- [Alison] Hello everybody, and welcome to "Marketing Your New Online Store."
If you're just launching your online storefront, I'm sure you're chomping at
the bit to start making sales, and we're going to talk about the various ways you
can use digital marketing to do just that. In today's webinar, we'll start by meeting
our digital marketing experts. Then we'll quickly go over each marketing channel so
you'll have a foundational understanding of what we mean when we refer to things
like SEO, PPC feeds, and then each specialist will share tips for using each
channel effectively. And last but not least, we'll answer your questions. So go
ahead and start typing those questions into the Q&A box in the webinar software.
We're going to have a lengthy Q&A at the end of the webinar, but we might get a
chance to answer some questions during the presentation as well.
So let's start by meeting the webinar team. Hello again, my name is Alison,
and I'm going to moderate today's webinar. I'm a Search Marketing Manager here at
Volusion, and I'm passionate about strategy, content, and helping small
to medium businesses outwit larger corporations. I'm originally from Central
California, but I've been in Texas for over eight years now and started
spontaneously saying "ya'll" a few years ago. So it's a done deal, I'm a Texan.
- [Sean] It wasn't spontaneous at all. It's been a long time coming. Howdy,
everybody. My name is Sean, and I'm the Paid Search Specialist for today.
I've been at Volusion for four years. I've worked specifically with shopping feeds
and product listing ads for the last two. I'm certified in all things Google,
AdWords, Analytics, and Shopping. And I'm a big fan about using
data-driven marketing automation strategies to help online businesses.
When I'm not behind my two monitors at work, I'll be out hiking
around in the greenbelts here in Austin, Texas.
- [Kavi] Hey, I'm Kavi. I'm one of the SEO Specialists here at Volusion.
My background is actually in publishing, but a few years ago, I took my writing
skills and turned those plus my love of data into a career in digital marketing.
And yes, you are reading that last bullet point correctly.
I've never seen "Jaws," "The Shining," or "Groundhog Day."
- [Samantha] And I'm Samantha. I am an SEO Specialist and one of the resident social
media gurus here at Volusion. I recently just moved to Texas from Long Island,
New York, and I have about four years working in social media, SEO,
and marketing. I've had experience dealing with clients in a multitude industries
from fashion to industrial fasteners. Oh, and a fun fact, I hate cilantro.
Apparently, they say it's a genetic thing.
- [Alison] Interesting. All right. So now that we've met our team of experts,
let's talk about the different marketing channels. We can start with the text ads
that often appear on the right-hand side and on the top of search results.
- [Sean] Alison, that's going to be me. So pay-per-click ads are going to be those
hyperlinked text ads that appears at the top or the side of search result pages,
as you can see in the highlighted box to the right here. These ads are the most
ubiquitous of the web, and if you haven't clicked on them, you've definitely seen
them before. These are going to be really short ads with only two lines of text and
use targeted keywords to drive really qualified traffic to your store. Keywords
are words and phrases that match your ads to the terms people are searching for.
And from this example, you'll see that we're searching for telescopes, and the ad
experience matches that. You're only going to be paying for ads when someone clicks
onto it and visits your website, rather than just having to pay a set rate.
And lastly, PPC is a great marketing technique to oust your competition quickly
because your ads can very quickly appear on the front page.
- [Kavi] All right. And SEO stands for search engine optimization. It's a set of
strategies that can affect the organic or unpaid results that make up the majority
of your average search results page. You can see where those organic results begin
for our telescope example here inside this green box. So unlike PPC or shopping
feeds, SEO is a slow and steady process. Results don't happen overnight.
Best practices are always changing. But when results do appear, they can provide
a lasting value long after you've started your SEO campaign. So by performing a few
technical changes to your website and featuring fresh, compelling content on
your landing pages, you can help the search engines recognize what each page is
about and why it should be considered worthy of appearing in the search results.
One thing to keep in mind, this is a common misconception that a lot of people
have starting out with SEO. SEO is not about tricking or gaming the search
engines into ranking your site higher than a competitor's. It's about
working along with the search engines' sophisticated algorithms to increase
your site's traffic and revenue.
- [Sean] Excellent. Moving away from organic and back to paid search for just a
moment, shopping feeds, or data feeds as I'll be calling them, are image-based ads
that appear at the top or right-hand side of the search result pages. Because they
have an image, they can really stand out, especially on mobile devices, and do a
great job of showing off your products. These ads are pretty simple and only
provide the product image, the product title, its price, and your domain name.
PPC, the text ads we just saw, can advertise services or locations, like
plumbers in your areas or restaurants nearby. Shopping feeds are a little bit
different because they're going to be an ecommerce-first type of advertising. That
means they can only show products. Lastly, these ads are not keyword based like PPC,
so you don't have to research any keywords or do much extra work.
Instead, your ads are going to be served to clients based on Google
matching your products with search terms.
- [Samantha] The last marketing tool we're going to be discussing is social media.
And social media doesn't have its own place in the search results, but it
definitely has a special place in the consumer's heart. The whole idea of social
media is to make your customers love you by showing them how valuable they are.
This mutual respect fosters trust between the customer and the brand, which is why
about 81% of small businesses use social media. When you're a small business,
customer relations and business reputation on social media are very important.
In fact, shoppers are more likely to make a purchase after reading something
they saw on social media. So you want to make sure that you're representing
yourself well. When it comes down to it, social media is an avenue for promotion,
but it's also an effective customer service tool and a great way for brands
to get noticed. It does not discriminate by the size of your business.
Small and large brands both have a chance for success on social media.
Oh, and as a bonus, it allows you to direct people to your online store.
