3 Must-Do Marketing Diversification Strategies Beyond Organic Social Media
The majority of brand new e-commerce companies are working with a very limited budget in the beginning, which forces them to focus their marketing efforts on just one or two channels, with social media typically being the main focus.
While it’s a great primary marketing channel, it’s important to understand the importance of diversifying how and where you attract buying customers. If you put all of your eggs in one basket it can result in revenue completely stopping literally overnight.
There are many things that are out of a company’s hand when it comes to social media, like a Facebook account being banned or deleted, Instagram shadow banning a profile, or an unexpected algorithm change. If something like this happens, all traffic and sales stop. In order to avoid this situation, you need to diversify, starting with the three suggestions below.
Run Paid Ads for Immediate Revenue
While organic social media is great, it can be very difficult to scale quickly enough to bring in the revenue required for growth. With so much competition for attention on social media, growing your following is much harder now than it was several years ago.
Paid social media ads gives you access to the massive audience, laser targeting, and infinite scaling abilities, as long as you have money to spend. Facebook’s pixel technology, for example, allows you to target previous visitors of your website and display relevant ads pertaining to what page they visited on your website.
Re-marketing or re-targeting is one of the most powerful and effective paid social advertising strategies. While Instagram and Facebook are excellent paid advertising options, you also want to look beyond them. AdWords is a great way to pull in targeted users based on Google search, and just another way to ensure your traffic sources are diverse.
With video content exploding in popularity, YouTube is another paid advertising goldmine that should be tested. Every business will have different sweet-spots in terms of where their buyers will come from, but you will never know what yours is unless you test them all.
Create an Organic Traffic Game Plan
If you aren’t going after organic traffic from Google you are leaving a lot of customers and money on the table. In order to take advantage of organic traffic you need to create a content marketing strategy for both your website and off-site.
Your blog needs constant high-quality traffic that is designed around keywords and search terms you want to rank for, and you should also explore guest blogging opportunities that will provide you with branding and referral traffic. All of this works together to help improve your search engine optimization. In much the same way that you can find tutors for any subject imaginable, even for things like economics homework help, the same is true for people searching online. Google continues to confirm that fully 15% of all searches are new, and have never been searched before.
When creating content for your website, make sure it’s both interesting and informative for your visitors. You want them to engage with your content and then make a purchase, so create blog posts that answer common questions related to what you are selling. Anytime you can dictate how you solve a common problem, it helps to build trust and it establishes a relationship, which gives the consumer the trust and confidence requires to convert into a paying customer.
Leverage Your Current Social Media Following
If you used social media from the start, then you have an asset built up that you can leverage to create an army of brand supporters and promoters. Rolling out an ambassador or affiliate program is an easy way to generate more sales without having to put out up-front advertising and marketing funds.
Every customer or follower you have is someone who potentially has an audience of people connected to them that would also be interested in what you are offering. By paying out a commission or referral fee for each sale you are rewarding them and also enticing them to put in extra effort to help promote your brand.
It costs very little to nothing to roll this out, and since you are only paying for performance you don’t have to worry about wasting your advertising and marketing budget. Include an automated email with each new purchase, inviting every customer to join your program. If your compensation is attractive it can lead to massive exponential growth.