"The man who prevents marketing to save money, like the man who stops the clock to save time"
Thomas Jefferson.
Marketing is the backbone of any project or company, whatever its specialization or field of work, there is no integrity of any project without good marketing. Although many young entrepreneurs - newcomers - believe that marketing is not as important as what we envision, and that there are several aspects to spend on the success of their projects, but marketing is not among them. This misconception leads them to a dead end in which their pink dreams are shattered from their projects that will grow and achieve huge success on the rock of failure to fall into the abyss and eventually bankruptcy. Given the importance of marketing in the success of any e-shop or project, we will present in this report a set of practical ways that small and medium startups can rely on in marketing their stores and products in order to achieve greater engagement with the public and consequently spread and growth and increase sales.
Oral Marketing: Recommendation and Nomination
"Oral marketing will never be out of date. It will always be the first approach by which people make choices about brands."
(Jamie Turner, author and entrepreneur)
Oral marketing is one of the most important and effective free marketing techniques ever, yet many startups do not pay attention to them and do not even think that they can promote the spread of their stores and increase their sales and profits. One of the most credible forms of unpaid promotion is word of mouth or word marketing, where customers recommend your products or service or recommend your brand to their own constituencies and acquaintances of friends, family, relatives, classmates or work, Without getting something in return. [1]
Oral marketing is not a modern method of promotion, it is one of the old marketing methods that are recognized among traders and consumers alike. Traders rely on it to boost their sales, and consumers use it to exchange views and experiences about different products and services to ensure the best product or service is reached. [2] According to a report by the Nielsen Global Foundation for Measuring Analytics and Data, which included more than 28,000 participants from 56 different countries, 92% of consumers around the world reported that they trusted verbal marketing, such as friends and family recommendations, above all other forms of advertising. . [3]
Oral marketing mechanisms rely primarily on transforming consumers into your own marketers, as it is their responsibility to promote your products between their circles and attract more customers indirectly, often without their knowledge. In the past, speech marketing took the form of oral narrative, in the way a person conveys his positive experience and shares his satisfaction with a particular product or service to his or her surroundings. Now, social media has contributed to a new and more modern blood for this type of marketing, as it includes other modern methods in addition to traditional means, and take many other forms besides talking directly such as storytelling written or social media ratings and video reviews and others . [4]
Since verbal marketing is based primarily on the promotion of circles surrounding consumers from family and relatives, it depends entirely on trust between customers and merchants.If consumer confidence disappears in your service or products, you are in a real dilemma that will not be accompanied by a shafi'i. The situation is turned upside down not only to not only buy your products, but also to passive promotion by warning their circles against dealing with your store which negatively affects your services and sales can lead to heavy losses sometimes.
Dr. Nick Hagley, director of graduate research at Swansea University in the International Journal of Marketing Research, wrote: “Confidence supported by social media has a significant impact on buying intent. Trust therefore plays a pivotal role in e-commerce by directly influencing the desire to the purchase". [5] Now, you may be wondering how you can tame oral marketing to your advantage and increase your sales? The answer lies in two key factors: building trust and loyalty to your brand.
Customer Service: The fastest route to oral marketing
"The best marketing strategy ever is attention"
(Gary Weinerschuk, entrepreneur and marketing expert)
Nowadays, with the curse of multiple choice and competitive pricing between companies and brands, the step of searching for the best and most valuable products and comparing them with competing products to reach the optimal product is a very difficult step that requires a lot of time, effort and energy, which not everyone has. So the vast majority of people save energy, time and wasted effort in searching for the best product, and make purchases based on the opinions and nominations of people who trust their choices, as well as the assessments of the majority of users.
Confidence in your store will not come out of the blue. Customers will only feel confident if you provide them with a unique service that not only sells, but extends to the deepest detail of their dealings. According to Jonah Burger, associate professor of marketing at James J. Campbell at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Infectious: The Reason for Outbreaks of Things,” passion and attention are one of the key principles that drive the public to talk about your products or brand and recommend them to their own knowledge and circles. [6]
So be sure to build a bridge of trust between your customers and your brand.Although brand loyalty is difficult, it takes a lot of effort, so maintaining one customer's loyalty can cost 5 times the effort and money required to acquire a new customer. Are able to build this loyalty easily. [7] Listening carefully to customer problems, seeking to solve them, accepting good suggestions and working on their implementation plays a pivotal role in giving customers a sense of interest, and consequently enhancing their trust in the brand and increasing their engagement, loyalty and attachment to their services.
