Do you want to be able to attract people to your online store and generate some sales? If so, you're going to want to tune into today's videos. We're going to cover some free marketing techniques that you can use for your print-on-demand store.
Last video, we officially launched your print-on-demand store. Now it's time to start attracting people to the store so you can start generating sales. We're going to go through some strategies of free marketing techniques and I'm also going to unveil to you the number one asset in your business, in your print on demand store that you need to be utilizing as a free marketing technique. So let's jump into the content and start driving people to your online store.
Now before we dive into the content of the video, I'm going to utilize one of my free marketing techniques and ask that you've been liking this series and you like the content on this channel that you would kindly click that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on so you don't miss any uploads. You're on Wix Training Academy. You'll plug into a community at 31,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs. Why not? Well, because it's just awesome. You get to join Wix Nation who doesn't want to join Wix Nation and be part of this amazing community. So go ahead and click that subscribe button and let's jump into the content.
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E-Commerce Marketing Techniques
So we are live with Marketing101, free marketing techniques that you can use to increase the traffic to your print-on-demand store, our Wix and Printful and just a friendly reminder that this series is gladly sponsored by Printful.
We've got one main objective in today's video and that is provide you free marketing strategies to increase traffic to your print-on-demand store. We're going to do this in a twofold approach like normal, which is discussing the free techniques and different marketing techniques available to you to use. And then I'm going to go through and unveil the number one asset in your business that will need to be used by you if it hasn't already crossed your mind.
Referral Marketing
So to start, let's discuss referral marketing as one of our first free marketing techniques. Referral marketing is extremely powerful. In fact, I would say one of the most powerful forms of marketing there is if you cultivate it correctly.
So what can we do to start referral marketing and increase referral marketing? Well, let’s first define referral marketing. Referral marketing is when someone purchases your product or service and they love it so much and they start to tell their friends, their family and their colleagues about your product or service and then those people purchase and they start to tell their friends, their family, and their colleagues about your product or service. And then you just create an endless web of people telling other people about your product or service.
That's ultimately what referral marketing is at its basic form. By nature, humans are social creatures; we like to talk to other humans, we like to tell other humans about our experiences, so we need to find a way to cultivate that experience within your business.
One of the best parts of referral marketing is it boosts trust within your product or your service because 92% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know according to Nielsen. So what that means is if someone purchases your product or service and they tell their family member, 92% out of a hundred that family member is going to trust that recommendation and likely come purchase that product or service when they need it at the time. So it helps boost trust in your service, your company, your product. What you need to do in order to boost referral marketing is you need to offer some referral incentives. The best way I know to do this is to offer, in the case of a print-on-demand store, maybe some special discounts, some coupons, some free goodies to your refers.
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So the people that go out there and refer people back to your online store say, “Hey, you know what? If you refer your friend, I'll give you 5% and I'll give your fan 5% discount on purchasing within our store.”, “I'll offer you a buy one get one free or buy one get one half off coupon for going out there and referring.”, or “If you refer 10 people to our online store, I'll give you a free product of your choice.” You have to go through and you have to create a referral program that's going to make sense and reflect your print-on-demand store best.
A great example of this would be dollar shave club. Dollar Shave Club created a viral ad campaign video a few years back when they were first launching and it was the CEO, he had kind of his own little monologue going saying, “Our blades are effin’ great!” and they had a whole ad campaign behind that whole concept. The video was just so funny, so unique that it just started to spread. At the end of 48 hours, Dollar Shave Club had acquired 12,000 new customers and at the end of one week, dollar shave club had acquired 25,000 new customers from a viral video they did.
People started sharing it with one another; it created a referral marketing approach to it because it was so viral. So people started registering for the service, and enjoying it and then sharing that video in their experience with service with their friends and their family. Those people started doing that, and obviously the web continues to go on. So referral marketing is an extremely powerful approach and you have to find ways to foster it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Second, search engine optimization. SEO, most of you that have been following this channel are very familiar with SEO. The best way I can explain it to you is your goal is to boost your ranking in Google. You're trying to boost your ranking to the top of the search engine in Google. In that way your website generates the most exposure when people are searching for products in your particular niche. If you're doing entrepreneurial t-shirts and someone types into Google entrepreneurial t-shirts or entrepreneurial apparel or entrepreneurial hats that your website pops up.