- [Alison] Excellent. All right. So let's talk about the strategies and tactics you
can use today to start marketing your online store. We've broken each channel
into three parts: Overview, Tips, and Takeaways. We'll also be providing you
with some resources. But before we do just that, I want to give
you some homework for tonight. If you do one thing today, please install Google
Analytics on your store. This way you can begin gathering data immediately and track
your store's performance over time. Volusion offers some easy do-it-yourself
instructions linked here, and the Volusion Tech Support Team can certainly assist you
with this. But trust me, it's literally copy and pasting. So you can do it,
and it's free. But if this is too intimidating, we also offer an
implementation service. But again, it's copy and pasting. It's free. I promise
you, you can do it on your own, which is great, because the data Google Analytics
provides is priceless. You'll learn everything from visitor demographics
and behavior to which channels are driving your traffic and conversions. So you'll
want to monitor your traffic data over time so you can make informed marketing
decisions in the future. We recommend that you explore Analytics in bite-size pieces
just to avoid being overwhelmed. There are a bunch of wonderful free tools out there
to help you learn the ropes. I recommend starting with this Metrics Webinar and
Google's free training resources. All of these links are not clickable now, but
they will be when we send you out the slideshow after the webinar concludes.
All right. So let's get to why you're really here. Marketing your store and
driving sales. We're going to start with pay-per-click, also known as PPC.
- [Sean] Excellent. Thanks Alison. As mentioned earlier, if you're a new store
just getting started or even an older, established store, PPC is a cornerstone to
any marketing strategy. Getting started with pay-per-click advertising can seem a
bit daunting, but it's really not too much to it. You're going to begin the
process by creating a campaign and then subdivide that campaign into
something called ad groups. Many of you may already be familiar with
AdWords and kind of know this, but ad groups are the subdivision where you
actually create the ads, add in your two witty lines of text as well as your call
to action. This is also where you're going to be setting your keywords. PPC is going
to be great to bring highly qualified traffic, and a reason for that is just how
flexible that it is. These ad types can change very quickly to accommodate store
changes, like a flash sale, as well as for seasons and holidays like Black Friday or
the Christmas shopping season. There really is a ton of flexibility of what you
can do. You can raise and lower daily budgets with a few clicks, test new ad
text, and add in new keywords. PPC is going to be great for marketing new
stores. You can direct the customer to any part of your store. And this means that
the landing page, the first page that the customer sees after clicking your ad can
be the homepage, an article, a category, or even a product page, anywhere on your
site. There will, of course, be better places to send them than not, so you can
try out a lot of different things and test a lot. So focus on popular categories and
higher margin products, it's always a great place to start. Lastly, it's going
to be great for gathering quality data about your store's traffic. Because the
data is tangible and quick, you can make a lot of great decisions that contribute as
you continue to build your store. So let's go ahead and consider some tips
to get started. First, you're going to want to make sure that your store is
presentable. Take your customers to an attractive and functional website.
Of course, it doesn't have to be perfect, and you're never going to be truly
finished building your store. But you still want your new customers to have a
really good experience when they get there. Second, you really want to organize
your categories and subcategories well. Think about your online store like a
real store. Different aisles or different categories and different shelves are the
different subcategories. So you're going to want to separate your products in
an appropriate way. If you sell apparel, you want to separate that from your sports
equipment and gear. If you have men's and women's lines of clothes, make sure that
they are not all jumbled together. For an example, let's look at considering
gift baskets. If you sell gift baskets, this would be your aisle, and the
different types -- baby gift baskets, movie gift baskets -- would be their own
subcategories and their own shelves. For PPC, if someone is searching for wedding
gift baskets, you want to show them products specific to that search.
It's going to be more qualified and they're likely to enjoy the
experience a little bit better. The third tip about PPC is try to keep
your CPCs, your cost-per-click bids, as low as you can while still getting the
traffic that you want. If you're just getting started, a rookie mistake that I
see far too often is that you're going to be overpaying for traffic because you want
people to get in the door. Instead, try to slow it down and focus on building a
sustainable and successful campaign. With this, experiment with ad position.
It doesn't always really pay, nudge, nudge, to be in the first spot. You're
going to want to see a good ROI, a return on investment, at a lower spot without
spending as much. So just don't overspend when you don't have to. And with that, try
to be more specific than too broad. You don't necessarily want anyone coming to
your store. I know it may seem like that. But instead, you're trying to advertise to
people who are looking to buy your specific products. PPC doesn't take a
shotgun approach to getting people into the door. A way to avoid the shotgun
approach is to add negative keywords into your account. Negative keywords are the
complete opposite of keywords. They are words and phrases that you don't want to
show up for. Common examples include the words "cheap," "used," or places like
"Craigslist" and "Walmart. " These people who are searching for "gift basket
Walmart" already have a destination in mind, and you don't want to pay for clicks
along the way when someone may just be searching and browsing around.
As a final takeaway, I want to say that PPC is going to be a great way to meet a
new audience through compelling text ads. It brings really quality traffic to your
site very quickly. But before you start paying for traffic, remember to have your
site in its best form. Structure your categories and subcategories as best they
can be to align your products with your campaigns and your ad groups. And finally,
try to offer some stuff that's going to stand out from your competition.
Well, I've added just a few little resources for you as well when this slide
deck and webinar are made available after we wrap up. These few little hyperlinks
include the AdWords Keyword Planner that will help you get an idea of how much
you'll be paying for your keywords, as well as some new ones you can add to your
account. I've also included a list of a few blogs and webinars that we've done
here at Volusion and will give you ideas of how to start as well as one of my
favorite articles about PPC Strategies for Procrastinators. This article is about
getting started in the holiday season in, like, November, but the basic steps
provide you the ability to create a brief skeleton and the same type
of structure you'd be doing when you're just getting started.
So I definitely recommend that third link.