Email Marketing .. Earn 32 times what you spend
"Marketing without data is like driving with your eyes closed"
(Dan Zrella, social media scientist)
In the year before 2017, there were more than 3.7 billion e-mail users worldwide, sending and receiving more than 269 billion e-mail per day. It is expected that the number of users in three years from now to 4.3 billion users - more than half of the world population - send and receive about 333 billion e-mail daily. [8] These interesting statistics illustrate the importance of email-based marketing, which is one of the most effective and current marketing methods.
According to the 2018 EMA Email Tracker study conducted by DMA, a research, legal advice, industry guidance and innovation organization, e-mail marketing through a well-thought-out strategy will make you make huge profits. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you'll earn about $ 32. [9] This study confirms that email marketing is a good opportunity that brands should seize with all their might.
No matter how big or small your online store or brand is, you have the ability to reach your customers via email marketing throughout the day throughout the year, by setting up a list of email addresses of your past and current customers as well as potential customers interested in your store or products, and starting In marketing your products and your brand. You can get customer email data in two main ways, the first is low-efficiency depends on buying this data from some specialized companies to collect, but this method will not achieve the desired results because it often includes a general category of users who are not interested in your brand or your store often. [10]
The second method is most effective, relying on willingly obtaining e-mail data from customers by including an e-mail subscription form somewhere marked on your website, and persuading them to provide you with e-mail in exchange for an incentive such as: Free or important report, get the latest offers and newsletter, or even a chance to get free shipping or win a discount or free product, and other ways of encouraging. [11] However, before you start sending emails, you should consider several important steps and points, such as:
* Identify your target audience carefully , there is no point in sending e-mails to people who are not interested in your store or what you offer, people will not bother to open your messages even. Your target audience should be carefully selected, often between two main segments: your current and former customers, and potential customers interested in your store and browsing your website more than once.
* Give the message a personal character , beware of relying on standard messages that do not pay attention to any client will be sent, because messages that lack personal touches do not meet the demand of the target audience and is often neglected. The message should start with the customer's name, tailoring the messages to each client's interests if possible.
* Choose the right time for a spam, such as when it comes to promotions or seasonal discounts, or to advertise new and improved products and services. According to the "Email Marketing Tracker" study, marketers see the best content that can be used in email is discounts at 38%, followed by brand-related content at 36% such as articles and domains.
* Drafting the text of the promotional message to contain brief and attractive information , with the option of preventing the receipt of the promotional message to maintain the privacy of the client and his wishes. So that your messages and email for your store aren't labeled as spam. E-mail marketing can be learned for free through the following short lecture:
Impact Marketing: Relying on social media influencers
Social media is filled with tens of thousands of influencers from content creators, lecturers, writers, and bloggers, each producing unique content that ultimately gets millions of followers who trust their decisions and nominations. An influential person can be defined as an individual with a good online presence who has the ability to influence the opinions and behaviors of a large audience, and therefore influential marketing involves influencers marketing products or brands to their audience. [12]
Influential marketing represents the radical shift of marketing from advertising tactics to individual-based programs, where merchants or brands develop relationships and build trust with influential individuals to enhance their brand message and enhance their reach and consequently increase their sales and profits. Recently, in conjunction with the development of social media, influential marketing has evolved from being just a sub-channel of marketing channels to one of the most powerful strategies used in brand marketing, and the cornerstone of any digital retailer strategy. [13]
Effective marketing applies between brands and influencers in two main ways: first, pay-for-nomination where influencers promote your brand through social media posts or share the product with the public, and second, get products before they are released to the market for review and highlight their benefits to followers, but in the second It is important to choose people who are influential in your industry or who are more or less connected to it. When designing a strategy for how to deal with influencers, this type of promotion will provide you with good, measurable results that will increase the value of your products in the eyes of potential customers. [14] But before you start identifying and hiring influential people or sending free products, there are several points to consider and adhere to, such as:
You should determine your ultimate goal of sending your free products to influencers, such as: raising awareness of your products, launching a new product, or creating content about your products
* Choose the influencers on social networks very carefully , and first determine which social networks and what kind of influencers will serve your brand, whether from creators, content bloggers, industry experts the same industry as you or even traditional celebrities. Of course, relying on the industry experts themselves and creators is the best options because of the real audience they are interested in your products, of course it is not preferable to send your products to an influential person but interested in creating content about another type of industry or products.