Now SEO really boils down to a consistent effort within Google, consistently posting content on your website, making sure that your pages are updated, that the content is up to date. You want to make sure that you have a value first mentality and what I mean by that is you’ve got to print-on-demand store. Your goal is to generate sales, but make sure your website is filled with valuable information.
Maybe even add a knowledge-based on your website for customer inquiries that they can just go to. In that way you can continue adding more and more content to it. So that way when people are searching for stuff in that related niche, you've just got loads of content on your website and it's all helpful information. So Google will index that, they'll recognize that people are going to your website for this information and that they're purchasing on your website and they'll continue to help you rank on a more technical standpoint.
What you want to do is you want to go to the Wix SEO assistant. What you would do is you simply go to your Wix dashboard, go to marketing tools and get found on Google and click that get found on Google tab and just follow Wix’s steps to maximize your SEO. It'll walk you through step by step and a checklist to make sure your SEO is as great as it can be through Wix.
So that way you can boost your rankings in that aspect on a technical standpoint as well. And you're going to want to go through that process to increase your SEO ranking, but really it boils down to a consistent effort of putting content out there on your website and making sure you go for a value first mentality rather than a sales first mentality. There's a fine balance to the two. But in terms of SEO value first is the way it has to be, because Google starts to rank based off of the amount of value you provide their visitors and Google has ways of tracking that. So you want to make sure you go value first.
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Social Media Marketing
So after we've hit referral marketing and SEO, we're going to talk about a very popular one, a trendy one at the moment, which is social media marketing and there is a lot to social media marketing. I can probably create my own series just on social media marketing alone, but we're going to do like a little crash course style on this particular set. And what it boils down to is your goals with social media marketing should be to create awareness and generate engagement.
You want to create brand awareness and get people to engage with that brand. Whether that's commenting on your pictures, going to your website, following you, getting involved with what your brand is doing and what your company is doing and the ways you do that is through consistent activity, consistently posting to all of your social media out outlets. A lot of people have different perspectives on the best way to go about this. Whether you should double down on one social media and go all in on that or whether you should have a consistent staggered social media strategy approach across each of the social platforms.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and my personal opinion is you should have a presence on all of the social media platforms. What you also need to be aware of is what your target market, what your niche is most active on, and that's really the one you should double down on and spend more of your effort and time, but you need to make sure you have a consistent social media presence on all platforms so that way you're not limiting your exposure. People can find you no matter what platform they're on and it'll just help you continue to build that brand awareness and generate engagement on each platform.
Just like SEO, you need to focus on value and entertainment rather than sales on social media. Yes, sales are component of it, but that should not be the main focus. If all you do on your social media is try to sell, it's not going to be an appealing approach to generate new people coming in. All they're going to see through all of your posts is another sale, buy this, and buy that. That's no fun, no one wants to follow your social media if that's all you're going to do.
They want to learn more about your products. How are your products made? What is your brand story? What's happening behind the scenes? Keeping people updated on social media, stories like Instagram stories, YouTube stories, Facebook stories, Snapchat stories by showing behind the scenes stuff or maybe like a new product you're about to unveil and showing that behind the scenes, giving a first look or showing how your product's made. Or maybe just like your behind the scenes, what's going on in the business, your brand story and posting this stuff out on social media.
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That's what people want to see. That's what's going to create that awareness and generate the engagement. By doing that you're going to get people to buy into your brand, buy into your story, which will then get them to go to your actual website on launch. When you're launching a new product or you've got products out there and purchase. That's what people buy into, they don't just buy into your product because likely whatever product you have, not in all scenarios but most times someone else also offers the same product, but it boils down to who has the better story, who sells it better, who's got the more engaging, interesting approach rather than just slamming it down your throat.
Sales wise, you're going to want to also focus on interacting with your community. No one likes someone on social media, especially businesses that post out there and then you've got all these comments and they're just completely unread. I mean, people are commenting on your stuff for a reason, they want you to engage with them. They want to interact with you, so give them what they want, interact. You don't know how big of an impact that will actually make on whether someone actually buys into your brand and purchases something from your website or not.
If they see that you're not active on social media and you're not interacting, what makes them think that you're going to be there for a customer support requests if something goes wrong with their product or that you're going to be there to help them through purchasing their product, nothing. It loses your trust and credibility if you're not interacting with your community, they don't want to see any dead interactions so make sure you're consistently answering comments, answering your direct messages, focusing on providing value whenever possible. These are all important approaches.