- [Alison] Awesome. Thank you, Sean. And just as a happy reminder, as questions
come up, you know, regarding PPC, SEO feeds, please send those on in.
No question is too basic. We'll tackle them all.
All right. So now, let's take a minute to transition from the paid side of things to
what we call the natural, or organic, search results. Kavi will give us
an overview of SEO strategies for getting your store featured
in Google's natural or organic search results.
- [Kavi] Okay. Thank you, Alison. SEO is a great search marketing tactic for
ecommerce stores in almost any industry. Search engine visibility is an absolute
must for getting brands discovered, and that's true whether you sell sundresses or
networking cables or anything in between. No matter what your site is about, you're
going to need some unique and relevant content to signal to your customers and
also to the search engines what you're selling and why it's great. Before
beginning an SEO overhaul, though, you do want to do some thinking about customer
behavior. Make sure your site looks and feels like a place where people want to
shop and actually make purchases, as Sean said before, because the search engines
can tell how much time visitors spend on your site and how often they just leave
the store without buying anything. So think about things like: Does your site
use a responsive template? Will customers have a good shopping experience if they're
on a desktop or a mobile platform? Those are important considerations for the
search engines, so they should be important to you as well. The way the
search engines treat your site and, as a result, your traffic and your revenue will
improve the more customers interact meaningfully with your online store.
In my opinion, the best thing about SEO is that it costs nothing but your time and
your brain power. When it's done right, it's a totally free way to improve your
presence in the search results and to attract new customers. SEO can definitely
be time-consuming, but the time and energy you spend is definitely worth the return.
I saw a recent digital marketing study that shows 88% of all shoppers do some
research online before making a purchase, even if that purchase ends up happening in
a brick-and-mortar store instead of online. So in order for potential
customers to discover your brand during that online research period, they have to
be able to find you using channels like Google Search. Think about the actual
phrases that your ideal customer is typing into Google. Think about what makes your
brand or your products unique, and then make a list of keyword phrases that are
specifically relevant to your business. Incorporate those phrases into the content
that appears on your product pages and your category descriptions. When they're
compiling their search results, search engines consider a landing page's
relevance and authority within the industry, as well as the user behavior
that surrounds it. So like I said, make sure your website's navigation is
user-friendly and that your content really reflects your industry expertise.
So here are some tips that you can use going into your SEO campaign. There are
two basic pieces involved in SEO. There's on-page and off-page optimization. On-page
optimization includes things like title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags, and
all of those are things that can be easily edited in the admin area of your Volusion
store. For your on-page optimization to be complete, though, you also want to include
about 150 words of unique, relevant content on each landing page. This content
should describe what can be found on the page and should contain compelling
marketing messaging as well to push people to buy. But you should not just stuff in a
bunch of keywords so that it sounds unnatural. That's a big no-no for the
search engines. On to off-page optimization. This focuses
more on how other influencers, like other websites and online thought leaders,
interact with your site. When you earn a link from another website, assuming that
site isn't spammy or totally unrelated to what you're selling, it's kind of like
they're giving you a vote for your website to signal that you're also relevant and
authoritative. So the best way to earn meaningful links to your site is, you
guessed it, by creating content that people will want to link to. Helpful
original content that demonstrates your expertise tends to earn the most
attention. Write stuff that people want to read and share. This can take the form of
a blog or some well-researched infographics or even a how-to video
series, if you have the resources to put something like that together. One thing to
keep in mind is that earning links can be a bit tricky because the search engines
have several rules that you have to adhere to in order to avoid harmful penalties
that can kill your search rankings and, therefore, your traffic as well. So for
example, paying for links is a major no-no. Links have to come in organically
and actually be earned in order to be considered legitimate.
So to wrap up our tips, it's pretty clear that having a good content strategy in
place is absolutely critical for SEO. And I know this can seem intimidating, but it
really doesn't have to be complicated. The most important thing to keep in mind is
what your customers are searching for throughout the sales cycle. So to give you
an example, I had an SEO client who sold organic skincare. So to draw in customers
who were in that research phase of the sales cycle, we created a resource library
that included explanations of some of the more exotic ingredients that she was using
in her products. But we also put a lot of focus on their individual product
descriptions so that customers who were pretty much ready to buy would know
exactly how to use that particular face wash or a moisturizer or whatever
they were looking at. So as I said before, you want to think
about the terms and phrases that your customers are using and incorporate those
as naturally as possible into your on-site content, whether that's in your product
descriptions or a short paragraph that appears on a category page or a useful
blog post that's connected to your site. The right content not only helps you make
sales and attract customers through the search engines, it can also help you earn
those valuable links that I mentioned earlier.
And one more thing to note, Sam will talk about this a bit more as well a little bit
later on, but you also want to consider how your social media strategy can support
your SEO. Make sure your social media profiles are optimized with the correct
business information and some good keywords for discovery on those platforms
as well. Plus, if you've written some really great content, avenues like
Facebook and Twitter and your other social media profiles are the most natural way
to share all of that. So our main takeaway for SEO is SEO is a
long-term process that can earn exponential results. It requires patience
and thoughtfulness, but it's the single most important way to signal your
relevance and authority to the search engines and, therefore, to your potential
customers. The earlier you start thinking about your SEO strategy, the more quickly
you should start seeing increases in traffic and revenue, which is
what we all want. So here are a few SEO resources for you to
get started. When you're doing your keyword research, Google Trends, which is
linked here, and even just carrying out your own searches can help you discover
what terms your customers are searching for. There might be customers in a certain
area of the country using a term for one of your products that might not come to
mind immediately for you, and that's a great way to discover things like that.
