How to implement digital marketing on a budget is a major concern for many startups, entrepreneurs, and businesses, especially dropshippers. With shoppers and shopping becoming more digitised smart entrepreneurs must design and develop a definite digital marketing strategy or die.
The internet and social media, for instance, can give massive exposure compared with traditional brick and mortar storefronts. For example, Instagram has 800 million users and counting, imagine the exposure you could get from a well-timed, well-primed post.
Yet, digital marketing transcends these channels to include SMS, mobile marketing, display advertising, blogging, you name it. This can be overwhelming for starters and can induce analysis paralysis, plus reckless, unguided experimentation with its attendant costs and frustrations.
Even if you stock some top selling products, a good digital marketing strategy will help you sell more. In this article, I outline two effective ways dropshippers can implement digital marketing on a budget, but before we go any further
What Really is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing as the name implies involves marketing via digital media, technology or channels like
- SMS
- MMS
- Push Notifications
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- SEM (search engine marketing)
- Content Marketing
- Display Advertising, and many more
It is broader than its brother, internet or online marketing, which is marketing that happens strictly online.
Why Bother With Digital Marketing?
There are 2 main reasons to go digital with your marketing campaigns:
#1. Customers
Consumer behavior has changed over the years necessitating a corresponding change in the way businesses serve customers, technology being a major driver of this change. Mobile adoption, for instance, has grown in recent years with over 2b people carrying out different m-commerce transactions on mobile/tablets in 2017.
#2. Competition
Serious businesses always look for new, more effective ways to better serve customers and become the preferred choice. Hence, we see increased digitization of business/marketing processes, practices, and procedures among forward-thinking dropshippers.
Following are
Some Key Digital Marketing Stats
Here’s what statistics have to say about digital marketing viz:
US retail m-commerce sales via tablets grew almost 153% from $38.02b in 2014 to $96.31b in 2018.
Source: Invespcro
We also see that desktop, tablet and mobile phone have a combined average conversion rate of 4.15%, with iPhone posting AOV of $117, thanks to its more affluent user base.
Here’s another interesting fact: online shoppers who shop using mobile devices tend to spend twice as much via digital channels than those who don’t.
Now here are:
7 Key Questions to Answer When Choosing Digital Marketing Channels
Consider the following when shopping for digital marketing channels:
- Availability: Is it widely available in your target market?
- Adoption: Is it widely adopted or relatively unknown in your target market?
- Competitors: Do your competitors use such channels in your target market?
- Audience: What particular channel(s) appeal more to your target demographics?
- Engagement: How engaging are your preferred channels for your target audience?
- Affordability: How affordable is marketing on such channels like?
- Performance Tracking: Can you easily and effectively track your marketing spend and ROI on such channels?
And here’re
2 Ways to Go Digital on a Minimal
#1. Mobile Marketing
Handheld devices are now in almost every hand. Reports indicate that by 2020 there’ll be over 9b active mobile phone subscriptions worldwide. These mobile devices are handy, plus studies by Esendex shows UK SMS open rate is a massive 95%.
Imagine your new product announcements, promos or discounts receiving massive visibility within seconds via bulk SMS for instance. How far could that get you?
Google Mobile First Index recognizes how far mobile has come. In 2015 for the first time, mobile overtook desktop as the internet device of choice. Mobile First meaning mobile-friendly results will rank higher in Google search.
Whether shopping, browsing, studying, watching videos or reading emails, mobile has become bae. Therefore a solid mobile marketing strategy will make your business more consumer friendly. This includes optimizing your website design, blog, navigation, UI, etc to deliver stellar user experience.
Following are some key mobile marketing stats:
- Consumers now spend over five hours a day on their smartphones,
- In 2018, 52.2% of worldwide online traffic originated from mobile phones, up from 50.3% in 2017,
- In 2017, 61% of US email opens occurred on mobile, 24% in a webmail client and 15% on desktop,
- In 2017, 95.1 percent of Facebook users accessed FB via mobile, Pinterest 80%, LinkedIn 60%
- 85% of Twitter session time comes from mobile
Source: Blue Corona
#2. Email Marketing
Email marketing is another cost-effective way of getting the word out about your products or services. For Dropshippers this is even more important as email plays a leading role in customer acquisition, nurturing, conversion and retention.
Brands like Jumia have excelled in the art of email communication. They employ it as a tool for unified multi/omnichannel experience.
From sign up to product announcements, campaigns, promos, order confirmation, tracking information, delivery notification, returns, retargeting, shopping cart recovery, etc; email plays a major role in marketing.
Automating these processes will save you a great deal of time and hassle plus improve the efficiency of your operations while minimizing human error at the same time.
What’s more, statistics show that 72% of businesses rely on email for their day to day communication. As a dropshipper there are free business email tools and applications like MailChimp, Aweber, etc that you can take advantage of to simplify and structure your business communications processes.
Following are some key email marketing statistics to note:
- On average 320% more revenue is attributed to Welcome emails on a per email basis than other promotional emails
- Consumers who purchase products via email spend 138% more than those who don’t receive email offers,
- Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share content on social media than leads from other channels,
- 80% of retail professionals report that email marketing is their greatest driver of customer retention ahead of social media at 44%
Source: WordStream
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the way to go but deciding which lane to go has left many entrepreneurs at crossroads. Today you can start with mobile and email and see how they’ll impact your marketing efforts.
