Your marketing campaigns can make or break your business’ capability to bring in sales — that’s how crucial they are.
Sadly, most effective and positive-yielding marketing endeavors often require that you spend a sizeable amount of money.
That might not be a problem for established companies with deep marketing pockets, however, if you barely have enough resources for your marketing campaigns, you’d be hard pressed to put your products in front of your audiences’ screens.
Let’s say you started a dropshipping ecommerce store — an ideal business model due to its minimal starting cost. If you go by the usual way dropshippers market their products, you’d spend quite a lot on paid ads — which is something you can’t pull off due to your limited budget.
If you want to succeed in promoting your business, you need to have a dropshipping marketing playbook that contains tried and tested methods to get you more sales.
That is why, in this guide, we’re going to talk about that — the marketing methods you can use for your ecommerce business.
To be more specific, however, we’re going to look at the affordable marketing strategies that you can leverage.
Do you like what you’re reading so far? Then let’s get to it.
1. Host Giveaways
As an ecommerce business owner, one of the most crucial questions you need to answer in your audiences’ minds is, “What’s in it for me?”
The more relevant and enticing your answer is to that question, the higher their likelihood to take action on your offer.
With that said, a solid marketing approach you can use is to give them a “preview” of your product’s value through giveaways and social media contests.
For instance, you can run a giveaway or contest on your Instagram account using a #ContestGiveaway hashtag.
You can post the mechanics of the contest, including tagging three friends in the comment section to qualify for the contest and the date of the announcement for the winners.
With social media contests, you can increase your brand exposure and offer your target customers a snippet of your product’s value at the same time.
It’s also a great strategy to increase your brand awareness through social media like wildfire without paying for ads.
It can be a win-win situation for you and your potential customers.
2. Offer Coupons as Social Sharing Incentives
Building a connection with your social media followers isn’t as easy as you’d think.
With countless brands creating social media profiles and publishing truckloads of content daily, there’s a good chance you’d be forgotten by your target audience.
That’s why it’s crucial for you to stand out, identify the best marketing channels, grab your target audience’s attention, and get them to share your content.
One way of doing this is by offering your target customers incentives - like coupons - when they share your social media content.
On ecommerce platforms like Shopify, you can create discount codes for your dropshipping store.
Let’s say you want to promote your blog post about how to get started with dropshipping on Facebook.
You can create a discount code on your Shopify account, and offer it as an incentive to users who share your content.
Once you set up all the details such as the discount type, value, and more, you can start offering it to your target audiences in exchange for sharing the link to your blog post.
By incentivizing social sharing, you get to promote your dropshipping store plus share relevant content to users who want to understand how dropshipping works.
Here’s a bonus tip: You can also use discount coupons as a reward for returning and loyal customers.
After all, who doesn’t love a good discount?
3. Start a Blog
One of the most budget-friendly ways to do content marketing is by creating a blog.
Blogging lets you engage with your customers by answering their questions and introducing your brand at the same time.
However, starting a blog requires specific steps to write great content and use it for your content marketing strategies.
Here are a few tips on doing just that.
- Make the link to your blogroll easily accessible from your main page. When a link to your blogroll is readily seen from your homepage, it becomes easy for your visitors to click it. As your readers consume your content, you’ll be in a better position to influence them to take action on your offers.
- Use the same root domain for your blog as your ecommerce website. Remember that SEO is a crucial factor in content marketing, so if you create a new site, you might lose the SEO benefits for your main site.
- For instance, to avoid creating a new link profile and another root domain, don’t make a new site like blog.mywebsite.com, but use mywebsite.com/blog instead.
- Use ecommerce platforms with blogging features. This can save you time and energy by using their templates, themes, and other tools to create your blog.
- Instead of starting from scratch to create your blog, you can focus on writing great content to engage your potential customers and help drive traffic to your website.
4. Utilize User-Generated Content
Customer reviews are goldmines for content marketing on a shoe-string budget, but so is user-generated content.
Using user-generated content is a great content marketing strategy because all you have to do is find customers that positively mentions your brand on social networks, and share their posts.
It’s pretty amazing, right?
For instance, you can ask your customers for permission to share their posts about your products - like photos or videos on Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook.
The screenshot below shows an example of user-generated content.
This is the kind of user-generated content that you can share on your blog, ecommerce website, social media, and more to help promote your brand.
The more your target audience see positive and honest feedback from satisfied customers, the more likely they are to trust in the quality of your products.
5. Share Your Brand Story
When starting an ecommerce business, you might be tempted to focus more on the technical aspects of your marketing strategies such as your SEO techniques and more.
Sure, SEO strategies are just as important in marketing, but when you’re on a limited budget, you might want to start with what you have and use it to your advantage.
This is where your brand story can come in handy.
Your brand story helps you attract your potential customers’ attention because it enables you to build an emotional connection with them.
The Hoover Company posted its brand story on its website.
It tells of how the company started as a solution to the dust that aggravated Murray Spangler, the inventor’s, asthma problem while sweeping at night as a janitor.
Today, Hoover has grown from its first vacuum cleaner model to a line of products for special-purpose and general vacuuming.
The key, however, is to write your brand narrative in a way that will pull your target customers’ heartstrings enough for them to connect with your brand in a more emotional level.
It might not only be an effective marketing strategy, but it’s also an inexpensive way to get people to notice your brand.
Start Marketing
It may be challenging and costly to run extensive marketing campaigns, but with these five tips, you can start small and work your way towards a successful ecommerce business.
Remember that the goal is to get your product out in the market and ultimately lead them to purchase, but it doesn’t have to cost you a kidney and a lung.
Give these tips a try and see how they can bring you marketing success for your ecommerce business.
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Marc lives and breathes writing. He writes about marketing, business, sports, cybersecurity, or just about anything and everything under the sun.
