Table of Contents
Introduction
Why do you need to know the Modern Marketing Hacks to achieve success in our E-Commerce Business, you ask?
Everything is changing in the marketing world and it’s changing at a very fast rate. We, as eCommerce entrepreneurs cannot afford to be stuck in traditional marketing funnel..
Funnels have just taken off like crazy and the way that people find things, the way that people discover what’s going on and embrace digital marketing has changed a lot.
Everyone’s unique, every experience is unique, customization, awareness and embracing user intent is going to be critical going forward if a Brand want to to stand out from the rest.
Let us get straight to the simple Marketing Hacks that you, as an eCommerce business owner can do to achieve insane success!
Let's understand the Traditional Marketing Funnel System
The traditional funnel that we, as marketers talk about regularly looks like this,
- Awareness and the top of the funnel (TOFU)
- Middle of the funnel (MOFU) is where people evaluate things
- At the bottom of the funnel, (BOFU), purchase and follow up post purchase
“There are more than 50% of the campaigns don’t have any follow-up. So, this is kind of an easy Marketing Hack that you can follow.”
Think with Google says, “as marketers we were taught to master the funnel which is a linear customer journey from awareness to consideration to purchase. And using mass media, the key levers to drive growth were reach and frequency. But this model no longer applies to today’s customer journeys because those journeys don’t resemble a funnel at all. These are intense-rich moments that create journey shapes as unique as each of us. In many ways, intent is redefining the marketing funnel.”
New Approach beyond Traditional Marketing Funnel
Think of making the marketing of your products as personalised as the DNA that each of us have inside us. The way to do that is to think of a spiral of awareness and a spiral of purchasing and post purchase conversions and in between we’re making evaluations. There will be multiple touch points in between.
You might see Search as one of the places that user begin but along that you might have social media, paid media, earned media, owned media and messaging. These are the building blocks of the customer journey today and each of these blocks have more branches. What we need to think about is, ‘how can you be in each of these places so that you are exactly where the customer is going’.
The customer isn’t just at the top of the funnel, but the customer is all over the place. The connectivity between these two spirals is the evaluation, consideration process and then they are trying to decide as to whether they should crossover from the journey to the destination of purchasing.
It’s conversion that we want and so, if we look at how this works with our traditional funnel elements you start with ‘Lead magnets, tripwires, core offers, up-sells and down-sells and follow on sales’.
The traditional funnel structures are still there but they just don’t happen in a single funnel type structure. They happen much more organically with hundreds of touchpoints along the way.
Some Simple Marketing Hacks to enhance the results of your Campaigns
Influencers help attract insane prices and demands for your product over competition.
This can be done through influencers story and personalization, and this is interesting. One of the best ways that you can improve margins for anything that you’re marketing, and selling is to amplify the value using one of these things.
You can sell $19.00 products for $200, $400, $600 if you get a few influencers to come in and say, ‘hey, we think these products are cool’.
This is an insanely effective Marketing Hack for you and your marketing campaigns to bring influencers in? Just by the fact of them being involved increases the perceived value, amplifies the perceived value of the things that you’re selling.
Increase the Value of your product by Attaching a Story.
In this Marketing Hack you can use True Stories have an unbelievable effect on the Prices and Demand of a Product. Another way to do that is through stories. You can use true stories and I’m going to give you an example of that, ‘first, this is a kind of a true story’. This moleskin has a story that says that this is the journal, the notebook that was used by Picasso Van Gogh Anne Hemingway to take notes and they built a company around it that’s valued at $578 million on a Journal with a story about some famous people who didn’t use a mole scheme, they used notebooks. Notebooks aren’t new but they thought that if they spun this story into the magic and romance of these famous talented people, then people will want to buy them, and they did Euro 135m in sales in 12 months. Last time I checked, that’s a story amplifying the value of a freaking notebook.
Even Fiction can be used if True Stories don’t exist.
Another interesting study is a ‘significant objects study’. This is a test called four stories and the value of them. A couple of researchers got 200 different journalists and hired them to write stories about the products that they purchased for an average of $1.25. Each of those was then put on eBay and auctioned off with an average increase in value of 132 times. It was a fake story that was created to talk about each of those little cheap things that they bought. In this case, it’s a snow globe that comes with a 7 page letter where they’re talking about their journey around the world, and she has a hard time parting with it so she gave it to a friend to sell and the friend is selling it and it has all this intrigue and romance and adventure wrapped up in the story and it’s worth 132 times more, simply because it has a story. So, we’ve got true story, maybe, if you can’t find one of those, you can write a fake one. All these people were given their money back so nobody was lied to.
Telling your buyers that it’s a Fiction can get equal attention.
Don’t lie to people but what about a story that everybody knows is not real? So, they did another test. They hired a different group of researchers and they said, ‘what if we just tell people that this is an object?’ They arranged for a small rubber ball for which they paid $0.25 and it comes with an original work of fiction. The original work of fiction is a story about the ball, and it sold for 3400% more than they paid for it just because of the story.