* To set clear expectations , you should set your ultimate goal of sending your free products to influencers, such as: raising awareness of your products, launching a new product, creating content about your products, or otherwise, and by customizing your marketing strategy accordingly, by choosing a social network Optimizing audience targeting, then identifying the right influencers, and ultimately identifying appropriate products and giving them a personal character.
Share the burden with affiliate marketers
Over the past few years, with the spread of personal blogs, video blogs, etc., affiliate marketing has become one of the most popular promotional technologies between online stores and online markets. Affiliate marketing relies primarily on the marketer promoting your brand's products to surrounding circles such as friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, and others, in return for a specific commission on each product purchased by one of their circles. Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where a company or brand offers a profit margin that can be described as relatively small commission commissioners for each visitor or customer making the purchase. [15]
Commission marketing technology is very similar to Drop Shipping. Commissioners and retailers who receive Dropshipping focus primarily on marketing products for their profits. Of course if you are reading this report and do not know about the routes, you can rely on this report; "in simple steps .. Start your e-shop without a large capital" to understand everything related to routes shipping from the ground up. Affiliate marketing is done through simple steps starting with the agreement between you and the affiliate marketer. The affiliate marketer will fill out a form or apply to join your affiliate program, which you incorporate somewhere in your online store.
Then, you communicate with the marketer and show him the details of your marketing program, and then provide him with a link to your own e-store, this special link often contains a number or letter at the end as an identifier for each marketer. The marketer advertises your brand products in his own way, whether on his blog, his social media accounts, his YouTube channel or any other means.When a customer purchases your products through the marketer's link, the marketer gets his commission. The most important thing about commission marketing is that it combines zero risk, low cost, flexibility and good results.You won't have to pay a penny to the marketer unless you sell your products, and you can start and end your marketers whenever you want.
Rely on Google ads
Google AdWords offers a wide range of great ways to reach your target customers, such as text ads on Google, image and video ads on YouTube, as well as in-app ads on mobile devices. With millions of websites, news pages, blogs and Google Network sites, and with options to target customers, keywords, and demographic information, Google ads can reach 90% of the world's Internet users. [16]
Your brand ads appear in the top search results on Google search when users search for your products and services, encouraging your customers to look at your brand, think about the services or products you offer, and do what they want to get. Display ads appear on more than 2 million websites and over 650,000 apps, ensuring your ad is shown to targeted customers wherever they are online. For example, when you search for a place that provides auto repair services in Google search, you will find that the first result on the left is the word "Ad" which is already a paid ad.
Google ads have many advantages to boost your brand's reach and attract more customers, whether you're looking to attract new visitors to your website, increase your online sales, or get customers to call you. It has the ability to advertise locally and globally, target customers in specific countries, regions or cities, or within a certain distance of your business or online store, not just local customers, and budget yourself according to the goal you're trying to achieve with your ads, and the ability to test your ads, edit, and test Those changes to get the best optimized image from your ad.
In addition to paying for the actual result, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad to visit or call you, when your ad meets its goal. You can also monitor the performance of your ads, see how many users see your ads, visit your website, or contact your business and see which category is most responsive to your store. You can learn how to handle Google ads step by step through this short course offered by Google.
Free shipping
According to the results of a recent survey by business leader alix partners, online customers are very stubborn and easily abandon shopping carts for many reasons. First, customers need to see and touch products before they buy them 37%, while the second most important reason was the cost of shipping by 36%, a difference of one percentage point from the first place. [17] Free shipping is one of the most attractive temptations in e-commerce specifically. For example, if you see a product that you would like to purchase available in an online store but can only get it for the actual price displayed on the site, without extra pounds for shipping, delivery or other, would you hesitate to order? of course not!
Free shipping has a magic effect on consumers because it plays on a common psychological plan that nurtures the user's desire to get something (free shipping) for nothing, although this is often not true.Although free shipping is well known, the actual practice of marketing free shipping is slightly different from the overview. Free shipping cannot be offered on all products, for example, to all customers, and so on. Free shipping is defined as a marketing method that eliminates the declared cost of shipping charges for eligible purchases. Here, a thousand lines should be placed below the word "eligible", because it means that free shipping is not available for all products, otherwise catastrophic failure is the way. [18]
To provide free shipping service to your customers without affecting your profit reduction or causing you material losses you must adhere to some steps and tips to properly launch the free shipping policy. First of all, you need to determine how much you need to sell in order to make a profit and provide free shipping. In other words, calculate the shipping cost in the cost of the product, and discover the most effective way to apply free shipping. [19] There are three basic ways online stores and brands can activate free shipping:
* Provide free shipping on specific products , in this way buyers qualify for free shipping only when you buy certain products you select, such as products that get a huge return or slow-selling products from which you own large quantities.
