, Phrase Match and Exact Match forms you are certain to make sure that your brand is prominently being displayed for anyone who is searching for it on Google. 

If you don’t yet understand what I mean about the different match types available give this a quick read…

About keyword matching options

If you’re new to all of this you might be thinking… “Why would I bid and pay to run ads on my own branded search terms when my site should already be showing up in the organic search results?” That is a perfectly valid question and the main reason behind doing this is 3 fold. 

• First, you want to secure as much virtual estate as you can for your brand. Having an ad and an organic listing running at the same time simply takes up more of the available google listings with your site, ensuring you dominate the page when people are looking for something related to your brand name. 

• Second, by bidding on broad and phrase matched terms you’ll begin to see all the things that people actually type into Google related to your brand name. This raw search data which you’ll find in the search terms report can help you get an idea of what people really want to know about your brand. You can then address these things in your site and marketing messages. You simply will not get that data relying only on organic. 

• If you're not bidding on your own terms most likely your competitors will. Since Google Search ads almost always show above the organic results if your not bidding on your own branded terms it would be very easy for any competitor to take the #1 spot on the page and steal some of your traffic. 

3. Competitor Search Campaigns

As I mentioned, competitors can bid on your branded search terms to show ads when people are really looking for you. So guess what!?! … You are going to do the same thing. 

If you know who your competitors are there is no reason you shouldn’t be creating separate campaigns to bid on their branded terms and siphoning their potential customers over to your store instead. 

These are oftentimes great clicks to go after because if they are searching for your competitor it’s very likely they are already in-market for what you have to offer as well. It’s sort of like remarketing to your competitor's list… LOL!

4. Google Display Campaigns (Remarketing)

Oh… the Google Display Network (GDN)

The GDN is probably the most intimidating and many times misunderstood campaign type you can go after from your Google Ads account. Unlike Google Search campaigns, where you are bidding on actual keyword terms that people are searching for, the GDN is a collection of Display or Banner ads across a vast network of thousands of different sites that are partnered with Google. 

Display ads by nature are “interruption” marketing meaning that the person seeing the ad is not looking for it, it’s just there on whatever site they are currently looking at similar to how a billboard is just there on the side of the highway as you are driving along. 

An example of how they typically are displayed to the end-user is like this ad from Grammarly…

The way I suggest you get started with running ads on the Google Display Network is to only use it for Remarketing campaigns. Trying to go after new cold traffic that has never heard of or seen your site or products before is a really good way to spend a lot of money with no results.

Please trust me on this…

…. I have learned hard from that mistake more than once. 

By utilizing the GDN for your Remarketing campaigns at least you can be sure you are showing your ad to a real person who has already been to your site and when they see your banner ad following them around the internet they will be way more likely to click it and hopefully finish that purchase!

Examples of Remarketing ads you might want to try would be something like giving them a coupon code for 10% off or a simple message like “You Forgot Something!”. 

Just make sure to not follow them around FOREVER! Create your remarketing audiences so they only follow people around for a couple of weeks and you're not wasting money showing ads to people 2 months later who still don’t want to purchase and are now just annoyed with always seeing your ads. 

5. Dynamic Remarketing Campaigns (GDN)

Dynamic Remarketing campaigns make use of Google’s Dynamic Product Listing ads feature. Dynamic Product Listing ads are what you already use in Google Shopping campaigns but in this case you are making use of them on the Display Network instead. Just like with Google Shopping campaigns, in order to effectively use them, you have to have a Google Merchant account already set up with product feeds from your website. 

Like any other remarketing campaign the point of these is to show ads on the Display network to people who have already visited your site. What’s different however is that Google will actually show them the products that they viewed while on your site. If you have used Facebook’s Dynamic Product Ads for remarketing before this is the same principle. 

For a detailed explanation on how to set one of these bad boys up check out this article from the Google Help section…

Create a dynamic remarketing campaign

Conclusion

There are several other campaign strategies I could list above, but in an effort to not overwhelm you I didn’t feel this was the time to delve into them. The 5 listed above are more than enough to get you effectively using Google Ads for your e-commerce business.

Also, please don’t think that you have to do all of these to start getting results. 

YOU DON’T!  

