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Marketing on a Shoestring Budget: Top Tips for SMBs

Tag: marketing

Marketing on a Shoestring Budget: Top Tips for SMBs
Mohab Growth Hacks 0

Marketing on a Shoestring Budget: Top Tips for SMBs

Marketing is vital for any business but is expensive at the same time. The costs associated with marketing campaigns can be especially prohibitive for small and medium scale businesses. However, with some innovation and creativity, you can market your business with minimal resources. Here are some of the top tips to help you make your business grow without breaking the bank.

Go Social: Social media changed the landscape of online marketing and any SMB would do itself a favor by incorporating it into its marketing plan. While generic social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may be useful in reaching broader clientele, you may also use specialized social and networking sites relevant to your target market segments. However, the use of social media for marketing is a double-edged sword and thus, needs to be handled in a professional manner. As an SMB, you should ensure that you are getting the right message across without overexposing yourself.

Harness the Power of Referrals: Grow your business with some help from your existing client base. Leverage your customer base by asking them for referrals. However, you will need to take the initiative and may also have to offer some sops to entice your customers to provide good referrals. Such word of mouth marketing generally entails low cost and high conversion rate, making it a highly efficient marketing tool. You can offer free trial to your clients in lieu of referrals or you may give them discounts on their purchase; just make sure that the incentive system offered by you meets the requirements of your target market. Keep your clients updated about your referral programs so that your referral program does not get stuck in a rut.

Network & Collaborate: As an SMB, you should focus on networking, both online and offline for promoting your business. But like any other marketing tool, you should ensure that you are not overdoing it. While you should be consistent in harnessing the power of your network, you should also be aware that you can drive people away by being too forceful. For this purpose, you may attend industry conferences and other such events to acquaint yourself with people in your segment. Networking is a long-term marketing tool and requires considerable time investment to yield proper results. Apart from networking, you may also decide to collaborate with other businesses engaged in your vertical. You can go for joint marketing of your products and services or may choose to engage in some industry specific contests.

Organize Giveaways and Contests: Conducting events and promotional schemes such as early bird discounts can help you in gaining initial customer base. Some of the tools you may use in this regard are organizing quizzes or other contests and then offering them goodies in the form of discounts or free merchandise. Such promotional measures will not only help you strengthen your hold over your existing client base but will also bring in new customers. While using promotional events as a marketing tool, you should ensure that the incentives you offer to your customers contribute towards the demand factor. If your products or services ARE new in the market, then you may offer time-based trial versions as giveaways. This will allow the customers to try out the products before they fully commit to them.

Create a Niche: In today’s highly competitive world, it is absolutely vital for your business to create a niche for itself in the market. While you promote your products and services, make sure that you tell your story in such a way as to establish a unique brand proposition. Creating a strong brand ensures that you enjoy higher recall value and customer stickiness. A powerful brand also helps you in incurring lower costs for acquiring and maintaining customer base. One other strategy which may help you in creating a unique selling proposition or USP is to create targeted videos and other such content.

For an SMB, it is important to execute an efficient marketing plan.

5 years ago
Multichannel Selling: The Right Move Forward or Too Many Things at the Same Time?(Part 2)
Mohab Growth Hacks 0

Multichannel Selling: The Right Move Forward or Too Many Things at the Same Time?(Part 2)

The Trifecta of Trouble and Growth

The tumultuous nature of multichannel marketing is going to keep you on your toes to accomplish your core business functions. In e-commerce, that’s marketing to help people find you, actually capturing the sale, and then getting the product to customers on-time and in a way that they enjoy.

By needing to be available across each channel, you’re going to always have more work to do. Customers are everywhere, and there’s a feeling that you should be everywhere too. We’re going to touch on that briefly at the end, but let’s look at the big picture for what it takes to be everywhere.

Marketing

Studies vary, but somewhere between roughly 80% and 90% of your audience are going to do significant research into your product before they buy. They’re looking for you everywhere, whether that’s to see what influencer is wearing your shorts on Instagram to Amazon’s “Choice” and “Best Seller” designations, and what podcast you’re sponsoring this week.

