Facebook Ads Gameplan to Grow Your Ecommerce Store
/So you have a shiny new ecommerce store set up - your store is live but no one’s buying.
Here’s a step-by-step gameplan to help grow your business using online marketing.
Before you start driving traffic to your site - If you were hosting a party, you wouldn’t invite people in before everything was clean and you were fully dressed, would you??
Your ecommerce store is like a party - make sure everything’s ready before the guests arrive!
Firstly, double check that all of the functionalities work properly. Place a few test orders (and refund them…unless you enjoy paying credit card fees!). Have a friend or two test your site as well. And don’t forget to test your site using your phone and a tablet - make sure your photos display properly. Obviously make sure you have all of your store policies listed correctly. A FAQ page is usually helpful to list (and answer) questions that buyers will have.
Secondly, make sure you have a well-crafted ‘About’ page. This is one of the most-visited pages on your website and overlooked aspects of your site. Be sure to let people know who you are and your ‘why’. The most important thing is that they trust you - if shoppers don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you no matter how great your product is.
Now that your store is good-to-go, it’s time to start trying to capture some sales.
1 - Low Hanging Fruit
Do you have an existing email list or a social media page with a good following? If so, this is a great place to start. On average it costs 10% to market to existing customers compared to trying to acquire new customers. Send out an email campaign or a social media post and with a compelling offer or intro price. If the people on your list/or social media followers already know about you and the products you offer, it will be easier to snag to some early sales without spending money on paid online advertising.
2 - Play the Long Game
This part of the strategy is geared towards long-term success by growing your audience and gaining brand awareness. Firstly, create your Facebook Business Manager Account, Facebook Advertising Account and Facebook Pixel. If you don’t already have a Facebook Page (not a personal profile, but a business page dedicated to your business), stop what you’re doing and create your Facebook Page now. You will need it in order to run Facebook Ads. Install your Facebook Pixel on your site - it gets copied & pasted into the header of your website. If you need help, please see the help section for instructions on where and how to install it or contact your web administrator. The Pixel will be important for retargeting purposes in the future.
Use a content marketing strategy to gain some traction in the marketplace - create videos, downloads, social media posts, email campaigns and blog posts that help educate, entertain, inform and inspire your audience. You should know who your target audience is - create content that is geared toward them. Answer their questions, explain how your product works, tell your story on why you started the business in the first place - these are a few examples of what type of content to create.
You can use the content for social media posts, post it to your blog and in an email marketing campaign. This content will: position you as an expert, further the process of getting people to know, like & trust you and hopefully be useful. In general your content should be approximately 80%/20% give to ask ratio - 4 of 5 posts should be helpful content before you can post an ask or call-to-action. Be consistent with your content - this will help grow your brand and your SEO search results will slowly start to improve.
3 - Amplify Your Message with Facebook Ads
Here is where you can start to devise your paid advertising strategy. I usually like to start with a three-tiered strategy focused on Brand Awareness, Engagement and Sales Conversion.
Facebook Campaign Objective: Branding: I usually start with 35-40% of my total budget with a general branding ad campaign but lower down to 10-15% once your retargeting audience starts to grow. The goal of this campaign is to get people aware of you and your product…not to sell.
Facebook Campaign Objective: Traffic - drive people to your website, preferably to an entry-point offer, sale item or great offer/promotion. This is where you hopefully start to see some sales trickle in. If the offer is great, interested people will buy it. But many people still won’t. This is where the Facebook Pixel comes in. You will create a Custom Audience in Facebook consisting of all people who visited the specific page (the Pixel will fire back from your website, telling Facebook that a user has visited). As people hit your website, they will be ‘pixeled’ and we can run ads to them later. I try budget around 30% for these ads and adjust based on sales - if sales are not being generated, I increase my budget on traffic ads, if sales are good, I can lower my traffic budget and move it to conversion ads.
Facebook Campaign Objective: Conversion - this is where we start driving people to making a purchase. We run these ads to our retargeting audience (people who have visited our website but not made a purchase). These ads should be geared toward benefits of the product, why someone should buy your product and addressing the objections that stop people from buying your product. Conversion ads usually cost the most, so I set aside at least 30-35% of my ad budget as this help to generate revenue.
4 Here’s a few other ideas to help some traffic and generate some interest:
do a Facebook Live and talk, in detail, with excitement about what you’re selling and why people need it
post item for sale on Facebook profile/marketplace, link back to online store
post item on Craigslist, link back to online store
bloging/content marketing strategy to improve your SEO
informational campaign about what your product is all about
email your list and let them know about your promotions
create a guest blog post/be a guest on someone else’s blog or podcast
rent a booth at local trade convention or event
sponsor an event
search for Facebook Groups where your target audience hangs out, search for people looking for what you’re offering, offer to help and offer information before mentioning or trying to sell your product
In summary if you are consistent, smart with your strategy, have a great offer and have nailed your target audience, this gameplan will work great to drive traffic and generate some sales!