Ecommerce Marketing - The Complete Roadmap

Marketing an ecommerce business is incredibly complex. There’s hundreds of different approaches you can take.

Today, we’re providing you with a proven blueprint that you can apply to your own ecommerce business when you’re ramping up your marketing efforts from our friends at Bootstrapping Ecommerce.

Enter Shabbir, Founder of Bootstrapping Ecommerce: 

Market research makes or breaks a business.That’s why it’s the first point on this infographic – it’s the most crucial.

The key to any successful business, online or offline, is research. Just like you wouldn’t open a brick and mortar store anywhere, you shouldn’t use up your precious resources to sell any product on the internet – whether it is through your own store or using a third-party platform like Amazon or eBay.

Researching a product to see if it is viable to sell or not boils down to four crucial things:

1. Demand: are there enough people looking to buy the product online?
2. Availability: can you source the product to deliver it to your customers?
3. Profitability: is there enough margin to make it worth your while?
4. Competition: can you survive amidst everyone else selling the same stuff?

Demand

Demand is tricky to quantify at times, but a good measure of how many people are looking for your product or not is to see how many people are searching for it in Google. You can use other search engines as well, but since Google has the largest market share, they are usually the best measure.

Google has a few tools that you can use to judge demand: the Keyword Planner tooland Google Trends. The Keyword Planner lets you enter keywords(words and phrases) that people might use to search for your product and shows you how many searches it gets per month. You can filter by location down to major metropolitan areas.

Google Trends shows you what’s hot and what’s not – and you can enter keywords to see the overall trend for their demand over a long period of time – usually a few years.

Another way to check demand is to search for the product itself on Google and see how many people are selling it. If there are tons of merchants offering the product, it’s got to be in demand, right? If nobody is selling it, maybe it’s not such a hot item. Demand by competition should be taken with a grain of salt, so more on that when we get to it!

Availability

Now that you know that people are looking for a particular item, you have to see whether or not you can get your hands on it. If the product just isn’t available to you as a merchant to resell, what’s the point?

If you are making the product yourself, this won’t be much of a problem.

If you plan on drop-shipping, however, this is a make-it-or-break-it factor. To find manufacturers and distributors for your product, you could either do it the old fashioned way by searching for keywords like:

• “Product” + drop ship
• “Product” + distributor
• “Product” + distribution
• “Product” + wholesale

And other similar queries. Be prepared to sift through a few pages of results, though, since most distributors are terrible at online marketing (if they were good at it, they’d be resellers instead!). You can also look up distributors in directories such as World Wide Brands, which maintains a very large and updated database of drop-shippers and wholesalers. As of this writing, they are a $300 investment, but it’s well worth it, since it is a lifetime subscription.

When approaching a distributor, you will need to have a legal business – distributors usually won’t deal with individuals or consumers. The legalities for setting up a business are pretty simple in the United States.

Profitability

Measuring profitability is a little tricky, since most distributors don’t let you see their wholesale price until you register with them. This isn’t all too bad, since registering is free most of the time, but it’s still an annoying extra step that might take a few days to complete.

If you are drop-shipping, it’s safe to assume that your margins are going to be pretty tight – between 15-20% at the most.

To judge profitability, you can crunch some numbers to see how much you can make from a particular product line.

Let’s say your product’s average price is $100. If you have a 20% margin, that means you gross $20 on each sale, plus you charge another $7 for shipping. Your credit card processor will charge maybe 3% to process the payment, so that’s about $4 on a transaction of $107.

At this rate, for each sale, you stand to make $17. If you get 100 orders a month, you can make $1,700. If you get 1,000 orders a month, you can make $17,000.

And so on. Getting the orders is another ballgame, though – conventional wisdom goes that for every 100 visitors, you should average one sale. So for 100 sales, you need 10,000 visitors. Is there enough demand for your product for you to get 10,000 visitors? That is something you need to decide, using the data from the Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and social media, too.

Competition

The last piece of the puzzle is competition. How many people are selling the same product that you are selling? How established are they? How good are they?

Competitive research is a never ending process, but to get an idea of who you are up against, head on over to Google and search using a handful of keywords that are related to your product. Check out the people ranking on the first page for those keywords, and it’s also a good idea to check out a few of the people that are advertising for that keyword as well.

For the people ranking on the first page, see how good their site is: is there lots of content? Is it professionally designed? Are there lots of customer reviews? If there are, then you are up against something tough. If not, it’s something you can get into and succeed, provided you do the work.

For the people advertising, see how targeted their ads are: does clicking on the ad take you to a relevant page or is the page vague? What about the ad copy itself? Is it highly targeted to the keyword or is it general with the keyword stuffed in?

These are some ways that you can judge your competitors to see how feasible this particular product line is.

Once you’ve done research on all four factors, you can take an educated decisionon whether or not it’s something to pursue. Don’t get disheartened if you don’t find the right niche on the first go – it usually takes a lot of tries before you find the right one.