Running an ecommerce store on a limited budget can be frustrating. Afterall, if you had a large budget surely you would sell more.
This is a misconception far too many people fall for. Having a larger budget doesn’t necessarily mean you will have more success.
Take for example, Dr. Bob Wagstaff, the creator of the Orabrush tongue cleaner. After spending $40,000 on an infomercial that converted into less than 150 order, he decided to give YouTube a try.
He spent $500 to create a video that currently has over 27,000,000 views. You read that right, over 27 million views!
Smaller budget, larger results. In this post we will discuss how you can market your ecommerce store on a budget. Since EditionGuard helps authors sell eBooks, we will use eBooks as the example product.
No Traffic. No Business.
Let’s imagine two bookstores. The first bookstore averages only 30 visitors per day. The second bookstore averages 1,000 visitors per day. Which book store do you think sells more books?
It may seem obvious that the second bookstore will sell much more books. Afterall, the amount of traffic at their store is much higher than the first store. However, when it comes to ecommerce stores this same scenario isn’t always as obvious.
It doesn’t really matter what you are selling, if you can’t figure out how to attract traffic to your ecommerce store you will struggle to sell anything.
If you don’t have a large budget, let’s be honest few authors do, then you will need to identify cost effective ways to increase traffic to your store.
A few options are:
- Social media marketing
- Guest blogging
- Promotional giveaways
- Community building
- Content marketing
- Influencer marketing
Build A Community First
One of the most affordable ways to market your eCommerce store is to build a community around your brand. Doing so will give potential customers an emotional attachment to your products that they may not have with your competitors.
There are many ways to build a community, including: Facebook Groups and a company blog.
The reason community building is so important for ecommerce stores is that it gives you access to repeat customers. Having customers that consistently buy from your store is crucial for success. Otherwise you will have to rely on spending money to constantly acquire new customers.
So, what would a community look like? Let’s take a look at an example of community building for an eCommerce store selling books. For this example we will look at how to create a community using a Facebook Group.
Step 1: eCommerce Store Creates A Book Related Facebook Group
Step 2: eCommerce Store Begins Creating Content To Attract People To Their Facebook Group
Step 3: eCommerce Store Begins Engaging With Members and Forming Relationships
Step 4: eCommerce Store Learns From Community and Begins Understanding Their Wants Needs
Step 5: eCommerce Store Creates An Offering Based on What They Learn
Step 6: eCommerce Store Begins Offering What Audience Needs and Sales Increase
Now this is a very high-level look at community building, but the goal is simple: if an ecommerce store can build a community of people who trust them and their product(s), then they will be able to increase sales. Marketing your ecCommerce store via community building is affordable and highly effective.
Content Marketing Is Affordable
We already discussed the importance of driving traffic to your ecommerce store. Content marketing, even when done on a small budget, is a very effective way to drive traffic.
Having a smaller budget isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to content marketing. In fact, most content marketing campaigns that have driven viral traffic required very little capital investment.
If you have a small budget, you will need to invest more of your personal time. If you are serious about increasing your sales, this shouldn’t be a problem. Neil Patel wrote a fantastic blog post discussing how to you succeed at content marketing with a small budget.
There are two approaches to content marketing:
- Drive Long Term Traffic
- Short-Term Traffic Boost
- How To Blog Posts
- Training Programs
- Explainer Videos
- Industry News
- Unique Ways To Use Your Product
- Case Studies
Influencers Will Help You
It doesn’t matter if you are selling books, skateboards, or anything else, there are always people within your niche that have extreme influence over the market as a whole. For example, if you were selling books, having a famous author like Stephen King help to promote your ecommerce store would be a game-changer.
Now it is very unlikely that a small ecommerce store would be able to get the support of Stephen King, but there are plenty of lesser known individuals that still have major influence.
Despite what many people might think, influencers are willing to help if you make the process easy and beneficial for them. When it comes to influencer marketing, it is crucial to remember that there is a big difference between popularity and influence.
You may find someone on social media with 100,000 followers that has far less influence than someone with 1,500. If you can identify influencers within your niche, you will be able to ask them for help.
So, how exactly will an influencer help you increase your traffic and sales?. Let’s look at an example:
eClincher, a social media management SaaS provider, created a blog post that involved over 20 of the top influencers in the digital marketing industry. The post included predictions for the upcoming year from these influencers. Simple enough, right?
The results were over 1,000 shares on social media and a massive increase in new customer signups. Since many of the influencers in the post shared it with their followers, it became a massive success.
The best part? The post was completely free!
