Guide to Building a Marketing Plan

Running a successful online store is a blast. Nothing beats the feeling of having your products sell like hotcakes while you wake up every morning excited to hammer away at your to-do list.

But running your own store can sometimes have its low points - those sobering moments when you realize that things aren’t going so great.When you’re tired of putting in all those hours without anything to show for it and you have absolutely no idea what you should do next.

While these low points can sometimes be enough to make you want to give up, you really shouldn’t. We’ve put together a surefire strategy to help lift you over any obstacle standing between your business and long-term success.

Let’s take a look.

The high of starting
When you first start your business, it isn’t hard to find the time or motivation that you need to get everything done. Coming up with a brand name, tracking down great products to sell, getting nice product shots and finding a good looking design for your site can be hard work, but they’re simply table stakes.

The real test comes later, at launch day, when you’re staring at your computer screen and can’t wait to reap the benefits of all the hard work you’ve put in over the last couple of months.

But a lot of the time, that hard work doesn’t include any marketing efforts which results in a launch day with a handful of visitors, mostly family and friends, showing their support.

By day two, there’s no one around to buy or even look at your products or pixel-perfect website. This is when doubt creeps in and starts to eat at your motivation.
You might start wondering if you’re really cut out for running an online store.

So, how do you know if it’s time to throw in the towel or if you’re just making excuses?

When the first doubts appear, some people will simply give up, but in a more subtle way than you might think. They don’t wake up and say: “That’s it, today I’m pulling the plug,” instead, you often hear things like: “I’m just too busy right now”.

If this is you, I’ll be honest with you: It won’t be easy. To succeed, you need passion and perseverance to get through the rough parts and if you’re getting discouraged after the first speed bump, that’s not the best sign.

At the very least, since you’re reading this article, I know that you want to make things work.

Those that keep going, even though their store doesn’t yield the expected results, might be seduced into tactical marketing hell.

This means you’re trying whatever you can get your hands on: Running Facebook ads, tweeting like crazy, writing daily blog posts to get your SEO going, and making constant changes on your site to improve your conversion rate.

If you’re very lucky, one of those tactics will bring you consistent traffic and sales, but, more often than not, trying everything at once will make you extremely busy without anything to show for it.

And without progress, there is no momentum.

Instead, you’re left with a thought that’s lingering in the back of your mind: Is there something I haven’t tried that could turn things around?

But when you take a look at how other stores generate sales, you seem to have tried that they’re doing and it didn’t work for you.The truth is that most successful stores are getting the majority of their sales from the same handful of channels.

So what can you do? The solution lies in the parts you’ve overlooked. When you’re trying everything at once, chances are that you’re not really taking your time to get good at anything.

It takes time to set up Google Adwords, make content marketing work, optimize Facebook ads or to set up a network of affiliates. For each one of those tactics, there are people out there that have done nothing but focus on it for the last five years (and even they're probably still learning how to be more effective).

But how can you sell more without having to spend five years getting good at marketing?

Being successful with marketing isn’t rocket science, but the learning curve can be pretty steep, leaving many people overwhelmed.

What you really need to make your store work is a system.

Creating a system for success
The goal is to create a system that answers two questions for every new marketing channel you’re trying out:

Am I making progress?
What can I do to improve?
These essential questions do not only give you direction on what to do next, they will also show you when a marketing channel doesn’t make sense.

So, if you use the approach below and can’t make any marketing channel work, that might indicate your store has more fundamental problems. It doesn’t matter how great your advertising campaign is - if no one wants the products you sell, you will get nowhere.

To create the system, we’re borrowing the Lean Startup Loop and tweaking it to our needs. It’s a loop with three stages that all your marketing efforts will go through.

Your objective remains the same: Make sales - but how you get to those sales is going to be different. First, you’re going to take your best shot at a specific marketing channel. Second, you’re going to measure the results. Then, based on those results you’ll make tweaks to your initial attempt and make it a little bit better.

This process continues until you’re happy with the results or realize that this specific marketing channel won’t work for your business at this stage.

Which marketing channel you start out with depends on you and your business. You might get some ideas after reading an interesting blog post or a conversation with a fellow entrepreneur.

To put this into practice and illustrate the approach, we’re going to create a system to generate sales with Facebook advertising.

Stage 1: Build
Right now you know you need to make sales and you’ll use Facebook ads to do it.The goal at this stage is to get one advertisement up and running, that’s it.