Marketing also needs to think about mobiles because this technology accounts for 92% of e-commerce order growth. So, your ads and site and other efforts need to not only work on mobile, but they have to be +optimized for this low-impact space. Minimalism isn’t just a fancy trend for luxury offices and site designer websites; it’s also a focus for your team to make the most out of the limited screen size by prioritizing what’s important.

Today, you’ll be stretching that same old budget to meet new people on more channels and give them information to support research instead of just selling. Look for opportunities to grow your impact with content that works across multiple channels, partnerships with people who your audience turns to for education and keeping everything easy to scan to determine its value to the audience.

Sales

Here’s an area even more complicated. Sales is specific to every channel, and you’re going to have to do your own research to understand what and where you can sell. Amazon has a drastically separate set of rules and requirements (especially if you’re Prime) than most other channels, and you’re building an independent reputation on many of these sites.

The channels you “own” tend to be restricted to those where your products aren’t always next to others. So, that’s your website and social channels where you’re controlling the message and some of the discovery. These follow traditional e-commerce and online store rules, where you can build your sales funnel to move people through and capture the sale.

Online marketplaces have their own audiences (with different preferences), rules, and requirements for success. There are excellent guides on the different audience desires, but what is essential at the outset is that your profiles and product descriptions will need to be different for each. In general, eBay will be a little more free-from, while Amazon is much more SEO-minded.

How you interact with the customers during and after a sale are also tightly controlled. Even outside these marketplaces, sales is expanding into the realm of customer service. As some studies note, as many as 88% of online shoppers say they are less likely to buy from you if you’re not responding to complaints or service requests posted on social media. This customer service element extends into order fulfillment too.

Nearly every channel has its own way of handling the flow and interaction with customers. Each has its own journey and process, which means you’ll need some salespeople to put those things in place.

The nice bit is that a lot of this can be automated after the initial setup, so you’re not always trying to force a sale with a specific individual. However, the other side of the automation coin is that it’s got to be set up correctly or you push everyone down a path that’s not optimized to sell.

To read part 1 click here

*to be continued

Multichannel Selling: The Right Move Forward or Too Many Things at the Same Time?(Part 2)

About the author

Jake Rheude is the Director of Marketing for Red Stag Fulfillment, an ecommerce fulfillment warehouse that was born out of ecommerce. He has years of experience in ecommerce and business development. In his free time, Jake enjoys reading about business and sharing his own experience with others.

5 years ago
#Payshout Campaign: An opportunity to extend your reach to your target audience
Mohab Special Offers 0

#Payshout Campaign: An opportunity to extend your reach to your target audience

There is plenty of great content available on the web. But the most visible content is the one that has been promoted intensively on the right platforms at the right time. In today’s world, you must focus on promotions, branding, and marketing to deliver your content to the target audience. This ensures extended reach and higher conversions.

#Payshout is PayTabs’s promotion strategy that facilitates collaboration, focuses on relevant content, ensures maximum outreach, and increases the chances of conversions. Read on to know about the #Payshout campaign.

What is #Payshout?

#Payshout is a marketing campaign initiated by PayTabs, a payment solutions company. The idea is to collaborate with the merchants for a promotional campaign. This is an excellent way to showcase a website, a business, a brand, a product, service, or some particular information to the audience on social media platforms.

The #Payshout campaign is a win-win situation for both PayTabs and the merchants. The collaboration ensures that the social media post reaches to a wider spectrum of audience. The merchant can curate content, upload logo, and add additional information while applying for the #Payshout campaign.

How can you benefit from the #Payshout Campaign?

The generic ways of promoting content, business, and ideas still work but you need to put in extra efforts to grab the attention of the onlookers. As social media usage is on an exponential rise, this is the perfect opportunity to reach your audience. Participating in the #Payshout campaign has following benefits:

Collaboration: You have a certain number of followers on social media platforms. When you post content, your content is delivered to your followers and other social media users (based on your targeting approach). Now when you collaborate with PayTabs by participating in the #Payshout campaign, you can extend your reach to their audience as well. Similarly, PayTabs also gets an opportunity to promote their business.

Enhanced Reach: Using the right set of hashtags, keywords, and visuals, you can showcase customized content to a targeted audience, thereby increasing the chances of capturing potential leads. And since there are various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and others, participating in the campaign can be immensely beneficial for both the parties.