Volusion and some of our other favorite online experts have written lots of great
blog posts and created tons of videos and webinars on SEO best practices. So there
are some links to those here as well, including our upcoming webinar next month
called "Tailoring Product Pages for SEO and Feeds Success." That's going to be on
August 11, and we will have a sign-up for that coming soon. And for some more
information and instructions on adjusting things like meta tags in the admin area
of your store, I'm including a link to our Knowledge Base overview
of Volusion's specific SEO features.
- [Alison] This is Alison again. My background is also in SEO, and I can
attest that it's a powerful long-term strategy. I also noticed that many times
when I started out with merchants, a question I often received was, "Okay, I
like that I'm showing up in the natural search results, but how do I get the
pictures up top or on the side? I want to see my products there."
So I'm going to loop Sean back in right now to talk about how
you can do just that. Take it away Sean.
- [Sean] All right, Alison. So the images at the top of the page are often going to
be a part of Google Shopping when they're not part of the image slideshow. Data
feeds or shopping feeds are a spreadsheet that has all of your products' pertinent
information, and it can be as simple as a CSV that you've exported from your store
and updated the column headers, or something a bit more advanced like XML.
You can take your store's data and submit that to Google for their approval so that
they're going to show your ads. We had a question that came in from John
that says, "What if your product is a service? How do I take advantage of
Shopping with such a product?" Well, this is the trick. Because Google is so
specific in what it requires, they can only be products. And a lot of this is
because they've got so many required fields and services. They're really trying
to create a window shopping experience, which is part of the benefit and also part
of the detriment of Google Shopping. So John, what you'll want to do is focus on
PPC. And we'll follow-up in the Q&A a little bit after to tell you what to do
with that. Back to shopping feeds for a little bit.
There's going to be so many required fields. They include obvious ones, such as
the product title, the product description, the weight, the required
fields in the Volusion Dashboard. There's also going to be ones that they are
looking for as well, such as product manufacturer and UPC code
and Google category. If a product doesn't meet these
requirements, it's going to be disapproved and won't be pulled into the data feed.
Or if it is taken up, it will be rejected after the fact.
I mentioned a little bit about the window shopping aspect of Google Shopping, and a
handy thing about using data feeds as part of your marketing strategy is that they
appear in search results and in shopping aggregators. This means that your ads get
to double dip where they appear. And like a PPC, Google Shopping campaigns are going
to be created through AdWords. Let's go ahead and just jump into some
tips really quickly. Because shopping feeds are so data-driven, as is said by
the name itself data feeds, what you'll really want to do is start by optimizing
the product page first. Because the landing page, that first page that you see
after a client clicks onto to an ad, is the product page, your customers won't
have the same context as they would from finding the product from searching through
your website, your on-page search. Instead, they're taken directly to it
instead. So your customers don't have the context of knowing if the item is in a
necklace category or a bracelet category if they're searching for something like a
36-inch chain. Instead, your product title should include 36-inch chain, necklace
made out of silver and gold, something more descriptive that provides them all of
the information that they need to be looking for. Because it's just the product
page, just make sure that it's descriptive and thorough. Don't have any thin content.
Just the more robust it's going to be, the more likely Google will show your ads as
well as the SEO benefits that Kavi talked about.
Next, and this tip may seem pretty obvious, but you really need to monitor
your campaigns. Feeds aren't a set-it-and-forget-it. And in fact, if you
don't submit a new data feed every 30 days, Google is going to automatically
expire your product listings. You want to make sure that any changes you
make in the store should be reflected in the data feed itself. If your items
fluctuate in stock or if you're changing the price point and taking things on
sales, reflect that in data feed so your potential customers are getting the best
experience possible. If you put something on sale, you're going to want to show the
sale price to incentivize people to come to your store, not your competitors.
So keep your data really, really fresh. Talking about monitoring your campaign,
use the data you get from AdWords and identify those products which are best
performing, call back to what Alison said about setting up Google Analytics. But if
you can know the products which are performing better, you can increase their
bids a wee bit, or you can even optimize your product title to ensure that you're
getting a larger impression showing your ads are serving a
more qualified group of people. The cost-per-click of shopping feed ads
are generally lower than PPC ads. So try to find a really good price point.
Of course, there's going to be no size-fits-all, but just start lower and
slowly increase your bids until you find the return on ad spend that you're really,
really looking for. The biggest, important thing here is just consider your ROI,
your return on investment, and where your window is.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, about shopping feeds is have a really good
product image. If you're a dropshipper and all of your images match that of your
competition, it's going to be really hard to stand out. So when you can, use
different angles. Take your own photos. Use really high-quality images and make
sure that the image just isn't pixilated and just depicts your product very well.
If you have multiple product images, please, please include those to the
product page itself. The more interactive your customer will be on the page,
the longer they spend and the more time they glean information about the product,
the likelier they are to check out. So lastly is the big takeaways. You're
working really hard, if you're still building your store, to build out your
store's inventory, so show it off with data feeds. Using comparison shopping
engines allows you to show off your entire inventory through image ads to online
shoppers. With so many potential ads, you can reach customers far and wide.
So structure your product information correctly and use these type of campaigns
to show off your best brands, and the customers will find you after that.
Some resources I've included as well is all those rules and requirements from
Google. The Product Recommendations and Requirements can be very, very helpful if
you ever wonder, "Why isn't this product showing up?" You may discover that it's
apparel. It doesn't have the color and size attributes. Or you may find that the
tax and shipping information isn't there. So Google has great, great support
documentation. I've also included some videos and blogs from webinars that I've
created as well as some other people on the team that help really define how to
set up shopping feeds as well as how to get started in terms of moving very
quickly and what you can do when your price point isn't super
competitive. So that's a pretty handy one of some kind of side
techniques you can really do. So thank you.
