Marketing A Small Retail / E-Commerce Business
This post is mostly intended as a checklist for my own reference, but I thought "Hey, if I'm doing this for me, it might help someone else !"
In the real non-Hive world, I own an e-commerce micro-business. I'm not going to say it's name, because it's a niche business solely focused on the UK market so not relevant to most Hivers, plus also if I give the name I'd be totally blowing away my own anonymity and doxxing myself 😂
So this list is all the ways I can think of to market a small business selling physical goods to a specific geographical area. I don't do all of them, but the idea with this list is to be able to go on and work out an order of priority based on which are likely to be most effective for the budget and time available.
Image by Mediamodifier from Pixabay
I've broken the methods down roughly based on which generation of marketing they're from;
Old School
- Have a bricks & mortar shop (or warehouse with collection point / trade counter)
- Have a stand at relevant events and shows
- Sponsor product-related events (event sponsorship, competition prizes etc)
- Word of mouth
- Leaflets enclosed with orders
- Leaflets delivered locally
- Networking events
- Print advertising (specialist magazine ads/advertorials)
- Loyalty cards / programs
Web2
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Email newsletters
- Abandoned cart emails
- Affiliate marketing
- Google Adwords
- Google Shopping Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Facebook posting / linking
- Bing Ads
- YouTube videos (own or sponsor other creators)
- TikTok
Web3
- Educational / informational posts on Hive etc
- Videos on 3Speak, Odysee etc
- ListNerds
- Hivelist
- Buying keywords on Presearch
- Brave Ads (expensive !)
I'm sure there are a bunch I've missed ! I'd love feedback on what I've forgotten, especially for Web3 marketing ideas - I appreciate it's a relatively new area that's still developing, so there are bound to be projects relevant to small businesses that I haven't heard of.
If you're interested in seeing posts where I drill down into some of these in more detail, let me know that as well 😀
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I'm especially interested in a drill-down on Hivelist as this is the first time I've heard of it (thank you!). As for other stuff…
Customer Support
I think customer support is an integral part of marketing. Though not everyone agrees. In any case…
Old School
Web2
Where I believe the ultimate online customer support is provided by giffgaff, the UK mobile network (run by you). Long story short - they pay customers to support other customers.
Web3
I didn't mean it's run by alonicus! "run by you" is something like the giffgaff slogan.
Thanks for the reply !
You're right about customer service, I guess it's something that is so integral (and essential) to what I do that I tend to forget it's also a marketing tool. I just think of it as something I do, because small businesses do customer service and large ones tend not to !
GiffGaff is something I hadn't come across before. I can see it working really well for some businesses, is it still effective for businesses in a niche where queries need accurate technical answers ? I look forward to seeing your Hive version - maybe co-ordinate with Reverio (which is like a Hive Quora) to feed Q&A back and forth.
Letter writing and phone calls are a good one. I tend to think of them as maintenance for existing customers rather than a way to get new business, because I'm a great believer in getting informed consent before contacting people.
When it comes to promotion, it is worth taking an interest in Google Shopping Ads. If anyone is looking for an interesting post, I recommend this one on this topic: https://gamerseo.com/blog/how-to-optimize-google-shopping-ads-4-key-strategies/