What you should know about digital marketing
Dan Kogan, founder and CEO of 1Digital Agency, has been in the digital marketing industry since 1997. So, I sat down with Dan and asked for his insights on Digital Marketing for eCommerce entrepreneurs.
Q: I want to do some digital marketing for my website, but I don’t know where to start. Are there tactics out there which are tried and true, which every eCommerce entrepreneur should be using?
Dan: If this is a do it yourself type of campaign for digital marketing, you should become the expert. Try to act as the voice of what you’re doing. Meaning that you should be on different social media platforms and forums answering questions and talking to people about the product, and the topic, you specialize in.
For example, let’s say you’re in the RV industry, like one of our clients RV Upgrades, and you’re an expert in RV’s. You know all about how to customize them and how to upgrade them. You should be in forums talking about RV’s and talking about creative solutions to the questions that people are asking there. Maybe you know some hacks or modifications, that would make your unique perspective worthwhile. Sort of like in real life. You would pound the pavement, and handout flyers where you think your customer might be. You can do the same thing in the digital space. You should write articles, you should do social media, and you should let yourself become that expert authority.
It’s no different than what we do for 1Digital Agency. We go to the BigCommerce forums, and just see if anybody wants some free advice.
And on the paid front, you should hire somebody for these services.
Q: Digital marketing would be a big investment for me. If I’m going to commit to putting a lot of money towards this every month, I need some kind of guarantee that I’m going to see a return. How can I be certain the marketing efforts I’m paying for will lead to more sales?
Dan: There’s never a guarantee in return, however, a good digital agency should be able to offer some sort of KPIs so you can measure their success. Whether that be an increase in traffic, branding, awareness, return visitors. There’s all different kinds of metrics. As a marketing team, our job is to bring people to your website, or make them aware of a product, or a promotion. Whether people will execute once they hit the site, that’s a whole other strategy. Of course, that could be baked into our overall efforts as an agency, but at the end of the day there are so many elements outside of our control, that there is no ethical way of guaranteeing results.
Q: I hear eCommerce platforms making claims about providing the best system for SEO. How do I know that my eCommerce platform is going to give me the best SEO advantage?
Dan: The best way is to research the forums, and read 3rd party reviews from business owners who already use these platforms. Another idea would be to take a few sites from each of the platforms showcase areas and run ‘em through some speed tests. You might also check how some of their sites rank for industry keywords, if you have a tool to check rankings, like Ahrefs. Apart from that, there is a lot of inside information that you’re just not going to be privy to. In that case, you would really need to talk to an agency that’s familiar with these platforms, because of course, each of these platforms will claim that they have the best.
Q: In the past, I’ve setup a PPC campaign myself, and it didn’t seem to be worth the money that I put into it. Is my product simply not right for PPC?
Dan: Your product might be right for PPC. It just depends on how you put together that campaign. What keywords did you set up? What negative keywords did you use? How broad or specific were your match types? How cohesive was the overall strategy behind the campaign? These are all things we should know before writing PPC off completely.
PPC these days is something that is very, very complex, and technical. There is a lot of opportunity for it to drain your budget if you’re not aware about the nuances. Versus our professionals, who know the ins and outs of what to do, how to ramp up slowly, what settings to set up in order to avoid wasting ad spend. It’s not just a do it yourself type of platform anymore. In order to figure out if your product can work with PPC, you should refer to experts.
Q: I get marketing emails in my inbox everyday, and I delete them immediately. Do sending these emails do any good, or do they just annoy my customers?
Dan: From our perspective, having tons and tons of different clients that do email marketing, and just from our own expirence, email marketing is still one of the best forms of marketing to your customer. Typically a customer that likes your product will review a promotional email quickly. A lot of people skim through their spam or promotional folders, and will still look at the emails that are relevant to them.
We still find that email has the best results for transactions, as long as the message and the focus is right. As long as you’re targeting the right client. As long as the right person is getting that email. That’s why building your own list is so important, as opposed to buying a list and just sending random email spam. If you have a targeted campaign, with a targeted audience and a targeted message, we still very much believe in email marketing.
Q: Can you expand a little bit on tactics for growing an email list?
Dan: Sure. One, create blog articles that people will want to read and email them out. Two, make sure that there is a clear subscribe field for your list prominently displayed on your website. Three, make sure that you’re soliciting through social media, whether it’s through an email list specific campaign, or you attach a request to subscribe to different promotional items. There’s a ton of different ways to try to get subscribers.
Q: I’ve set up social media feeds for my business, but no one is following them. How can I get more people looking at those feeds so I can make posting on them worthwhile?
Dan: Similar to email, you have to make sure you’re talking the right target audience. You have to figure out who you’re sending those feeds to. You have to make the content of your feed more interesting, and then you have to find people who will be interested. If you’re trying to force people into something that they might not want, it’s never going to happen.
Q: How can I tell if my digital marketing is working? Short of sales numbers going up, are their certain analytics to watch that are good indicators that a digital marketing team is having success?
Dan: Obviously, number one is transactions. Number two is just as important though, and that’s cost per transaction. So, how much of your budget are you spending to get that one transaction. You’ll need to factor the marketing cost of that sale into your total margin. For example, you might be spending 6K a month on marketing, to pull in 10K in sales every month. But if you only have 5K in margin, you’re at a loss. Unless you have some kind of recurring revenue product. Long story short, your marketing team could be getting you more sales, but still not running a successful campaign. And if you don’t how much transactions cost you, on a CPA basis, you might think everything is fine.
You should also look at your bounce rate. If you’re having a ton of visitors bounce within seconds, that’s a sign that you’re not reaching the right audience. If people are staying on the page, and engaging, that’s great. You can tell how they interact with your site using heat maps. Analytics. You take all that data together, piece by piece,and you can figure out if your social media or your PPC team is doing a good job. And that’s how you know if your digital marketing is working or not.