- [Alison] Thank you, Sean. Okay. And last but not least, we cannot forget social
media marketing, which is a very cost-effective way for a new store to
build their following. And Sam can tell us a little bit about that.
- [Samantha] Thanks, Alison. I love social media. I think it's sometimes overlooked,
but it's actually one of the best marketing tools out there, and as Kavi
said earlier, it works hand-in-hand with SEO. It can boost traffic to your website,
improve your brand authority, and enhance customer loyalty. Not to mention, it works
well with a multitude of industries from fashion to food and everything in between.
There's a wide array of social media networks out there, and many of them are
industry-specific. The vastness of the social media landscape makes it easier for
people to find networks where their brands can thrive. So while I bet your first
inclination is to choose Facebook, it's important not to discount others such as
Twitter, Pinterest, Polyvore, Reddit, or even Instagram. So for instance, if you're
in the fashion industry, Pinterest or Polyvore might work better than, say, I
don't know, Twitter. You don't have to be active on every channel all at once, so
choose one or two networks to devote your time to. It's better to be active on one
or two platforms than inconsistent on all of them.
Not only is social media extremely versatile, but it's also a cost-effective
marketing strategy, because guess what, creating a social media page is free. So
to get started, the only thing required is your time. There are tons of social media
networks out there. As I mentioned before, I've listed some of the most popular
networks. So you can use those to promote your brand and interact with customers.
You may be familiar with some of them, or perhaps even all of them, but I thought it
would be helpful to see a wide variety of your options. We've got the big guns that
are very well-known like Facebook and Twitter, and then we have some more
visual, lesser known ones like Pinterest and Instagram. However, if you are in a
very specific industry, it might be worth taking some time to look at networks that
are created specifically for your niche. For example, Houzz, it's a social network
for interior designers and brands in the real estate or housing market. So you can
use anything that relates specifically to your audience, and that's pretty much the
main point. You want to be on the network where your audience interacts most.
It's also important to note that, like SEO, social media success takes time. But
social media can also help enhance your search visibility. To give your brand the
best chance at being discovered, you want to begin by optimizing each social network
you decide to use. So what this means is filling out all of the fields in the
"About" sections of your social profiles by using relevant keywords and search
terms. However, please do not publish duplicate content. Don't just copy and
paste content from the "About Us" section on your website. Instead, try to write
similar, new keyword rich content that shows what your store is all about.
If you have a store with a brick-and-mortar location, make sure
to add your address and other locally specific information as well.
Social media is also the best way to engage with customers and potential
audiences. You can see what people are talking about by using relevant hashtags
and join those conversations on Facebook and Twitter. This will showcase your
authority and your relevance within your industry. And please, don't neglect your
followers. They love receiving replies. So make sure that you're always replying to
those messages or comments to keep the conversation going, because social media
can actually be your best customer service tool.
And last but not least, if you have a little bit of wiggle room with your
budget, social advertising opportunities like Facebook ads and boosted posts can
really help your strategy, plus they're reasonably priced. With Facebook, it's a
pay-to-play environment, so we recommend using social advertising to reach new
customers and grow your presence online. Facebook ads can be used to garner page
likes or to drive traffic to your website. However, if this seems a little bit
overwhelming to you, you can choose to boost individual posts right on your
timeline to reach more people. These are really easy to use and can serve your ads
to large numbers of people for a minimal cost. The best part about the boosted
posts is that they can also allow you to target your audience using a variety of
filters. So this means you can serve ads to people who already like your page and
their friends, or create a custom audience by targeting specific locations, genders,
interests, or keywords. Now, you may be asking, "How do I go about
doing all of this?" I know it can be a little bit overwhelming, but don't panic.
I'm going to share a few tips and some social media best practices to make
that a little easier. So first, posting regularly is extremely
important, because it lets your customers and your followers know that you are
active. I would suggest spending about 15 minutes per day posting and engaging.
Creating a weekly or a monthly content calendar can be a huge help. This will
keep you organized so you won't have to spend too much time thinking about what to
post every day. We recommend posting around three to five times per week to
keep that content fresh. And you don't want to clog the timeline with too many
of your posts. Speaking of posts, you have to get to know your
customers. Learn about your audience to find out what type of posts they like.
Once you have an idea of what type of content they like, make sure you aren't
overloading them with too many self-promotional product posts. Instead,
try creating your own unique and engaging content, you know, the stuff that people
will want to share. Don't just post links to your products. We tend to use the 80/20
rule. About 80% of your posts should relate to your brand's industry and your
target audience, and the other 20% should be self-promotional and used to introduce
sales or giveaways or contests or anything like that. Try to use your own images if
you can, or create them on your own using Canva.com or other free design tools,
which I will list later. And remember, here, unique content is key. Unique images
can also be used for promotions. Promotions, such as sales, giveaways, or
other contests that I mentioned before, can enhance customer engagement and help
you gain new customers. We recommend using those boosted posts to promote all of your
exclusive deals, content, or even new product launches.
Another tip is to always track your success. To get a good idea if your posts
are working, dig into the Facebook Insights or another network's analytics to
see how well your posts perform. This will help you figure out what type of posts
your audience likes and what prompts them to take action. You can use this
information to identify your strongest performing posts and re-create similar
posts to garner higher levels of engagement.
And finally, as I mentioned before, if you decide to delegate some of your marketing
budget to social advertising, don't forget to monitor those campaigns. Ads must be
monitored periodically to ensure that they are performing and you're getting the most
bang for your buck. I recommend checking them bi-weekly. You can edit the copy, you
can edit the target filters or images on poor performing ads to see if they begin
to work. And this also goes for the boosted posts. Make sure that you look at
your results after the paid campaign ends to see how your audience responded to that
post. This can help you decide how you want to refine your targeting the next
time you want to boost something. So what's the main takeaway regarding
social? Well, when it comes down to it, social media management is the best way to
get to know your target audience, drive traffic, and engage with potential
customers. It requires patience, creativity, and the willingness to learn.