If you’re a Facebook pro, that will be pretty easy.If you’ve never used their advertising platform, getting to the stage where you launch your first ad campaign will take some time.

To set up your first Facebook advertising campaign you’ll need to decide on the following:
Your end-goal is to sell, but Facebook has all kinds of options for optimizing who it will show your ads to. For now, just pick Send people to your website or Increase conversions as an objective.

Landing page
Which page are you going to send your visitors to?

Audience

Which combination of criteria are you going to use to select your target audience?

Demographics: Location, gender, age, language, education level, etc.
Interests: Which pages do they like or which subjects are they interested in?
Behaviour: This targeting option is based on what Facebook has learned about its users’ behaviour.
Budget
How much should you spend right now, before you know what the results will be?To start, just pick something that you’re comfortable with like a couple of dollars a day.

Ad Formats
Where do you want your ads to display: In the News Feed on desktops, on mobile devices or in the right column?

Content
What will be the headline and text of your advertisement? Are you pitching your whole store or one specific product? Or are you just promoting content to grow your email list?

Images

Will you use simple product shots, photos that feature people using your products, or a different image altogether that grabs your audience’s attention?

Each of the options above might seem like a small decision, but they’re all necessary to create a great ad, so it’s easy to get overwhelmed and get stuck. Use resources like Google, blog posts, and guides to help you figure out exactly what you need to do.

Your first attempt will not be perfect, but don’t worry about that. Just try to get something out there.

When you’ve got your first ad running, it’s time to move to the next stage.

For other marketing channels

To apply this to other marketing channels, you’ll need to learn the fundamentals of those specific channels. Keep in mind that you don’t need to know everything, just enough to get something out there.
Stage 2: Measure
In this stage we’re going to answer the first question: How do you know if you’re improving?

For an online store, orders are the ultimate goal. If you can't turn visitors into customers, you don't have a business, so your number one metric to track is orders. But what if there aren’t any orders coming in?

Knowing where you are at and not getting discouraged is one of the main reasons that we’re creating this whole system.

It all comes down to having the right expectations. Because when you’ve put out your first simple Facebook ad, it will be tough to measure its performance if you only look at the raw sales numbers. So how can you evaluate your efforts?

The answer comes from the data you collect in your ecommerce platform, Google Analytics and Facebook.We’ll run through the three platforms and indicate which metrics are worth paying attention to.

Your ecommerce platform
This is probably the part you’re most familiar with. In your online store back-end, you can find all of the details about your orders:

Number of orders
Average order value
Sales conversion rate
Added to cart conversion rate
Reached checkout conversion rate
In Shopify, you’ve got these metrics right on your dashboard:
If you’re using a different ecommerce platform, you might need to make some website tweaks in order to track all of these metrics.

Google Analytics
Getting the right data from Google Analytics can be pretty overwhelming for a lot of people. But you don’t need to look at every report in there. Here is which metrics are worth paying attention to:

Users (in the Audience report)
Traffic sources (Acquisition report)
Bounce rate, time on site and pages/session (in the Audience report)
Transactions and revenue (in the Conversions report)
To make sure you’re able to track the data above, especially for your Facebook campaigns, you’ll need to make some extra tweaks:

Enable ecommerce tracking
Add the Facebook pixel to all pages of your store
Add tracking to all Facebook URLs (this is a good idea for all marketing efforts)
That will make sure that when there are sales coming in, you’ll be able to see in Google Analytics where those sales originated from. For more details, check out this guide on using Google Analytics for ecommerce.

Facebook
Facebook will show you three levels of data: Information about your overall campaign, your ad set and individual ads.

Interesting metrics:

Clicks
Click through rate or CTR
Cost per click or CPC
Cost per conversion
Frequency
Relevancy score
Now that you’ve got all the data coming in, let’s figure out in the next step how you can use all those metrics to make your ads better, and start selling of course.Other marketing Channels
Measuring is the cornerstone of getting better. You’ll need data from your ecommerce platform, Google Analytics and the specific channel you are testing. This could be keyword positions for SEO or reach if you’re working.

Stage 3: Learn
All the data from the previous stage might leave you a bit overwhelmed, but don’t worry, you don’t need to look at everything at once.

In this stage, we’ll check what you need to pay attention to. It will also help you to answer the second question: How do you know what to improve?