The other thing you don't want to get caught up on is don't focus solely on vanity metrics. What I mean by vanity metrics; likes followers, subscribers, those are all exciting numbers and it gives you actually something tangible to show growth, but just because you have those numbers doesn't mean that all of those people are actually engaging with your content. If you've got a million followers, but you've only got 500 likes on a Instagram picture or 20 comments on an Instagram picture, it goes to show that you don't really have an engaged following. You'd much rather have 5,000 followers and 3000 people commenting on every picture and like every picture, like every video, then have a million followers and 20 people like in common.
There's a huge difference between that. Don't just solely focus on vanity metrics, focus on engagement, generate that engagement, do it competitive social analysis, research other companies within your niche on their social media and see what they're doing. See what's working, see what's generating engagement for them or where they're lacking and where you can make up for that lack in your social presence. Do a social analysis.
I also put video first, strategy video is by far now the leading interactive form of content. It's what people really buy into, they watch video. People are consuming video at an all-time high, so if you can find ways to incorporate video into your social media and your social presence, doing brand stories doing interviews within people in the company, showing a video of how your products are made. These are all things that are really engaging and get people interested in your brand and what you're doing. So find a way to incorporate video.
And then lastly utilize shout outs and special interest groups. On Facebook they've got groups, right? So if you're in an entrepreneurial apparel company try to get involved in different entrepreneur groups in different apparel groups and make connections and build relationships in those groups. So that way you know, when you do have the opportunity to maybe shout out one of your products or services, you can do it in a way that's very non-intrusive because you've built relationships within those groups.
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Also, if you've got people that like your stuff and like your brand, ask them if they can give you a shout out on their social media. Just like take a picture with their product that they just received from you and say, hey, just got a new product from entrepreneur co or whatever your company name is and whatever the products are. Shout outs go a really long way and you never know. Sometimes if you've got big influencers, and we're going to talk about influencer marketing in one of our last two segments and marketing techniques next week, but if you get big influencers that shout you out, that can be a game changer to who comes in and buys products or services from you. So that's really something to take into consideration.
Co-Marketing Strategy
So you've got social media marketing and we've also got co-marketing. Co-marketing is when two companies get together and they've got a strategic co-marketing partnership. So what you want to be careful of is this can be a really powerful approach, but you want to be very strategic about making your partner choices. Don't partner with a business that's not going to be mutually beneficial that the two kind of what your product is and what their services don't really align. You don't want to go through that partnership approach.
You want to find complimentary products or services so that way you can find two businesses, your business in someone else's that can do a whole co-marketing campaign together and it makes a lot of sense. Kind of like peanut butter and jelly rather than peanut butter and tuna fish, weird food example? Yeah, I get it, but that's kind of what I mean here. You want to be careful about choosing your partnerships for co-marketing strategically and the good benefit of this is that there's a little bit less work on you to do a whole campaign and you'll get more of a reward for it. Why? Because you'll generate interest from a new audience, from some other businesses, audience and their customers and you have to make sure you get clear on your goals, your content and your strengths.
When you partner up with this other company, the last thing you want to do is partner up with another company. Say you're going to do a co-marketing campaign and you have no goal set, you have no content plan and you have no idea what their strengths are and what your strengths are. So you can focus on doing your strengths in the marketing campaign and they can focus on their strengths in the marketing campaign. That's what's going to lead to a successful co-marketing campaign strategy and you don't want to skip this aspect either, right?
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In agreement, have something in writing as far as you know, this is what the co-marketing partnership looks like. This is who's doing what, this is who earns this percentage and this percentage or who earns this and who earned that from this co marketing strategy. This company is going to share all of this content with their full community and their full list. You know, I'm going to be sharing this with my full company or my full community and my full list. These are things you need to have written down and signed. In that way there's no confusion, no legal trouble at all.
As I just mentioned that with a co-marketing strategy approach that you're promoting within both companies, communities, that's the whole point. So you're going to get some cross community engagement in that way you know your community might be interested in this company's products. Again, you don't want it to be the same product as yours. That doesn't really hit the approach well. You want it to be complementary products.