And while growing a social media presence can be a long-term process, it allows
businesses of all sizes to increase awareness, boost engagement, drive traffic
to online stores, and prompt followers to take action.
That being said, we've complied a list of resources that can help you save some time
and further educate you on social media best practices. These include free tools
that can help you create amazing, sharable images along with a few apps that can help
you schedule posts during your busiest days. I've even included some guides that
provide information on how to best drive engagement and get the most out of your
social campaigns. The last resource there is a helpful tutorial on how to create
your own Facebook ads if you decide that that's something that you want to explore
more. Also, keep an eye out for our upcoming webinar on September 1 about how
to craft a social media strategy for the holidays. It's going to be full of great
information, so be sure to keep checking for sign-up dates.
- [Alison] All right. Thank you, Sam. So that rounds out the four digital marketing
channels we wanted to cover today, and the questions have literally been pouring in.
So without further ado, let's get to those questions. We might start with
paid search since that was the first section we went over.
- [Sean] Sure. Yeah, I'll talk a little bit more about PPC if I can. So Marin you
asked, "Can you explain a little bit more about negative keywords. Why would I want
to attract someone who wants free, cheap items when I sell quality goods?"
I'm sorry I wasn't clear. Negative keywords will do the exact opposite of
that. When you create a new campaign, you will set your keywords for your goods and
the products that you offer, and the negative keywords, which go in a slightly
separate location, are going to be the ones to dis-include your ad from. If
someone searches for a cheap car and you're selling cars, that means that your
ad would not serve if the negative keyword appears in the query itself. So whenever
there's a term or a phrase you don't want to show up for, you can throw that right
in there, and then your ad wouldn't appear.
Thomas, a little bit more about PPC. You asked, "Can you track PPC through a sale?"
The answer is yes, absolutely. This is why installing Google Analytics today is so
vitally, vitally important. Within your Google AdWords account, at the very top of
the page under "Tools," you'll see the option and ability to create conversions.
That conversion is what you'll put on the order finish page, one of design site
contents page. You'll put on the order finish page to ensure that when someone
gets to that page after the one-page checkout, it will be registered. This is
vitally, vitally important for monitoring your ROI. You really want to make sure
that you're seeing return on ad spend and that you're just not bringing in a lot of
traffic without seeing where it's coming from.
To follow up with John about PPC and the services and shopping feeds, I'll talk
about shopping feeds a little after SEO to give some other people a chance to talk.
But John, to follow up with you about PPC as a service, is that I looked at
specifically the services denied for Google Shopping, and they include product
bundles, online services, such as financial or downloading, and this is
maybe likely the case for you is business services, including locksmiths, plumbing,
or with ecommerce consulting. If you offer IT setups or any type of consulting,
instead you'll want to be using PPC, the two lines of text. This allows you to
target keywords about business consulting, IT, or whatever the service you may be
offering, rather than Google Shopping. Google Shopping as a product aggregator is
kind of very similar to Amazon. You're likely not going to find a plumber onto
that resource, so that's why you have to use a slightly different
type of advertising model. Both are amazingly effective for what
they're doing, and your vertical will probably recognize that as well. There can
be things that you can offer and others that you don't. So just try to focus on
what the best fit for you when starting with paid advertising is going to be. So
John, if not, shoot us an e-mail too, as well. We'll follow-up with you
if you want a further explanation of what you can be doing as well.
- [Alison] It looks like we've got quite a few SEO questions as well.
One of you want to focus in on this?
- [Kavi] Sure. I can start off with a question from Cindy. She said, "I heard
that Google does not use the keywords tag any more but still uses the meta
description. Is this true?" So a little more info on that. Cindy,
Google actually doesn't read the meta keywords or meta description tags. The
keywords tag really doesn't serve much of a purpose at all any more since it doesn't
show anywhere. But still, having a good list of keywords around is great for your
own reference, just don't worry about actually inputting them because, like I
said, they don't show up anywhere and Google doesn't read them. So the
description tag does still show up in the search results though. That means that
customers are seeing it even if Google isn't paying attention to it. So that
description tag is a great field to include some marketing messaging to
encourage people to click your link instead of someone else's. Phrases like
"free shipping" and really enticing marketing tactics like that can attract
a lot of clicks. I also wanted to answer a question from Joe.
He asked, "How do you know your search ranking when talking about SEO?"
So search rankings are something that ecommerce sellers obviously care about a
lot, and Google's Webmaster Tools, if you have that set up, can show you your
average ranking for certain keywords. But keep in mind that your search rankings are
going to change all the time. The SEO experts generally agree also that it's
much more beneficial to focus on your site's improvements, like how much traffic
you're getting and how much money you're making rather than focusing on your search
rankings, just because they change constantly. There are tons of competitors,
and you really want to make sure that you're attracting more customers and
making more sales, and that should be your top concern rather than that ranking.
- [Alison] I've also noticed that a lot of ranking is personalized. I've had a few
merchants call in and they're like, "I'm number one now for this."
I'm like, "You need to log out of your Google account."
- [Kavi] Yeah. That's [inaudible 00:40:29].
- [Alison] Because your results are being tailored to your search history.
- [Sean] Very much so. And that comes into PPC all the time. Some people will say,
"Why aren't my ads appearing? Do we have the right keywords?" Well it's often that
you're searching for your own ads too often, and, therefore, Google thinks
they're less relevant to you and therefore stops serving them as much.