Opportunity to Connect: The #Payshout campaign is not just about connecting to customers. The promotional and branding strategy can be applied to capture the attention of other businesses as well. It is possible that these businesses are looking to collaborate with the brands – like yours – offering similar products and services.

How to Use the #Payshout opportunity?

If you are willing to collaborate with the PayTabs payment gateway provider, you can submit content along with some essential information. Follow the given instructions:

  • Create suitable content for the #Payshout campaign. The content can either be a promotional message, an informational message, a greeting, or any other information deemed fit for the social media audience. Along with the content, you can specify hashtags and social media profiles that you want to link.
  • You have to submit a visual depicting the nature of your business. It can either be your brand’s logo, product or service image, or any other type of visual related to your business.
  • When content and visuals are ready, you have to upload them on the PayTabs #Payshout page. Along with this, enter your business’s or website’s name and email address.
  • Before you submit the aforementioned information, you have to grant permission to PayTabs to promote your brand on social media platforms. Once you do so, submit the request for further evaluation by the concerned authorities.
  • Once it is approved, it will go live on social media platforms as a part of the #Payshout campaign.

The Bottom Line

Participating in the campaign can be a game-changing decision for your business. It gives you an opportunity to experiment with a unique way of promoting your brand and reach out to your target audience.

5 years ago
How to Set the Right Price for your Product or Service
Mohab Ecommerce 0

How to Set the Right Price for your Product or Service

Placing an appropriate price tag on a product or service is a sensitive task. To generate sufficient profit, you have to set the right price. At the same time, you cannot exaggerate it because this will keep buyers away from your store. The following set of recommendations will help you in optimizing the pricing strategy for your e-commerce business.

Cost Analysis

Right from manufacturing to the delivery of the product, everything is driven by money. There are various costs involved in a business, directly or indirectly associated with the product or service. The market price depends on the costs and expenses incurred. The profit is what you get after deducting costs from the market price.

The direct costs are associated with the manufacturing the product or conceptualizing a service. The overhead costs include fixed and variable costs like rent, salaries, administrative expenses, warehouse maintenance, advertising costs, payment gateway charges, and so on. After considering all these aspects, you can determine the right selling price.

Market Evaluation

You should be aware of the consumer behavior and industry trends to accomplish the task of market evaluation. Identify and segregate your customers on the basis of demographics, buying trends, and so on. Work on determining the amount of money they are willing to pay for your product or service. You can conduct surveys to gather complete information.

Competition Analysis

There is a rare chance that you don’t have competition in your niche, and therefore, you should be prepared to perform competition analysis. The procedure involves evaluating their business process, analyzing products or services, identifying their tie-ups, and understanding their pricing strategy. You have to offer a superior product or service, at a competitive price, to gain prominence in the market.

Value Proposition

The value proposition is an art, and if you can master this, you can reap maximum benefits. Finalizing a price depends on the value of your offering. If you are dealing in premium products or expert services, you cannot set a low price. You have to maintain a suitable price to maintain its value proposition.

In addition to these, you can also work on user experience. For example, you can install a payment gateway for smooth and swift online payments. Customers are sensitive, and they are willing to pay more if you enhance their shopping experience.

Marketing and Promotions

Understand buyer’s psychology to mark the correct price of your product or service. During marketing stints, utilize tactics that will attract the buyers. For example, when a buyer sees a “SALE” tag, he or she develops an urge to check out the product. Similarly, odd numbers in the price tag can rake in more sales. Instead of a boring 500, simply mark the price as 499. Although there is no significant change in the price, it will definitely attract more onlookers.

Paid promotions can add up to the overhead costs. Whether you opt for social media promotions, search engine promotions, influencer marketing, or affiliate marketing; prepare an estimate and consider it at the time of pricing.

