The holiday shopping season is upon us.  You have spent months planning your inventory, hiring employees for the shopping season, working out your shipping policy for online orders, and stocking your shelfs.  The next step is selling your product.  You ran out of time or maybe you are short on funds to put a lot of money into marketing. 

Good News!  There are 3 simple quick and inexpensive things you can do to move your products this holiday season.

Boosted Posts or Social Media Ads

You can boost a social media post or ad on Facebook for as little as $5/day.  You may be thinking how much can I sell for $5/day?  More than you think.  The trick is to target where your posts or ads are displayed.  When you select to boost a post or create an ad you need to edit your audience demographics.  This will help you focus on displaying your ad to people who are most likely to purchase from you. 

Let us assume you have a women’s boutique, and you have a gorgeous hat/scarf/glove set you want sell.  You would set your target audience to women ages 18-65, located in cold, snowy states such as PA, OH, NY, NJ, DE, MA, ME, NH, MD.  There is no point in having your ad displayed to men who will not wear your item, or to folks in FL, GA, AL, etc. where they rarely, if ever, experience cold weather.  You can be even more focused based on potential income.  Let’s say this is an expensive set made of cashmere, then you would narrow your age range to working women who are more likely able to afford such an item so you may adjust your age range to 35-65.  You can also target your audience based upon interests or job titles.

Targeting your audience allows you to spend your limited funds more wisely with better results Boosted post or ads will be running within 24 hours.

Email campaigns

Say it with me now, “Email campaigns are not our enemy, they are our friend.”

Since social media has become so popular there is a common misconception that email marketing is outdated and useless.  The truth is email marketing campaigns can have a return of $36 for every $1 spent.

Sending emails to your loyal customers is the quickest way to get them in the door or to order online.  I have clients that I send out emails for on a weekly basis and I see orders coming in within 30 mins of sending out the campaign.  Customers who sign up to receive your emails are telling you “I like your product.  I like your store.  Keep me updated so I can order more in the future.”  That is valuable.

If you have an email list there are many email marketing providers that offer free plans you can access to start sending out your emails today.

Retargeting or Remarketing Ads

Retargeting ads, or Google refers to them as Remarketing ads, are ads people see once they have visited your site to encourage them to revisit and make a purchase.  I’m sure everyone as experienced this, right?  You check out a pair of shoes on a popular retail store site and every where you go you see ads for those pair of shoes. We find them annoying sometimes but the reality is they are effective.  Retargeting stats indicate on average a reduction in cart abandonment by 6.5% and an increase of online sales by 20%.

 

The good news is you can do it to!  It isn’t that expensive, and they can be running within 24-48 hours.  You can set any budget you want and when you reach that budget Google will stop displaying your ads. The only catch is you will have to have your web designer put a code on your website in order for it to work properly.

Happy Sales

Wishing all small business owners a productive and profitable holiday season!  If you are able to implement any, or all, of these ideas I would love some feedback at the end of the holiday season.  Please email us at sales@keyconn.net