I think I talked a little bit more about paid search. We've got two very similar
questions about, "What percentage of my monthly income do you recommend to a
start-up, to invest in PPC and feeds, and a reasonable monthly budget to show
results?" Two very similar questions. When you're first getting started, I hate this,
because I always want to say it depends, but start small. If you want to start with
$10 a day daily budgets, I think that is a fine medium if you're just getting
started. Ten dollars a day is small enough that it's going to be $300 for the month,
assuming you're hitting your daily budget, and allows you enough money to have some
flexibility. As I said earlier, you don't want to be overspending, and you really
need to be tracking this information. So rather than starting to potentially waste
or spend ill-advisedly $20 a day, start with $10. The best thing about both of
these paid advertising models is that you can go in and change your bids and daily
budgets whenever you want. It's just a small click. You don't pay upfront. So if
you're finding a lot of success or you're not, you can very quickly lower those
bids. I can keep talking about ... Oh there's another one
about shopping feeds, if I may. We'll wrap it up. John and Jeff, you
asked about, "What are shopping feeds?" Once again, I apologize for not being very
clear. Two great resources to find them. Support.Volusion.com, you'll be able to
find out a further explanation what I've blabbered through very quickly. But a data
feed is just a spreadsheet of all your store's information. From the dashboard,
if you go to Inventory Import/Export and export your product table, that's a data
feed that Google Shopping will take. You just have to change the product title
headers just a little bit. We call it "Product Title." Google just calls it
"Title." We've got "Product Code." They call it "ID." So what you'll do is you'll
export your product information and then start to tweak the column
headers a little bit to what Google specifies. But we've got a lot of
great support documentation on that stuff.
- [Samantha] We've also got a bunch of social questions rolling in here. One of
them from Brianna, "What is the best way to get followers quickly if I just started
a Facebook business page?" This is a great question. My answer would be Facebook ads.
Facebook organic reach has slowly been declining, so the best way to kind of get
people to start liking your page is to set up an ad campaign. You can set your budget
and your targets. You can target based on a variety of different things, such as
what interests you know your audience might have or your potential customers
might have, and set your daily budget. From there, people will start seeing your
ads based on your targets, and you'll start gaining "likes" that way.
Marisema also asked about LinkedIn, which is a great question. We don't really get
too many B2B questions, so this is good. "The 80/20 rule, how does it work on
LinkedIn?" So basically, when you're on LinkedIn, you can have your published
posts or whatever, and then you can also join groups. When you post in groups,
you want to make sure that you're posting relevant stuff to that industry. So take
some newsworthy content and post it in the group so it would help your fellow group
members. The 20%, use your own posts, your own blog posts or anything like that to
post personally from your own page. That's the best way that I can kind of
break down that 80/20 rule that way.
- [Kavi] I've got a couple more SEO questions here. One should be a pretty
quick answer. From Pete, he says, "We've activated the SEO-friendly URLs in
Volusion, but this still creates paths like the slash category S/107.htm, for
example." And he's asking, "Is there a better way to do this in Volusion so that
we have tidier URLs?" Yes, there definitely is. First of all,
great job activating those SEO-friendly URLs. That's a really important thing to
have checked off. That URL structure is the standard that Volusion uses, and it's
very easy to change that category to a phrase that more accurately describes
what's on your page. So you can change it to, for example, "/redmittens-s" instead
of just "/category." That's a really easy thing to change that you can do in the
Admin area of your Volusion store, the same way that you would change your title
tags, your meta descriptions, things like that, that I mentioned earlier. In the SEO
section of the webinar slides, when that's sent to you later, you'll see a link to
the Volusion support article about how to change all of those fields.
One more thing, this is a really important question for SEO. Somebody asked, "What do
you mean by a penalty, and are paid links not effective?" So earlier, I mentioned
that not following the search engines' rules when it comes to earning links to
your site can be really harmful and can cause the search engines to put manual
penalties on your site as well. So a penalty is basically when Google or
another search engine recognizes that you've done something that they don't
like, like paying for a link, and they decide what they put on their
search results. So they can decide that they will not list you
when someone searches for a product that you sell or something that's relevant
to your site. Obviously, you don't want that. You want to be listed as much as
possible. So in order to avoid upsetting the search engines, you just have to
follow their rules, and they do have a very strict rule against paying for links.
Paid links used to be a very common practice in SEO. They are not any more
because they're so frowned upon. They may be effective in terms of earning traffic
to your site in the very short term, but Google will very quickly catch on to the
fact that you're using that tactic and will penalize your site and
cause you to not show up in the search results. So don't do it.
Don't even think about doing it. It's a terrible idea.
- [Alison] I remember, like a year ago, there was period of time where there were
a tremendous amount of penalties being leveled through Webmaster Tools, and we
got so many requests for people, like just do some disavows and clean this up. It was
a very difficult task. So it is just not worth the risk.
- [Kavi] We've also got some other marketing questions. Another one from
Brianna, "How can we add a blog to our site? Is there a specific article we
should use?" Volusion actually has this awesome tool. It's called the Knowledge
Base. If you go in there, it's right on our website. You can type in "how to set
up a blog for your Volusion store." It'll give you a complete how-to guide.
The first thing you want to do, obviously, is create a blog on a third-party site,
whether it's WordPress or Blogger or something else. Then you want to make it a
subdomain of your Volusion store. I'm not going to get too technical with this
because the guide is going to have pretty much word-for-word directions on what you
should do. So I totally encourage you to go on the website and look through that.
- [Alison] Another alternative to a blog that, I mean, it just depends on what
you're trying to accomplish, would be creating your own, like, resource library.
Kavi referenced this earlier with her organic skincare client. So sometimes
there are times when it might make sense to have some of that content living on
your website. But I think our team often uses blogs, because blogs are really great
for producing content quickly and pushing it out there and having an audience.