Pricing Options

Some of the pricing methods that you can adopt include:

  • Penetration pricing – This is suitable when you plan to acquire a market share in the initial stage. Initially, you can offer a low price and increase it later when you have established your presence.
  • Pre-emptive pricing – You have numerous competitors in your niche. To disrupt their monopoly, you can offer similar products or services at lesser prices.
  • Premium decoy pricing – When you plan to boost sales of a particular product, simply increase the price of other products so that customer opts for the product with the lowest price.
  • Price Leadership – When you established your brand and customers vouch for your product or services, you can set up a convenient price, without worrying about market trends and competitors’ presence.

You can deploy any or all of the aforementioned suggestions to finalize the product or service price. Your ultimate aim should be to maximize revenue and minimize expenditure. You can also innovate and apply pricing strategies or experiment with different combinations of pricing methods to obtain best results.

6 years ago
7 Valuable Tips to Make E-commerce Payments Easier For Customers
Mohab Growth Hacks 0

7 Valuable Tips to Make E-commerce Payments Easier For Customers

It’s common knowledge that a better user experience on an e-commerce website leads to swift transactions, conversions, and sales. Yet, we have identified many e-commerce websites where making payment is not so easy and swift. Sometimes, a bug prevents users from quickly getting redirected to the payment page after they enter their payment information. This may frustrate even a genuine and loyal customer. If it happens more than once, the customer is not likely to come to your website again.

The checkout process is extremely critical, so e-commerce vendors should be extremely careful in this last and final stage of closing the sale. They should make sure that there is nothing that might prevent, distract or lead to bad user-experience on the checkout page.

If the entire customer experience is swift and smooth, a window shopper is likely to become your customer. However, if it is not the case, even a genuine customer may bounce off. Some vendors think that their responsibility is over once they slap a popular gateway on the payment page. If you do not have the full control on your entire checkout process, you are not likely to increase conversions and sales.

Let’s discuss a few ways to make the payment process easier for your customers.

  1. Creating an account should be optional

Several websites make it mandatory to create an account before a visitor lands on the eStore and decides to make a purchase. They do not allow users to purchase in guest mode. Largely because their marketing agencies tell them that it’s very important to retrieve the contact details of visitors. I agree, but there are several ways to collect this information and forcing them to create an account should not be mandatory.

According to Smashing magazine, there are many people who do not wish to set up an account with e-commerce sites, because of the fear of getting their inbox filled with spam and promotional emails. Another reason why people do not like to create an account is that while shopping at brick and mortar stores, nobody forces them to create an account before they make a purchase.

Sometimes it is the length of the form that distracts a customer. So make sure that your customer information form is as short as possible. Have you seen Facebook’s sign up form? It has just 4 entries in it.

  1. Consistency in web design

Maintain consistency across your website including your checkout page. It is not only good for branding but it will also prevent the skeptical people from leaving the website. People become skeptical after going through the horror stories of scams taking place all across the globe.

  1. Convince the customer about security and privacy

According to a study by eConsultancy, more than 60% of the participants abandoned the E-Commerce sites on the checkout page, primarily because they had some concerns about payment security. In order to assure such people, you should maintain a consistent design and shouldn’t redirect people to a third party website. Use secure socket layer certificate on your website and make sure that you comply with PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC). It enhances the customer confidence.

  1. Make it easy for people to correct the errors 

While filling up their personal and financial information on the payment page, users might mistype and enter incorrect details. Usually, the error message flashes on top of the page and users are not able to see that. Instead, if only the particular field is highlighted, it will make it easier for the user to fix it.

  1. Ask for the information that is essential

Make sure that you do not ask unnecessary details and keep it to the bare minimum. According to a report published by Forrester, more than 11% of adults in the United States abandon an e-commerce site, when they are faced with a long form to fill up.

  1. Do not redirect your customers

Psychologically, people love branding – it includes the site layout, design, look and feel. They might feel a little uncomfortable, when they are redirected to another website to just complete the funnel. They might think that it will take additional time to complete the procedure, even if it is a part of same funnel.

  1. Prevent distractions on the checkout page

When the customer is at the end and the most critical stage of buying cycle, there shouldn’t be any distractions as customers have very little attention span these days.  A little distraction can take them off to somewhere else and they might change their mind.

Final thoughts
So, if you are really serious about shopping cart abandonment, make it easier for people to pay. As a thumb rule, follow this: “I have to turn window shoppers into paying customers.”

6 years ago