Do you see the opportunity here, to really focus on story? We hear a lot about it but this is hard evidence of the increase in value that telling stories can bring to the products, that you’ve already got. You just need to create the story and turns out you can tell people that the story is not even true and it’s still worth more because they were entertained.
Personalise, not only the Marketing but the Product as well.
The next way to do it is through personalization. If you personalize your landing pages and your emails, you can get a pretty significant impact like 113% increase in views and 117% increase in start accounts. We kind of know that personalization there is important but what about the product personalization can bring?
If you see the Louis Vuitton site, they have a purse for $335 but if you’d like to have them put some initials on it for you, it’s $495. That’s an increase of 48% on this site, in the face of the customer, simply for personalization because we all want to be different.
It goes back to that customer journey. We all want our own experience; we all have an individual identity and we want the world to see it too. Think about how you can not only personalize your messaging but how can you personalize the products that you’re selling, so that they become more valuable and in turn more profitable.
Let’s look at 5 of the most important tactics for selling anything on Amazon.
Visible in search results of Various Keywords
Now, let’s talk about some important factors for these six different building blocks that we talked about.
Brand Keyword Searches
The first is ‘branded keyword searches’ which means that you need to increase your branded queries in search.
So, what is a branded query?
It’s important to know that it’s basically anything about the name of your product or company. Why is this is important is because, have you noticed the real estate on Google for unbranded search things? It’s shrunk dramatically over the period and as a matter of fact, there are significantly less clicks on the first two full screens.
Branded search terms change that, branded queries increase your chances of ranking. Meaning, the more often people are searching for your brand and your brand is associated with the non-branded thing that you want, like leather jacket or personal injury attorney, the more you’re going to have a chance of owning those.
You should also focus on your SEO efforts, on great content and increasing branded queries. Those brand-new queries, any search query that contains all or a part of the business name or a variation of it.
So, how are we going to do that? You can use offline, paid earned media, remember the six building blocks? We just go to those, we say offline paid and earned media referral, and loyalty programs will also increase this influencer shoutouts, hashtags, and UGC which is user generated content. If influencers are talking about our brands and people who have consumed our products are posting user generated content showing our brands, other people will start searching for them which will give us a better chance of ranking SCO.
You must work on you SEO content to match User Intent
Another thing to use is Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique. He just recently came out with skyscraper 2.0 which is all about better user intent saying, ‘Google is only successful in keeping its edge in search, if the search results match the user intent.’ That’s why, the first few screens now, in all search results, are Google trying to figure out what you’re searching for. They want to give you the answer based on what they think your user intent is before you even are sure. That’s why it’s become hard, right? So, you need to think about informational, navigational, commercial and transactional intent. What is the searcher who’s searching for the thing that you have to offer, intending to find? You then create your content around it. If you do, you will have dramatically better search results in just a few days.
Social Media is one of the most powerful mediums to reach the right audience
There are many ways that you as an eCommerce business owner can use the Social Media to attract audience. But, there are some hidden but important elements which can help you achieve your dream results from your Marketing Campaigns.
Using Facebook Live to attract engagement and ranking
Live is so important, we all know that the Facebook algorithm dramatically prefers Facebook lives. So, how can we think about that?
Benefits of Live are:
- You get three times the watch time versus video
- Engagement is increases 10 times
- and you get that preference from the algorithm
What can we do to get more live engagement, to get more people watching our lives? One tool is to create awesome digital and animated content to go with your topic and then share to on Facebook.
Another hack? Giveaway a chance to win a prize on each live you do to anyone who posts a question. Here’s a pro tip, ‘if you want more comments, incentivize people to post questions and then answer them but answer them with a question.’ Why? Because it causes them to put more comments, it causes them to ask more questions, it shows more engagement which tells Facebook that you’re on fire and it generates more engagement.
Always try to schedule your live, in advance as Facebook will notify all your followers. Create insane content, graphics and animations, share it and tell everybody that you’re going to do a giveaway and then let Facebook notify all the followers, so that you have a whole lot more people come.
Facebook Groups can help you generate some amazing results
If you would like to have access to all the members of any group that you are a part of or that you own, you don’t have to own the group to do this. There are a lot of tools which extract all the user information which you can use as leads. You can upload that into Google or Facebook as a custom audience you might be able to run retargeting ads to everybody it’s in the group that says something about the group.
Have you ever looked on Facebook and said, ‘hey, I have this many clicks on my add that I’m paying for but, when I look at my landing page views I don’t have as the same number of landing page visits as I do clicks’
This is because, maybe your site is too slow or maybe people are just impatient as hell and there’s an awesome pet video with somebody amazing that they want to watch.
So, how can you capture that traffic?
