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Starting a dropshipping business is pretty easy – anybody can do it. Finding a great product to sell is also fairly easy.
Where the real work lies is in marketing. This is where a lot of dropshippers fail.
And you wouldn’t blame them because dropshipping marketing is anything but easy. It is downright hard and not for the faint-hearted. However, without marketing, you can’t reach your target customers and, so, won’t make any sales. In short, without marketing, you won’t be in business at all.
Nevertheless, dropshipping marketing is very much doable, and you can be successful at it. In this guide, we will be exploring some of the marketing techniques you can leverage to market your dropshipping business and generate lots of sales. So stick around!
To begin with, marketing your dropshipping store gives you the chance to get your products in front of your potential customers.
Let’s say you just launched a pet supplies dropshipping business. Your target audience will be pet owners, apparently. But you won’t expect them to magically find your store somehow.
Only by running creative marketing campaigns do you have a chance of getting their attention to your store.
Another reason why marketing your dropshipping store is very important is because you have fierce competition to deal with. No matter the dropshipping niche you pick, there will always be competition to battle, and the only way to get ahead is by aggressively marketing your store.
Thirdly, marketing your dropshipping store allows you to build brand awareness and consumer trust for your business. After all, until people know you are in business, they won’t come to buy from you.
That said, let’s now see some of the essential marketing strategies you can use to grow your business.
Like every other endeavor in life, you need proper planning to increase your chances of finding success with marketing. If you don’t, your efforts and money could go down the drain without any meaningful result to show for it. With that caveat out of the way, let’s now explore some tested-and-trusted strategies to promote your dropshipping store.
Before lifting a finger to market your dropshipping store, it’s important first to identify who your potential customers are. Or simply put, your target audience.
Where do they live? Are they mostly males or females? What age bracket do they fall into? Do they have a unique characteristic or buying preference? Perhaps, they belong to a particular profession?
Answering these questions will provide you with cues to identify your target audience. When you have answered those questions, the next thing you will want to do is to develop what is called a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a graphical representation of what your ideal customers look like. It captures vital information such as where they live, their pain points, profession, etc.
Developing a buyer persona makes it easier to understand your customers’ needs. It allows you to determine the right product to sell and the best marketing strategy to employ.
Lucky for you, buyer personas aren’t so hard to create. All you have to do is conduct a survey. In that survey, ask your audience as many relevant questions as possible. Then create a persona with the answers you get back.
When you are done with that, move to the next step: determine your traffic channels.
What route will potential customers take to find your store? Or, put in another context, what traffic channel will work the most in generating sales for your business?
The thing is, there are lots of channels worth exploring in generating traffic to your dropshipping store. They include organic search (SEO), Facebook and Instagram ads, Google PPC ads, influencer marketing, and a host of others.
Your success with each channel will largely depend on your dropshipping niche. For example, Facebook ads work well for skincare products.
Women’s clothing, shoes, and other fast-selling products are better suited for Google PPC ads.
This is not to say you have to exclusively limit your traffic channel to just one advertising option. If possible, experiment with both to see which brings the most sales for your business.
If you are just starting out, chances are you might be on a shoestring budget, and so won’t have much to spend on ads. As such, it’s best to leverage organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
This will mean publishing insightful blog posts that resonate with your target audience. These posts will contain search terms (keywords) potential customers looking for your products will use in their searches.
Keep in mind that it takes a lot of time to see results with organic SEO, so you have to be patient with it.
Other traffic channels you can try your hands on are video marketing (YouTube and Tiktok), Reddit, and online forums.
If customers don’t know about your business, how would they buy from you? This is why building brand awareness is very important, even if you have stayed years in business.
There are a couple of strategies you use to build solid brand awareness for your dropshipping business. They are as follows:
Let’s now have a closer look at them individually.
When it comes to building brand awareness for your dropshipping business, Facebook/Instagram advertising is one good place to look.
The reason is simple; most people on Facebook aren’t ready to buy anything. Often, they use social media to connect with friends, socialize, and watch entertaining videos.
As such, trying to hard-sell your products to them might not work as much as you would expect. The best approach is to build brand awareness to let them know about your business. When they are finally ready to buy, they will come to your store.
For best results, use video ads for your brand awareness campaigns.
If Facebook ads aren’t your thing, try giving Google Display ads a shot. Google display ads are the banner ads you see when you visit some of your favorite websites.
Google display ads are effective for building brand awareness. When done right, they can help you increase consumer interaction with your brand, build loyalty with your potential customers, and win you lots of sales in the end.
Search Engine Optimization can also help you build brand awareness for your business. The best part is that you can start with a zero marketing budget and be massively successful. What’s more, you don’t need to be an SEO guru, or hire one, to get started.
All you have to do is put in lots of effort in creating textual content that your potential customers will find helpful and useful.
Pick relevant keywords with high search volumes – and low competition, possibly – and infuse them into your content. Your starting paragraph, post title and subheadings, and meta description are good places to insert those keywords.
You need to be consistent with blogging to see results with SEO. Publishing posts once in a while or whenever you feel like won’t help.
Did you know that for every $1 you invest in influencer marketing, you stand to gain back $5.78? It might also interest you to know that 67% of brands are actively using Instagram for influencer marketing.
Now, you might be thinking that influencer marketing only works for established brands and not for upcoming dropshipping businesses like yours. That’s certainly not true.
The thing is, influencer marketing works for every business, regardless of the size or niche. And you don’t need a heavy budget to make it work for you.
Plus, you don’t necessarily need a celebrity to help you promote your products.
To start, you first need to determine what your objectives are. This could be more awareness for your brand, more traffic, or more sales.
Do you know what differentiates top-rated marketers from their mediocre counterparts? Simply their ability to measure the performance of their marketing strategy and make needed adjustments.
To this end, it’s important to routinely measure the performance of your marketing strategy, as doing so will help you spot out what is working and what’s not.
For example, you can use Google Analytics or Google Search Console to measure the performance of your SEO strategy to know the keywords your website is ranking for.
Let’s say that after measuring your performance, you realize Facebook ads are not working as they should. Your instinct would be to ditch the ads altogether. Don’t!
Instead, try a different approach. Target a different demographic of audience. Try a different ad format: carousel, video, or collection ads. Time your ad campaigns differently. In essence, A/B test.
A/B testing is a marketing term used to refer to the concept of trying different marketing methods, approaches, and tools to see which works best.
You need the right tool and platform to find lasting success with dropshipping. One of the best dropshipping platform you can rely on is Sell The Trend. Sell The Trend allows you to automate product research, and order fulfillment.
Ready to take Sell The Trend for a spin? Start your free trial today.
