Online Marketing

[sammc123]

Hi, just looking for a little advice from you online business guru's out there regarding online marketing. I currently operate a small online business where I sell beard trim templates and a selection of beard oils etc. Now currently the business is only bringing in a few hundred per month which is great as an extra income but now I really want to ramp up the business. I have around £2k to spend on marketing the business and I am currently looking for the best way to invest this money for the best return. Do you guys have any ideas or thoughts on the best place to start? This is really my first "REAL" business that is actually making money, small amounts at that but money is money and I'm happy with its performance I just really see where this business could be in a few years time and I want to drive myself in that direction. Ideally I want to get the product into the retail market in the future and with this I am really struggling as I don't have a clue where to start in terms of approaching companies as a wholesaler but for now just getting more online sales and growing instead of staying at a consistent few hundred per month would be great!

[trowelhead]

sammc123 said:

Hi, just looking for a little advice from you online business guru's out there regarding online marketing. I currently operate a small online business where I sell beard trim templates and a selection of beard oils etc. Now currently the business is only bringing in a few hundred per month which is great as an extra income but now I really want to ramp up the business. I have around £2k to spend on marketing the business and I am currently looking for the best way to invest this money for the best return. Do you guys have any ideas or thoughts on the best place to start? This is really my first "REAL" business that is actually making money, small amounts at that but money is money and I'm happy with its performance I just really see where this business could be in a few years time and I want to drive myself in that direction. Ideally I want to get the product into the retail market in the future and with this I am really struggling as I don't have a clue where to start in terms of approaching companies as a wholesaler but for now just getting more online sales and growing instead of staying at a consistent few hundred per month would be great!

I would be spending it on facebook and instagram paid ads. But, be sure to buy and read a book or two on the subject first as there is alot to learn about structuring the ads properly. PM me if you need pointers.

Start small and try and make a positive roi on a small daily spend then go from there.

Also - make sure to read anything Eric Bandholz has written (he posts on reddit about how he grew his beard care brand into the millions per year in revenue)

https://www.reddit.com/user/bandholz

Edited by trowelhead on Monday 16th January 23:02

[Splats]

Got a link to your website or products? Facebook (paid) might be a good way to go here as you can target your audience well and, I assume, it's a relatively inexpensive product that blokes would be prone to impulse buying if it caught their attention/interest. At that sort of budget you'd have to create and run campaigns yourself but there's loads of tutorials online and it's not that hard. With some time and a few hundred pounds you can probably get a good feel for whether you can run a profitable campaign. The great thing is your audience is wide but can be fairly well defined meaning you can dip your toe in the water, play around and then scale it if you find a system that works.

[trowelhead]

Splats said:

Got a link to your website or products? Facebook (paid) might be a good way to go here as you can target your audience well and, I assume, it's a relatively inexpensive product that blokes would be prone to impulse buying if it caught their attention/interest. At that sort of budget you'd have to create and run campaigns yourself but there's loads of tutorials online and it's not that hard. With some time and a few hundred pounds you can probably get a good feel for whether you can run a profitable campaign. The great thing is your audience is wide but can be fairly well defined meaning you can dip your toe in the water, play around and then scale it if you find a system that works.

Quick tip, start by uploading your customer list to facebook as a custom audience then retarget those customers for repeat purchases. Then target your web visitors (using facebook remarketing pixel) then move onto interest group targeting (test, test, test - small ad groups with a few interest groups work best. You can target people who like competitor pages, or more beard related pages etc)

[Yipper]

Social media, direct email and YouTube are your friends. You can market online to thousands for free. No need for a 2k budget. But it does take time and effort and hunger. You could end up Tweeting, Facebooking, LinkedIning or Instaing 50 times a day if you get good at it.

[Oceanic]

So it looks like there is some demand for your products without any real marketing efforts on your part to date, which is really good news. Have you been collecting data on any of the customers you have had to date at all?

I'd not jump into any paid advertising until you have figured out exactly who your customers are, once you know who they, you should then do some research on where they tend to be online (Facebook/Instagram/Linikedin/Reddit or whatever).

Once you know who and where, you should run small well managed campaigns and improve and expand on them iteratively. Ensure you have all the tracking and conversion scripts in place before you start any of this.

I'd also be making sure you are collecting email addresses as much as you can.

As others have mentioned, it would be worth reading a few books or taking a course on the online advertising part, it is easy to piss ££$ up the wall very quickly with Facebook unless you know what you are doing.

SEO should be part of the mix and have a long-term goal.