This is hardest of the three stages to learn. Expertise about a specific marketing channel can really help you at this point. If you know when to focus on which metric, you can save a lot of time and money

In what follows, I’ll use my experience with optimizing a Facebook ads campaigns, to get out the precise approach you would like to follow to optimize your campaigns.

Tweak your audience and offer
With Facebook advertising, you'll usually haven't any problem blowing through your budget. Once your ad is up, you’ll see clicks are available and other people visit your website.

This can be exciting initially , but if after a couple of days there are not any sales coming in, you’ll start wondering why you're actually spending all this money. What you would like here may be a sign that you simply are literally bringing the proper people to your website.

If you’re attracting the proper audience with the incorrect offer, you’ll see a coffee CTR. the incorrect audience with the proper offer will get clicks, but you’ll see your on-site metrics (such as bounce rate) skyrocket.

Decide how you'll improve your campaign and make a second ad set with a replacement advertisement. Then see if your CTR (or your on-page metrics) improve.
Metrics to check:

Orders: Are you making money?
Reached Checkout: Are your visitors beginning to check out?
Added To Cart: Have visitors added anything to their cart?
CTR: Do people find your ad more relevant vs another one?
Bounce Rate: Are people landing on your site and leaving without doing anything else?
Pages/Visit and Session Duration: Do your visitors merely scan or do they are going deep and really consume your content?
A couple of ideas to enhance this step:

Create ads that are targeted at your ideal customer (better text, images, etc.)
Select a special audience: Try a replacement combination of demographics, interests, etc.
Change your offer: Pitch your store, one among your products, a life-style or highly relevant content.
Add in several sorts of campaigns
When you get to the present step, you’re already pretty conversant in the Facebook platform and every one the metrics involved, but you continue to won't see any sales are available . Time to level up.

Besides running ads aimed toward folks that haven't seen or heard of your store before, Facebook also has another great features.

1. Custom Audiences

Custom audiences are audiences you create. for instance , you'll target:

People that have visited your website.
People that haven’t visited your site within the last 30 days.
People that have added a product to their cart but haven’t verified .
People that have placed an order.
2. Lookalike Audiences

Lookalike audiences are audiences supported the custom audiences above. Facebook will use its algorithm magic to seek out people that display an equivalent characteristics and behaviours because the people within the custom audiences. These tactics are great to seek out new people to introduce to your store and products.

You can create these audiences by adding alittle snippet of Javascript to your store called an advertising pixel.

For Facebook advertising, custom audience campaigns are usually those that bring home the bacon. Your first ads reach folks that haven’t heard of you, but this second set of ads reaches folks that already know you and are on your site, but just need a touch more convincing to form a sale .

A couple of ideas to enhance this step:

Create different audiences and measure the response for every group.
Adapt your ads to form them simpler . If people have already visited your site, how could you bring them back? Showcase your best offer, give them a reduction , etc.
Optimize for ROI
When you get to the present step of the optimization, you’ve seen sales are available . you recognize what you spend and what comes out.

Now it’s time to tune the machine to maximise your sales and proportion your budget. Focus your attention on the campaigns that are profitable and ditch those that aren’t very effective.You can also try starting a Facebook product ads campaign.

A couple of ideas to enhance this step:

Pay very close attention to the relevancy score of your ads. a better score will lower the value per click (and conversion).
Continue testing your ads and audiences.
Can you usher in more “cold” traffic to convert together with your other campaigns?
For other marketing channels:

The exact steps you would like to follow to optimize your marketing efforts are going to be different for each channel. One thing to stay in mind is that each marketing channel has its own learning curve. So once you start out, don’t be too narrowly focused on sales. attempt to find other metrics that indicate quality and improve on those.

Applying this to your store
The main goal of this text was to stay you moving, in order that you’re never clueless about what you ought to be doing next or if there even may be a next step.

In summary, here’s how you'll apply the system above to your own store:

Pick a marketing channel and provides it your best shot. Measure what happens together with your marketing and your sales and use this data to guage and improve your initial effort. Keep going until orders are coming in or until you'll confidently say that a selected marketing channel doesn’t work for your store.

Now that you’ve learned the way to create and improve your Facebook Ads and Google AdWords campaigns, you'll start optimizing your tactics to place your business on a surefire path to success.


About the author: Dennis Moons believes that a profitable ecommerce business can change everyone's life. That’s why he wants to assist more store owners achieve that goal. determine more at Store Growers.