* Provide free shipping if the customer spends enough money , as some brands restrict the process of free shipping with a minimum purchase, if the customer requests more than the minimum will be able to take advantage of free shipping service. This method ensures that your profit margin will remain high in every order your customers make.
* Free shipping is used as an incentive to buy during a short marketing campaign or during a specific time period, where free shipping is restricted by timing, which means that the customer must purchase within a specified time period to get free shipping. This method allows you to provide free shipping for a specified period or during events as part of a complete marketing campaign.
Trinity Marketing: offers, discounts, discounts
In the world of marketing, offers, discounts and discounts are three aspects of a single currency, where they are considered the magic gates to turn a generation of site visitors or e-store who have no way to convince them to buy into potential customers. They are also highly effective tools to take care of potential customers in your online store and make them more willing to place orders. According to a recent survey to identify the impact of offers on sales, 45% of respondents said they only enter a store when they see discounts of 41% or more. [20]
40% of consumers said they would be willing to travel to another store to see if they could find the same item at a lower price. There are many practices that can be relied upon in designing marketing offers that are highly effective in increasing sales and profits and maximizing the benefits. One of these best practices is to create a lot of targeted marketing offers. It is not possible to create offers and discounts in the absolute without a good reason to do them, we must design the right offers for the right customers at the right time. [21] An arsenal of marketing offerings is therefore required to suit each category of existing and potential customers.
You can create a spreadsheet that allows you to list the offers you currently have, highlight their gaps, and gradually fill in those gaps in order to make the marketing offers suitable for each customer category you previously selected. Most e-stores rely on this method.For example, during the month of November each year, most e-stores design a lot of marketing offers that suit large categories of customers, these offers are divided by days and the quality of products, each day during the week Deals are customized on a specific category of products, once home appliances, again smart phones, and a third time clothing, shoes, and so on.
When it comes to marketing offers and discounts, we must rely on attractive language, phrases and phrases that urge customers to interact with each of your offers, and make them take a real step towards the shopping basket, as well as rely on distinctive images of products with unique designs attractive price includes each product before Discount and then to entice the customer and pay him to make the purchase. [22] During offers and discounts, you should rely on e-mail marketing, create lists of past or existing customers, and send personalized messages with marketing offers and discounts. Customers.
Correct timing and product variety
In February 2018, Sippy Insights analyzed the reasons behind the failure of startups, and interviewed the founders of many of the projects involved in the study to find out why the projects failed. Its founders. It then sorted these reasons into different categories according to how these causes impacted on project failures. As a result, the timely release of the company's products resulted in the failure of nearly 13% of the total projects under consideration. [23] While choosing the right timing to display your products is one of the simple steps that will cost you nothing if you do, it depends on the success or literal failure of your brand or online store.
The late issuance of your product reduces all the opportunities for the product in the market, as well as the early release may make it vulnerable to defects or lack of quality, which creates a negative impression on customers, and consequently shrinking the target segment of the customer followed by shrinking sales and profits. So you should choose the right timing to display all your products, study the timing well and carefully determine what customers need. [24] Along with the right timing, the lack of product diversity is one of the most important elements that may contribute to reducing your sales opportunities and discouraging your profits. For example, when a customer visits your store and finds the same products without renewing, he gets bored and may decide not to return to your store again.
Pay attention to statistics
Although the step of monitoring statistics and analysis is important for the continued success or failure of a brand, many online store owners neglect it. Reviewing and controlling your brand's website analytics is critical to the success of your project. These statistics show what your customers are doing on your site, including the pages they access, the time they spend on certain pages, the route they take to leave your site, the number of times a customer visits your site, etc.
Understanding the behavior of each of your customers directly will help you understand why your brand succeeds or fails. One of the most powerful web analytics applications currently available is Google Analytics because it is primarily a free tool, with many unique features and features that contribute significantly to maximizing your website and customers' understanding, such as integrated customer behavior and interaction graphs. With your services, so you can finally deliver good experiences to them and thus achieve better results. [25]
In the end, the above techniques are considered one of the best marketing channels that can be used to enhance the spread of your brand or your emerging business, whatever the nature of its work. . There are many other channels and marketing methods that can also be relied upon, but they have not had room here, and we may consider them in a future report as the opportunity arises.