The easy way is, instead of taking our ads straight to our landing page, put a page in between. That’s a blank page that has no heavy images or anything else but a redirect, so it immediately redirects the visitor from the blank page to the landing page. All you have on that page is your pixel for Google, Facebook or any other pixel that you want to have. You will now have the same number of clicks as you do landing-page views because they don’t have to wait any time for this page to load. If you find that the number is too great between the clicks and landing page views you really do probably need to look at how can you increase your page load speed. This is a great way to get everyone’s pixel.
Now, the second and most valuable thing that you can do which is the opposite of pixel everybody, don’t pixel everybody. Only pixel whose people who want to see, who will wait around long enough for your page to load to see what you’ve got to offer. The way you do that is that you wait 45 seconds to drop to fire your landing, your pixel, your retargeting pixel. You can typically save 50% to 75% on your retargeting CPA.
If you use Captions on your Facebook videos, you will be able to reach out to people who don’t speak your language as well
85% of the people who watch Facebook videos, watch them without the sound but 76% of those videos need sound to be understood.
How do you solve that? Captions!
If you use captions, you’ll increase your reach by 16% on average, your views with captions will increase by 22% and your clickthrough will increase by an average of 35%.
“Captions are very important.”
You can create captions in multiple languages and get a whole bunch of very cheap traffic from non-English speaking countries without having to speak all those other languages. You can use any service to get these captions and then put them up in those countries target those languages and you instantly have access to global traffic which is way cheaper than domestic traffic.
Upload your Facebook Custom audiences to Google and YouTube for highly targeted Marketing Campaigns
Just take your Facebook custom audiences and your look-alike audiences that you’ve created and export them and then upload them to Google and use those custom audiences now on Google’s display network on GDM. The CPA, the cost per acquisition gets reduced between 20% and 50% and now you’ve got Google.
If you’re not doing phone follow up, actual phone call follow-up with salespeople for whatever you’re selling, you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of sales.
You have to work to reduce the amount of time that it takes to get from when the lead comes in funnel to the time when a live person follows up with them. If you can follow up and make a hot connect in 60 seconds or less it’s almost 400% higher conversions. 55% of companies take 5 days or longer to follow up with lead that comes in online and that’s frustrating as hell.
Like, why would they call me back? They said that they were interested. They were interested in your product / service for 60 seconds but now they’re watching funny videos.
‘You’re not the only one who’s trying to reach these people and they’re probably looking in multiple places.’
78% of the closes go to the first responder, so be the first responder and be the first responder in 60 seconds!
Elements which you can enhance for success in the marketing campaigns on LinkedIn
There’s a lot of opportunity on LinkedIn. The best one is LinkedIn native video! Don’t share embedded videos on LinkedIn because if you use native, you’ll get two times more views, three times the engagement, five times the conversations, and 10 times total complete views with talking head. Do native uploads if you’d like to automate your LinkedIn growth. What this does is it increases the exposure every time that you have a video. A notice goes out to all their friends, all of their connections and they get an email from LinkedIn saying, ‘you got this notice.’
Create a Sponsored Ad campaign using our Holiday-Specific Keywords to attract holiday customers.
Give me the Formula!Stages in Buyer's Journey
This is a fantastic study; these are the stages in the buyer’s journey where each type of interactive content is the most effective. Early stage will be called top of funnel if we were using the old 2014 technology, middle stage is middle of funnel and late stage is the bottom of the funnel.
Assessments, contests, games, interactive infographics and quizzes are the top of the funnel early awareness things.
You want to think about creating that kind of content at the beginning to engage people, use more quizzes. Lead quizzes are the best easiest way to build these the average League capture. You can expect almost 40% shares on average from each quiz that you post.
You want to create your results based on segments so that you can tag them and then send personalized message to each segment. This is something that a lot of people miss but you should not because it is an important factor in marketing.
Run more contests as they can help improve the ranking and with ranking going high, you bounce up depending on how many subscribers you have.
For those people who have fantastic results, typically are opt-ins up by 41% dynamic content. We talk about personalisation; we talk about everybody being an individual and it’s important.
- 50% of the people who unsubscribe do it because it’s irrelevant.
- 71% are interested in giving you cookies so that they can get Internet browser history-based recommendations.
- 82% want more relative relevant emails
- 80% of customers want past purchase-based recommendations
Re-target with offers intelligently. Users want post purchase-based recommendation and if you use this, you’ll increase your open rates by 29% and your click-through rate by 51% on average and six times more purchases.
It is highly recommended that you consider to Geo personalize your message based on where people are located. For example, if you’re selling apparel and you’re running an ad to somebody who is in a cold place right now, you should probably run cold type apparel ads but if you’re selling in a hot place, you generally want to offer warm weather apparel. When you do this,
- Your ad is going to increase 25% of your conversion rate
- You will reduce your bounce rate
- You will increase Google’s love for you is going to increase 92% on average.
