This week on Instagram and Facebook and pondered what our followers thought where the hardest obstacles to overcome as a drop shipper, so we asked:

Advertising Your Drop Shipping Store

Advertisement is a huge part of owning a business, whether it is drop shipping, online or a physical store. Unfortunately there isn’t 1 simple strategy, hence why it can be daunting to to advertise your store. Here are the most common ways of promoting your store.

Social media marketing:

Social media marketing is the process of obtaining attention and sales through the use of social media platforms. There are two types of social media marketing: organic (free) and paid.

Paid advertising:

Paid advertising is a form of internet marketing where advertisers pay to show their adverts on search engines and other online platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Content marketing:

Content marketing is the process of consistently creating, distributing, and promoting relevant online materials in a way that’s strategically designed to attract, engage, and convert your target market into customers.

Affiliate marketing:

This strategy essentially just online referral marketing as a business will set up a program that pays commissions to individuals or external websites for the traffic or sales they generate.

Email marketing:

Email marketing is the process of using emails to send direct marketing messages to people as a effort to gain new customers and retain existing ones.

Influencer marketing:

This process is working with influencers to promote a product to their online following. We recommend using our database full of influencers with proven engagement with their followers.

Search ngine optimisation (SEO):

SEO is the process of optimising websites and digital content to improve search engine rankings which in turn, maximises the number of visitors to a particular web page.

Not Receiving Orders

There is no single strategy to getting your first sale with drop shipping and retaining orders. However there are many factors that go into improving your sales. Here are a few that will definitely improve your store’s turnover.

Drop shipping tore reliability:

By putting your customers perspective into your own you can understand how taunting it is to buy from a new store. That is why making it more reliable is a must: the best way to achieve this is by using reviews. Reviews allow the consumer to have an insight on what they are spending their money on. We recommend asking new customers and past customers to leave a review… if you struggle to get reviews use Download Review.

Branding:

It is proven that a consumer needs at least 8 touch points before they buy. Touch points doesn’t specifically mean forcing a product in front of their eyes, touch points are also branding. Having you brand consistently popping up encourages consumers to remember you unconsciously. It is important to retain branding across every platform and store.

Offer Free Shipping:

82% of customers admitted to spending more to reach the minimum spend for ‘free shipping’. Free shipping is one of the most attractive offers for online shoppers. Even if the shipping still costs you, you can blend the shipping price with the product price. This appears tot he customer as you having their best interest at heart.

Offer Coupon Codes:

Once again sales and coupons are blessings to online shoppers. It either encourages a customer to spend more or makes their decision on what they buy faster. You can also campaign your sale to attract new customers.

How To Target The Right Audience

If your market is saturated it can be hard to find an audience that isn’t already being hit by other stores. We recommend our Facebook Audience Builder, however for a more personalised audience we recommending targeting your own. Here are a few easy tips:

Create customer personas:

Who is your perfect customer? By filling out a customer persona you can understand what the perfect way of advertising is. Ask yourself some questions, such as: Age? Job? Class? This way you can see what platforms to target on, what they need and whether your product should be advertised as high end or low end.

Analyse current customers:

Who is already your customers? Once again you can use what you are already attracting to see where and who you should be targeting .

Analyse the competition

Using Site Scanner you can see your competitions data from any drop shipping store, which helps you see where they get their traffic from. You can use this to improve or differentiate your self from. However don’t get to focused on competition, remember you are your own store.

Drop shipping is an easy business module however like anything else that is great it doesn’t happen overnight. Make sure to follow our Instagram and Facebook to be involved in more polls.