How To Develop A Marketing Strategy For A Dropshipping Business?

A user or a customer needs to see your brand  or interact with your message at least seven times before they’ll actually convert.  Sometimes you get lucky.  Sometimes you get those first-time conversions, but I would say, what are we looking at – 97% of time people do not convert the very  first time they interact with your brand.  If you’re doing well and you get 3% in conversions  and then you’ve got 97% that you already  paid for that now you need to nurture.  

You can use these different nurturing channels like YouTube videos – absolutely excellent way to communicate with your customers or future customers,  about what they can expect.  Training, tips, techniques, unboxing,  showing off products, showing services.  

Pinterest is also a good way to showcase where you can go. It’s all about DIY.  It’s all about learning how to do new things or getting inspired.  A lot of people have these Pinterest  boards that are just inspiration boards.  So, you should have an inspiration board,  again, depending on your market.  If you’re a landscaper, have an inspiration board. If you’re an ecommerce expert, have a board on aliexpress best sellers, etc. People might try to do it themselves and then  they’re going to realize that is way too much work,  and then they’re going to hire you to do it  because you originally inspired them. This is all in your nurturing.  

You may not find that you are getting immediate results  and sales as a part of this nurturing part of the funnel,  but you’re not always supposed to.  This is the middle of the funnel. It’s going to be sending people down  to the very end of the funnel,  and this is your close, this is your lead,  your sale, your revenue generated, your job completed.  In this situation, when you’ve got people that have, they have been nurtured,  they’re receiving the information that they want,  they’re still researching, they’re looking,  they fill out that lead form again.  Maybe you have to call them again utilizing a CRM  to keep track of all of these customer requests.  Down at the very end, that’s where you get your sale.  So, you have to think about it when you’re  defining your channels and defining your marketing plan,  I would segment it into three different steps.  What’s my top of funnel,  that’s going to be generating all of my leads and my traffic.  What’s the middle of my funnel where I am  nurturing them and retargeting them to bring  them back to my site so they actually convert.  And then, once they land on my site or  they call me or they reach out somehow,  what is my next step and my action that  needs to be completed so that they close  and actually turn into business.  So, planning all of this out.  Different channels require different things,  and different channels require different  strategies and a different outlook to get what you’re looking for.  

Now, we’ve got this all written down, you’ve identified what you want to achieve, your next step is actually executing.  Now, executing is not, okay, end of March I’m ready to go,  I hit the go button, boom,  now I’m makin’ money, I’m a millionaire.  That’s not how it works.  Marketing is not an overnight success.  It’s never an overnight success.  If you have someone that’s telling you otherwise,  they are dead wrong.  Lightening can strike, sure.  We can all see a great success right at the beginning, but that’s not sustainable, it’s not going to last,  you’ve got to work at it.  April 1st you’re not going to be a millionaire.  If this is the first time you’re being told that,  I’m super sorry that I have to be the one to tell you,  but marketing takes time, it takes energy,  it takes commitment, and it takes budget,  like we talked about earlier.  

Once you’ve executed it’s not like  you’re just executing and launching once.  For most businesses you have some seasonality.  You have seasonality, you have sales.  For e-comm and retail stores we’ve got Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  For landscapers and roofers and folks like that you’ve got the early spring through summer,  depending on where you’re located.  There’s always some sort of seasonality, as well.  So, just launching isn’t enough.  You will have a lot of micro launches,  a lot of micro execution that  you’re doing throughout the year.  This was a part of our planning  and setting those milestones.  By setting those milestones we know when our  launch dates are for this campaign and for  that campaign and for this campaign.  No part of marketing is set it and forget it.  By identifying all of this, that helps you stay ahead  of the competition and it helps to make sure that you’re  not just reacting to what the market is doing.  You’re actually helping to lead  the market and educate the consumer.  After you have launched,  and we’re talking about launch number one,  you may have a hundred launches throughout the year,  you have to start to optimize.  Optimizing is essentially just understanding that  you are not going to get it right the first time,  but you’re going to learn and you’re  going to make adjustments from there.  You’ll change your ad copy, change your message,  change your offer, change your budget,  change your targeting, change your audience,  change your website, change your services,  change your products.  There’s all sorts of things that you will optimize.  It can be,  it can be really exciting after you launch a campaign  to jump in and just start tweaking and tinkering  and turning the knob and things like that.  I would recommend that that is not your very first step.  It shouldn’t be because what will end up happening is that  you adjust too many things and then you’re not able to  identify what actually helped and what may have hurt you.  When you go through and you decide that you’re optimizing,  optimize one at a time and give yourself  time to understand the data from there.  

Maybe you need to make a change to your ads.  So, change out your ad copy or your ad design,  something like that, and then stop.  You might even have to force yourself to stop,  but stop, hold on, give yourself some time, and perform some aliexpress product analysis, if you’re in the ecommerce niche. Depending on your budget and depending on the amount  of interaction your ads get, how wide your audience is,  how globally effective or globally interested,  or interesting, your product is, think of things like that,  you may wait a couple of days, you may wait a week or two  before you start making other changes.  Now you go in, you change your ad schedule.  Well, I don’t want to show on Sundays,  and it looks like Tuesday night  I’m just not getting anything.  Okay, so now we make that adjustment, and then wait.  And then you hold on again.  By making these adjustments one at a time  you can identify what is actually driving success,  what didn’t really make a difference at all,  which is a great indicator that you can go back  and make other adjustments or other changes,  or what has been really reasonably  effective that you want to do again.  Or you want to continue to make  those changes and try other things.  Just because you see success doesn’t mean you’re done.  You can run into ad fatigue.  You can run into ad frequency issues.  You can run into competitors identifying what  you’re doing and then jumping into the same market.  You can’t ever stop.  Now, marketing doesn’t sleep.  Marketing doesn’t stop.  Continually make these optimization adjustments,  make these changes as necessary.  So, that’s it, right?  Really easy, huh?  It’s not actually that easy.  This does take time.  It takes time to come up with your 2019 marketing plan.  But by following these steps you can identify  the best way to provide yourself with the  greatest results you could possibly imagine.  For a lot of companies and a lot of  business owners 2018 was a great year.  For you, maybe it wasn’t,  but that doesn’t mean that 2020 can’t  be the best year you’ve ever had.  By starting now, starting early,  identifying your milestones,  identifying what you want to achieve,  doing a SWOT analysis of last year,  identifying the amount of growth your  budget needs to experience, like I said,  a minimum of 3%, minimum, identifying your channels,  identifying what your funnel looks like  from top of funnel to mid-nurturing funnel  to actual lead and sales generation,  identifying your channels and which channels  are feeding which part of the funnel and  affecting your sales and your outcome,  and by creating this agile 2020 marketing plan,  you’ll see the success that you’re looking for.  You’ll grow your business.  You’ll see all the results that you need.  And you’ll be preparing yourself for an even better 2021.