How to Spend Money on Marketing Campaign effectively for online stores

Marketing or advertising reflects the way online sellers choose to spend their money in order to increase sales, and how much they spend usually depends on their budgets. The most important thing is how to spend effectively – will it attract their target customers or will it just be burned into ash? Online sellers may have wasted tons of money on marketing campaigns that are not effective at all, it could be because they’ve chosen the wrong channel or don’t how to analyze its effectiveness and optimize.

1. The crowded places are not always the most suitable place.

We often think that it’d be better for us to start a marketing campaign where it is as crowded  as possible. However, that is not always true. For example, the more crowded a market is, the more competitors would enter and the higher chance that your marketing efforts are being neglectful. Even though there are a lot of people, you can’t make sure that they’d stop to look at your banners.

It’s the same in e-commerce world; you can spend a lot of money on your marketing campaign: hanging your banners in a good spot in one of the best high traffic websites or creating Facebook ads. However, it doesn’t mean that your campaigns are effective just by achieving a lot of impression. Although many customers visit Facebook or that website everyday; most of them might not be your potential customers or you may target the wrong sites.  Asking yourself these questions before starting any of your marketing campaigns:

• What is wrong and right about your previous marketing campaign?

By answering this question, you will know what to do and what not to do in your new marketing campaign. It saves your time, your money and also your effort. Remember that ”Failure is the mother of success”.

• Who is your target audience?

For each campaign, you have different target audience so take your time to examine exactly who you want to reach by classifying their genders, age ranges, interests, habits,…

• Which channel(s) should you choose?
• What is your goal and How do you measure success?

These things are really important for both online sales and traditional sales, and make sure that you’re happy with your answers.

2. How many channels should you choose?

There are a lot of marketing channels that you can choose but as we all know, budget is limited. On the other hand, if you chose 1 or 2 channels only, you would waste the chance to reach potential customers in other ones that you didn’t use.

Online customers often look for products and services in many different places. They can search via Facebook, Twitter, Google, newspapers, or emails… Before considering how many channels you should choose, you’d better figure out which channels your customers often use, and which channels can bring you high traffic rate. If you have money and a big team helping you run marketing campaigns, you can choose from 5-7 channels, as long as you can manage them all. On the other hand, if your budget is limited and you have only 1-2 members to do all the tasks, you should choose less than 4 channels (you’ll be able to reach to a certain amount of customers and still manage them well). This infographic will help you choose the social media platforms that suit your marketing campaign.

3. The cheaper price doesn’t equal the higher effectiveness

Online sellers sometimes think that the cheaper a cost per click, the more effective it is, but they are wrong. No matter how you ran your marketing campaign or how much you spent on it, it’s all about sales, sales, and sales. If you have a low cost per click price but it doesn’t bring you any sales, the fact is that you’re wasting your money and the price is actually not cheap at all. The cost you spend on marketing campaign should be measured by all the index you have: Click, Impression, CTR, CR, ROI…

4. Measuring and Optimizing is the key of success

In any marketing campaign, measuring is necessary. It allows you to optimize your marketing campaign by overcoming your weakness and developing your strength. Here are some tools that you could use to measure your campaign:

• Website analytics tool such as Google Analytics (free), Webtrends and HubSpot will give you a look at your site performance and user behavior. Those information gives you insight about the value of your advertising media, which media you should promote and which you should stop.
• Webmaster tools from Google or Bing: they tell you exactly how they crawl and read your site. It helps you to see your sites as Google and Bing see it, helps you bring better SEO for your campaigns.
• Marketing Automation App such as Beeketing can help you track customers’ behavior, analyze tracked data and then use that data to engage buyers better, help you sell better. Moreover, Beeketing also has the in-depth analytics tool that gives the insight you need about your customers.
• Social Media profiles such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…and management solutions such as Buffer, TweetDeck,  Sprout Social, HootSuite and Radian6. While social networks allow you to get closer to your customers, to understand and get in touch with them; management solutions help you control your social media profiles better, making everything easier and more effective as well as saving your time.

Here are some great tips for you to run a complete promotion campaign, why don’t you take a look and apply to your store right now? And please remember that if you need any support in running your campaigns, Beeketing is always here to help.