Although I think you’ll want to incorporate most of them eventually it’s important to just pick one or 2 at the most to get started with and just focus on making them successful campaigns before implementing any of the others. 

Lastly, I wanted to leave you with the video below that goes over a few advanced tricks and hidden settings within the Google Ads platform that can really help you campaigns be more successful. Most people never take the time to figure out or look at this kind of stuff, but it can be very important when it comes to optimizing your Google Ad campaigns for maximum profit. 

If you are new to running ads on Facebook you might have heard terms like interests, custom audiences, and even lookalike audiences and thought what the heck does all that mean?

Do I need to test all these different audiences when running my ads on Facebook? Which ones should I be using and when? Why does this have to be so darn confusing?… LOL!

How To Test Audiences On Facebook

The good news is I’m going to spend a little time below going over the different audiences you can use when running ads on Facebook and how to test audiences on Facebook. 

Interest-Based Audiences

What Are They:

These are audiences you build by picking different interests that you know the people you want to target would be interested in. The best interests you can use are usually things that you know only people in your target market would be interested in. 

For example, if you wanted to sell something to people who played guitar you could go after interests like “guitar world” or “guitar player magazine” which are both popular magazines aimed solely at guitar players. You could also go after specific guitar manufacturer brands like Gibson, Fender or Ibanez. 

The likelihood that someone who does not play guitar would be interested in these kinds of things is pretty low so these kinds of interests would be highly targeted to your market.

There are so many different things you can do with interest-based targeting options that I thought it best to make a quick video showcasing how to use interest-based audiences. 

Hopefully that video should be enough to get you on the right track to effectively using interest-based audiences when running your Facebook ads. 

When To Use:

These are ideal to use when testing new ad campaigns and products you are trying to sell for the very first time. Since you have no data on these people you cannot yet begin to use other options like custom audiences and lookalike audiences yet so interest is the way to go. 

Interest-based audiences can also be used to scale winning ad campaigns by targeting even more interests you think your customers might like and/or going after broader interests. Interests really are the starting point and backbone of any successful marketing campaigns on Facebook. 

Custom Audiences

What Are They:

There are many different types of custom audiences you can create within Facebook which I explain more in-depth in the video below, but in a nutshell custom audiences are audiences you can target based on a person's interaction with your site and/or content. 

In e-commerce specifically, it is always good practice to create custom audiences for the people who visit your website and even specific pages on your website. For example an audience of only people who have visited the cart page or a specific product page or category of products on your site. 

All of this is useful for remarketing to people who have already visited your site in an effort to get them to return and hopefully purchase an item they were looking at the last time they were there. 

Here’s a quick video on custom audiences and some examples of what you can do with them:

When To Use: 

Since custom audiences are made up of people who have already visited your site they should primarily be used after you’ve been running some interest-based campaigns and getting visitors to your site. 

You can also think of your custom audiences like a list of contacts that you are building up for future marketing efforts as well. These are the people you might want to run special promotions to in the future. It can also be a good idea to just run simple low budget content based ads to these people as well to help build your relationship with them and hopefully turn some of them into raving fans in the future. 

Lookalike Audiences

What Are They:

As the name suggest a Lookalike Audience is an audience that Looks Like other people in an audience. You have to build these Lookalike Audiences off of the different custom audiences you have set up. 

For example, If I’ve built a custom audience for everyone who has completed the “Purchase” event on my store (these are my buyers!) then I could tell Facebook to create a lookalike audience based solely on the people in that audience. That’s a pretty powerful audience to have don’t you think! 

It’s scary to think how much data a company really has on its users, but that’s exactly what makes things like Lookalike Audiences so powerful. They are able to compare the interests and behaviors of those in your custom audience and build you a new audience of people who show very similar patterns. 

To fully understand how to set these up and utilize them for success I suggest you give this a quick peek:

When To Use:

Lookalike Audiences are best used for scaling campaigns. Once you’ve had your interest and remarketing audiences running for a little while and having success there’s always a point where you want to grow and get even more traffic and sales. That’s what Lookalikes were made for!

Conclusion

After reading this and watching the videos I have no doubt that you will be well equipped on how to test audiences on Facebook with the options available to you with Facebook Ads Manager. 

Now get out there and start launching some ad campaigns!