Develop a well defined marketing strategy and engage in conversations that are relevant to your industry
There is no dream big enough that can’t be achieved and by that we mean, make the impossible attainable. If you are starting out as an entrepreneur in the e-commerce world and you have chosen to partner with a dropshipping company, you can do so much with your business. Your production and delivery is handled by the dropshipper and thus, you can focus on business development and marketing.
Marketing is a wide spectrum and to hit the right note can be intimidating. Your research on the market structure and buyer personas need to be crisp and relevant. Use all the information you have and channel it in the direction you want your brand to take.
The thing with marketing is that you aren’t just selling your product, you have to sell a thought, an ideology or a lifestyle along with it.
So figure out what your business future should look like and then when you arrive at the marketing strategy, you can refer to the points below.
Here is How you Market Your Dropshipping Business
- Build Trust
No business will survive unless your customers have established a firm confidence in you. Like most human relationships, a business relationship also requires you to put in a lot of effort. You need to be more interactive with your audience and make them believe about your transparency in operations.
You can do this by adding testimonials to your website of your existing or past clients, customers or partners who will speak about their experience with you.
Adding a customer review page will also help because it will make it easier for you to grow your brand. Potential customers could refer to past reviews and then come at a purchase decision.
The bad reviews can be taken into serious consideration for product improvement and your response to them will also make the customer realize that you aren’t leaving them high and dry.
2. Set Your Marketing Budget
You first need to identify who your target audience is and what channels you need to use to reach them. If your product is targeting a teenage audience, then social media would be the best bet. You can run google ads and facebook ads to get their attention but do it keeping in mind the budget you have.
If you think your marketing strategy is definitely getting you sales then it won’t hurt to invest more in your budget. At the end of the day, your product will only sell if people know about it.
3. Find Your Niche Audience
Just like you would look for a group that shares the same interests as yours, you should look for groups that your niche audience hangs out in. Find discussion forums like Reddit, Quora and Tumblr and participate in the discussions there.
Don’t try to aggressively market your brand as they are there to seek more information on the subject. The more credible your information, the more people will look towards your product.
4. Free Samples To Influencers
One of the best ways to make sales is by getting affiliates for your brand. Most affiliates are bloggers and influencers on social media who have a good range of followers and can reach a wider audience.
Here, your audience is already defined for you and you are directly interacting with them. Provide free samples to your influencers so they can try it and write about it in a way that will appeal to their audience.
Free samples will get you more affiliates and they will get the freedom to actually try the product and experiment with it.
5. Communicate With Bloggers And Press
It might sound redundant but it is actually very important to stay in touch with bloggers and the media houses. The new updates on your store will be covered by these platforms and it will only make your outreach circle wider.
Your comments and mention on blog posts will drive more traffic to your website because only people interested in your industry will be reading up on them.
6. Email Marketing
Despite the emergence of social media, emails don’t lose their ground. They are the epitome of the online world expansion. For professional and business deals, email marketing is the best option. There are a lot of things you can manage to cover when you have an email list of your target audience and existing customers.
Follow up is a very important function as it helps you understand the customer’s perspective and reminds them of your existence. Follow up email series will help in getting a response from your customers and taking the conversation forward.
Promotional emails create awareness in a more professional and organized manner as you will be providing them with all the necessary details and because you are personally addressing them, they will feel important.
Newsletters will help you update your existing customers of what is new at your company and what do you plan to come up with next. All doubts and queries could also be solved when you are personally emailing them.
7. Encourage Sharing Of Your Content
The “word of mouth” version of the online business world is sharing of your profile and links to the website by people who already follow you. You can also approach friends and family for this, get as many people you know to share your social media profiles and websites.
It helps in spreading the word and once people see that there have been so many shares, it automatically makes them believe that so many people trust your brand.
Concluding..
You have an added advantage when you drop ship: Time. That’s right, you will get abundant time to focus on marketing and business developments which can help you cross your own expectations of business growth. The only thing is you need to believe you can make it big and work diligently on achieving that.
