We’re living in an era where everything we know is transforming at an exponential rate. The horizon of eCommerce is stretching, bringing everyone to an equal playing field. This is resulting in a lot of global and local eCommerce brands stepping up with innovative ideas that are shaping the world as we know it. However, this buzz in the market has caused the marketing costs to rise across all major marketing channels making it difficult for businesses with a small budget to lose hope.

But don’t worry, Keywordio commends your efforts and is thrilled to share with you a budget-friendly approach to online ads. This will help you manage your marketing budget and scale your business despite it being a time when the marketing cost is at an all-time high.

iOS Update and Facebook

Apple is known to follow high security standards and is a strong voice in respecting privacy. In the fall of 2021, Apple rolled out its iOS 14 update that changed the game for marketers and all apps on Play Store, including Facebook.

With this update, Apple released an ATT prompt (image above) that allowed users to opt out of getting tracked. Since then, Facebook has been trying to find ways to make it work for its marketers who don’t look happy because of far less control over their ads’ performance. To combat this, Facebook has introduced Aggregated Events Measurements (AEM).

According to some marketers, this heavy term saved the day. Marketers can still track and optimise their ads’ performance up to a certain level through AEM. Aggregated Events Measurements gathers data from the good old Facebook Pixel in a safer way, respecting the privacy of its users.

Misunderstand Distribution

Digital Sales Funnel is a very powerful strategy that can be a game-changer for your business if executed properly. It can bring a new audience to your business that can go through the customer journey to become loyal customers in a short period.

How does it work?

Getting new customers to buy from you is a process that involves a series of stages. The first stage is called Attract. This is where online ads, social media posts, blogs, etc. can be extremely helpful to introduce your brand to people who have never heard about it before. The point of this stage is to get people to visit your online store or website.

The second stage is called Convert. This stage involves getting the visitor’s attention and converting them from a potential customer into a customer. The chances of success at this stage depend on how good your website and products are. Having ongoing offers on your products and coupons surely helps too. 

On to the third stage - Close, where your visitors are very close to completing the purchase or have completed the purchase. Make sure that you have a straightforward checkout process to avoid any cart abandonments, which ails a lot of eCommerce businesses due to confusing checkout processes, hidden charges or lack of cash on delivery (COD) option.

You’ve successfully taken a stranger through a journey where they got intrigued by your brand and it all came together in the end when they decided to buy from you. But the funnel doesn’t end there. There’s one last stage that often gets overlooked by brands due to which they aren’t able to retain their customers.

The fourth and final stage is Delight where you encourage your customers to also become your promoters. Trust us, it’s not as tricky as it sounds. It’s just some extra efforts from you as a brand that would go a long way for your customers. Here are some things you can put that extra effort into as a brand to show that you care:

• Packaging
• Delivery
• Use Facebook/Instagram to interact with your audience
• Facebook/Instagram messages and DM’s
• New products with ads for the current customers

A happy customer will go to great lengths to promote your business if they felt that they are important to you. Things like packaging and interaction with your brand can be great experiences for your customers that will encourage them to spread the word about your business.

Don't Crash Your Marketing Budget

Now that you’ve learnt how the sales funnel works, we hope you’re excited to implement it across various platforms. But how do you make sure that you don’t spend most of your marketing budget on ads? It’s trickier than ever with Facebook hiking their prices for cost per click and cost per thousand impressions. We’d suggest you look into different platforms that might have a lower price, for example, TikTok offers a lower CPC and is equally, if not more, effective in getting good reach in contrast with platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

The Right Way to Target Audience

Let’s talk a bit about how you can target the right audience the right way, keeping your marketing budget in mind. There are a few different custom audiences that you can use to keep your ads relevant. Earlier, eCommerce businesses collected emails from their customers but now they have a good reason to collect their phone numbers to gain more control over how they target a similar audience.

A good example is how TikTok for Business allows you to track your current customers by uploading their phone numbers. You can then create a lookalike audience from those phone numbers to target similar people. Additionally, you can create audiences based on the people who have engaged with your page, social media posts or who have visited your website. This goes to show how fast the technology and market are evolving, it’s best to keep experimenting with new features and evolve along to stay on top of your digital marketing game.

Never Miss a Lead Again

You will miss out on a bunch of leads if you rely only on the data from your marketing channel. This is due to the fact that there will always be a few customers who will fall outside the 7 or 30-day window. So it’s always a good idea to double-check with your website or CRM system so that Facebook and TikTok can get their hands on the data that will help them pinpoint the relevant audience to show your ad to.

Custom Target Audience

This is one of the most effective ways to target an audience that’s likely to convert since it’s based on their interests. It takes some fun experimentation, patience and improvisation to stack audiences and the results can be highly rewarding. For example, someone that drives a car, likes winters, skiing, biking, a particular outfit and uses a phone can be put in one custom audience by marketers of a certain niche. This might work in some cases, but that doesn’t give them any clue if they like this particular car brand or snow or skiing, etc.

That’s why we’d recommend testing one thing at a time. Analyse what works for which audience and then you can experiment with blending audiences with common interests and stack them together.

Checklist

Here is a checklist that will instantly put you in a good place as a marketer:

• Set up Aggregated Event Measurements (AEM) for Facebook
• Set up Facebook and TikTok Pixel, Event Sources and Catalogues
• Build Funnels (Awareness - Consideration - Conversion)

If you have a small budget, it will take you a considerable amount of time to get through the Awareness stage of the funnel. But patience is the key here. If you have a good amount of events on your website/online store, you will slowly but surely get through the first stage with more and more people adding to the cart and completing the purchase.

Conclusion

We believe that no business should be kept from becoming successful just because they are on a small budget. We believe it and want to prove it through the approaches in this article that you can implement to level up. It will surely take longer but quality products, genuine determination and the right set of strategies will eventually pay off.

We help our clients make better decisions for their eCommerce businesses and allocate their marketing budget through proper planning. If you’re stuck in your eCommerce journey, don’t hesitate to ask for help, we’re here for you.

Book a FREE consultation with us; let’s talk about your hustle.