There's one more question I would like to address. Alexander asked, "How can we
convert the visitors on our site into sales, and how long to start having
sales?" I just wanted to, Alexander, point out that I think it was last Tuesday we
had a conversion webinar. We should be getting out the recording fairly quickly
on Thursday. So that's going to be a good hour devoted to that topic. As far as
going to how long is it going to be to have sales, that's going to depend.
There's too many variables for us to say definitively. But you can start driving
qualified traffic now, which means a sale could happen at any point.
- [Samantha] One last social question we had from Jennifer. "What are the best
keywords to have in your social descriptions?" So basically, what I was
talking about before is you kind of want to go into your "About" section and think
about keywords and your products and everything that you sell, what kind of
words really embody your store and your products, and just kind of fill those into
your "About" fields. There should be a short description on Facebook, a long
description, stuff like that. If you really want to get involved in the keyword
stuff, you can go into the Google AdWords, if you have Google Analytics already, and
take a look at some of the keywords that people are searching for products similar
to yours and kind of fill them into a natural description on your social page.
- [Kavi] There's a question about tags in SEO. Marcia asked, "What tags is Google
paying attention to for SEO?" I mentioned that keyword tags and meta descriptions
aren't things that Google particularly looks at any more. But they do pay
attention to a number of other things. For example, your title tag and then the H1,
which is kind of the biggest header that appears on any particular landing page.
Again, that's a tag that you can just manipulate within your HTML, super easy to
do, and we have information about that in our Knowledge Base as well that I linked
to in our SEO slides. So the title tag and the H1 tag, I would say, are the most
important ones that you need to pay attention to for Google. We'll actually
have a product optimization webinar that I mentioned a little bit earlier. Again,
it's on August 11. In that webinar, we're going to be running through all of the
different tags that you can change in your Volusion store in order of importance to
the search engines so that you know exactly how to change each one and exactly
how much time you should be spending writing each of those.
- [Sean] A question from Joe, "How much does it cost per click for PPC, and does
that change often?" So the cost-per-click for PPC is a bid that you will set within
your own campaign. That bid is how much you are willing to pay whenever a certain
customer visits your site based on their ad. That bid will change, and you can set
it at a different time, and then Google will charge you up to that amount. If you
bid $0.50 for a customer to visit your site, Google can only charge you up to
that much. They may charge you $0.25, they may charge you $0.30, but they know that
you are willing to spend up to $0.50 for that qualified traffic and, therefore,
that's what it is. There is something a little bit more complex called the AdWords
Auction of how often you will truly be changing. But it's really about the bid
that you choose to set. In the resource, right at the end, about the Keyword
Planner will give you the best idea about the keywords in your specific vertical and
how much you'll be paying for them. So it's going to vary, of course. But you get
to set it yourself. You've got a lot of control in that situation.
There's also one from Glen that I wanted to take too. Glen, you asked, "How often
should you redo your sitemap?" The best thing about that is you don't have to.
Under "Marketing and SEO," Volusion automatically updates your sitemap daily.
It's going to regenerate it for you. So every change that you make are going to be
reflected in your sitemap later that day. Unlike maybe former platforms and things
like that, you've had to manually create it, but Volusion takes that step away
from you. So as you continue to add new products and new categories
your sitemap will be regenerated daily.
- [Alison] And I mentioned Webmaster Tools, just briefly, earlier. That's
another thing that's good to have set up along with your Google Analytics account.
When you submit your sitemap to Webmaster Tools, that's another great way to get
Google to recognize each of the pages that's on your site and sort of your
general site structure and navigation. That's super easy to do as well.
It's literally just a click of a button.
- [Kavi] Alejandra, "Is there anywhere where I can learn more about how to use
Google Analytics effectively?" Yes. There's a ton of resources on the Volusion
website. If you want to go to our ecommerce blog, there's a "Welcome to
Metrics." It's an Analytics webinar. It will kind of show you what metrics are
important for you to pay attention to, how to set things up. There's a lot of
resources on the Volusion Knowledge Base. And then also, Google puts out its
own kind of instructions on how to install it and what metrics need what.
- [Female] Okay. Maureen had one about keywords and sort of keyword hierarchy.
She asks, "For SEO, do the keywords have to be on each page, or can you have
keywords that are relevant to the entire site?" That's a great question for when
you're thinking about the way to structure your overall site content. So there will
be some keywords, obviously, that are relevant to your entire website, but it's
important to differentiate your lower-level pages from each other so that
you don't end up competing with yourself. So if you sell gardening supplies, for
example, make sure that your homepage includes keywords and content about
gardening supplies in general. Then make sure that your rakes and your gloves
categories each contain content that's more specific to rakes and gloves rather
than focusing on, again, just gardening supplies in general. Just when you're
writing out your list of keywords, make sure that each one is particularly
relevant to that page so that people will get to that page, specifically, when they
type in those keywords rather than just finding your site as a whole.
- [Alison] All right. It looks like we're getting close to the hour here, so we're
going to be wrapping it up. As a happy reminder, you're going to be
receiving these slides and a video recording in a couple of days. So you'll
have all the resources that we covered here at your fingertips. We also offer
regular webinars, as we keep referencing these, but it's something we do all the
time. They're on all these sort of marketing topics, and we go a bit more in
depth than what we did today. Some upcoming webinar topics include the
product page optimization that Kavi referenced and crafting a social media
strategy for the holidays, and that one will be on September 1. All of our
marketing webinars are absolutely free, and we encourage you to sign up
for as many as you can. Our team also offers marketing services.
So, if at any time you want to outsource your marketing efforts to our experts,
simply reach out to the number you see on the slide or the e-mail on this slide.
And again, we want to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join
us today. We wish and your store tremendous success. Happy selling.