So for example, I know what East Coast Lifestyle apparel did a kind of like a brand co-marketing experience with a brewing company and they created apparel for the brewing company. It was an East Coast Brewing company. So it was like a very mutually beneficial co-marketing approach. Those were complimentary products of one another. And then the East Coast lifestyle people went and tried out the beers, the craft beers from the brewing company and then the craft beers customers, the brewing companies, customers started buying some East Coast Lifestyle apparel. And so these are examples of strategic co-marketing relationships. So co-marketing can be extremely powerful as well.
So guys, we've just touched on quite a few different marketing techniques and now I would like to unveil to you the number one asset in your business. Your email list. Yes, I'm serious. Your email list is the most important asset, the number one asset in your business. Why? Well, for starters, according to Life Marketing, the median email marketing ROI return on investment is 122%. That means for every dollar you spend you're getting 122% return on that dollar. If you're effectively utilizing email marketing, what should be your goal with your email list and email marketing? It should be consistent communication. You don't want to bug your list and be annoying right to the point where people are unsubscribing, but you do want to be consistent enough that you're relevant, that people are looking forward to receiving your emails. Your goal with email marketing is to build relationships. You want to build a relationship with your list.
For example, all of you that are on my email list, in my community, I usually send out a weekly email. My goal is to build a relationship with you. That's what I'm looking to do. I'm trying to build a relationship with you, because otherwise what's so different about my email is compared to any other email list regarding Wix content, nothing. It's not necessarily the content that you're there for. It's the relationship with the person that's delivering the content. That's why people are subscribing to your email list. In order to get people to subscribe and even get on your email list, you want to offer an irresistible opt in, and what I mean by an opt in is kind of a trade off in exchange for you signing up to my email list, I'm going to offer you a 15% off coupon for your first purchase on our print-on-demand store.
That's an example of an irresistible opt in. If someone likes your products and they see that if they registered their email and get on your list, they're going to get 15% off their first purchase. Why wouldn't they do that? Right? That's free, 15% off on their purchase. That's creating an irresistible opt in and in exchange for that, you're receiving an email, so now you have the opportunity to build your relationship through consistent communication with that person on the email list, just like social media, just like SEO, your goal should be focused on providing value and fun updates before sales.
There's a fine line between sales emails and providing value. Both have their place in time and both need to be utilized, but it should be a higher percentage of value filled emails and update videos like our update emails for example, like sharing your brand story or sending an email about how your products are made or maybe giving someone an update of like, “Hey listen, Christmas is coming. We're thinking about offering these new products now.” Stuff like that. And then every few emails you also want to go in for a sale. You can't be afraid to send an email about a sale either because doing a 100% of value and fun update emails is good because it builds that relationship.
But then it never actually gives anybody a call to action to go purchase by nature. Humans need to hear what they need to do. You need to tell them like, “Hey, listen we just launched this new product. Go check it out, go purchase it, or maybe 15% off, go check it out.” And you have the ability to send sales emails too. So there's a fine line between value filled emails and sales emails. Both of them need to happen. Both of them have their own place in time. The other thing you have the ability to do is you can run specials to your email list, you know, special discounts, holiday specials you know, new limited releases. You have the ability to do this with your email list.
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Lastly, within your email list, you want to encourage people to share your content and refer other people. Give people easy outlets to make those things happen. But your email list is by far your most powerful asset in your business and it's going to be the biggest and most helpful free marketing technique that I can possibly give you. So make sure you utilize it to the max. Other than that, that completes our free marketing techniques
Conclusion
Here's our series schedule, we have two more videos left in this series and then it's done on January 30th and you will officially be equipped with a launch print-on-demand store and three value filled lessons on marketing techniques.
Next video, we're going to discuss more marketing techniques except we're going to take a different approach on it and we're going to focus on some paid marketing techniques as well. And then our last one, we're going to focus on upselling and optimizing. As far as marketing techniques go. I hope you enjoyed today's video. You are now equipped with some free marketing techniques to go out there and start generating traffic for your print-on-demand store.
If you enjoyed this video, please drop a like thumbs up, down below comment. Let me know which technique you're going to use and what you believed was most helpful and don't forget to hit that subscribe button, the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on. Instantly plug into 31,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs and it's much appreciated and we're ready to have you in Wix nation.
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Other than that, make sure you tune in next week for our final two videos in this series. One is paid marketing and one is upselling, optimizing, so you can make sure that your online store is absolutely set for success and you are ready to go out for the races. Thank you very much. Catch you next week.