Kay Auster | eCommerce Marketing

"If you can’t measure performance -
you can’t manage performance"
Peter Drucker

Target Group
Analysis

You need to be where your potential clients are and you need to know what exactly they are looking for. It is all about your target group. There is the focus, there are the people that are going to buy your products/services. The more we know about them the better. From there we create and develop the ideal Buyer Persona. The generated data allows you to get rid of useless content and focus on what you potential clients want, need or demand. The generated data allows you to create the very important process of Content Evaluation and providing the Content you really need.

Buyer Persona Development

The more defined, the better. Knowing your targets is crucial for any business. The more defined the better. The clearer the picture the easier to approach. The properly defined Buyer Persona provides the frame what you need to do and how you need to approach them. Your ideal customer is a fictitious person which your product/service is perfectly suited for. A marketing persona is then created based upon this ideal client. A persona represents a subset of your target market. You give them name, a profile, demographic info, job title, pain points, aspirations, the channels they use and phychographic details. Do you provide the right answers at the right Touch Points? Is the content that you provide what they are looking for? Do you go with any strategic approach or just hoping for the best?

Competitor
Analysis

You need to know what your competition is doing. The more - the better. Knowing your ideal customer is only the first step. You also need to know with whom you are competing. How much do you really know about your competitors? Most companies will monitor their competitors' business activities, some more than others. I can help you to enhance the competitor information that you have at hand. I help you to find out what you need to focus on to go ahead or how to close the gap(s) levelling up. We can create performing strategies out of these data sets and develope the appropriate measure for your business.

Funnel Installation & Optimization

You need to guide your visitors to the right points. Visitors on a website normally get guided to a certain point throughout different funnel stages. There are lots of marketing- and content funnels out there and Online Businesses not understanding the general Funnel structure normally can hardly generate relevant traffic, leads or sales. The idea behind all of this is almost the same: Attracting people, engage people, make them convert and make them your client by letting them purchase whatever you offer. What many online businesses forget: it needs different Content for each stage. The funnel stages: 1 AWARENESS 2 ENGAGEMENT 3 EVALUATION 4 PURCHASE

A few things you might want to consider promoting an eCommerce project:

SEO

Good SEO provides the relevant data to create strategies and tactics for your marketing and your strategic content. Dedicated content people in charge should understand almost all aspects of SEO. Especially using the right SEO tools and understand the generated data. Good (!) SEO is definitely important. For your rankings, your organic traffic as well as for understanding what your competition is doing and to create the right content your target group is looking for. Long tail keywords, semantic, keyword competition, search intention, volume or your linkbuilding strategy are deciding factors where SEO provides the right and important data. I would always suggest to not 100% focus on Ads - every organic visitor you bring to your webshop saves you money for other - non-organic marketing activities.

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness might not directly sell online but it is another factor to take care of. Let's consider you are looking for new specialized people to hire in certain areas? Need a special developer for a bigger new project quickly? During the hiring process the Brand awareness is always a factor of how attractive you might be as a potential employee. Especially when looking for rare talents in a special market or niche. Beside the HR context there are several other topics where Brand awareness is important and relevant. In general - do not forget: Google loves Brands.

Daily Traffic/Visitors

Just generating more traffic doesn´t help. You need the right traffic. Targeted. As long as you provide the right Content with the right answers to the questions of your target group in the right channels and in the right way - your targeted traffic will increase. Only if the rest of your online business setup has a proper strategic approach and is really optimised to create Leads out of your targeted traffic you will achieve relevant results. Otherwise you only create more not converting visitors. The traffic needs to be directed through the right channels and touch points. For that it needs a data based strategy how which visitors at which touch points will receive which content. Targeted Traffic is the result of providing the right answers to the visitors needs, demands and pain points at the right time, at the right touch point. Also you always need to determine whether your generated traffic contain way too many "clickers" & "look arounds" which usually come through many social media ads - they ruin your data. It´s not helpful to generate that traffic - because most of these above mentioned visitors are never gonna buy anything. They just click around, look at each category, put stuff on their wishlist, compare, put stuff in the cart etc etc - but they have no intention to buy anything. Those visitors mainly just ruin almost all your data sets - from conversion rate to ROAS and your customer acquisition costs. So always keep an eye on those "clickers"- and "lookaround"-visitors. In the end you might also need a proper re-targeting strategy to keep track.

Landing Pages

Optimised Landing Pages are crucial and deciding factors especially if it comes to non organic traffic such as paid Ads (Google, Facebook etc). With bad Landing Pages behind it those Ads are nothing but a waste of time and money. There are a few rules how a performing Landing Page should look like and the Content elements that need to be integrated. The variations are coming by the kind of product or service you offer. Landing Page optimisation is a constant process by using different versions to find out what is performing (converting) and what not. A/B testing is crucial to optimize your Landing Pages helping you to achieve your goal of getting leads and sales.

Conversion

Conversion is nothing but providing the right answers at the right touch points to your visitors. Also Conversion is based on how you structure your content and where you provide what to your visitors. Do you deliver answers to the visitors pain points and provide what they are looking for? Lots of companies just struggle with their Landing Pages, proper A/B-testing, their paid Ads and the general conversion optimisation processes. Sometimes it is also more than obvious that the whole setup is simply not made for any optimised conversion. You can start optimizing your Conversion as soon as you determined and tackled the most relevant Conversion blockers in your setup.

Ads / PPC/ Paid Media Search & Social

Ads are non organic - so it needs a solid data based approach and detailed research. Ads in any form such as PPC campaigns in search engines or social media channels do not generate organic taffic. That seperates the PPC approach a bit from the general content approach. Unfortunately, for so many online businesses their Ads approach is nothing but a waste of time and money. From channel management, campaign creation, data analysis for the campaigns up to performance evaluation - most of the times the results are not satisfying. It needs a keen eye on ROAS & POAS to determine whether your campaign is working or not. Most of the time the ROAS is way too low - especially in the first six months. In example does a ROAS of 4 (as industry standard) always sounds good first sight and is easy to gain - but in reality a ROAS 4 usually makes you no relevant money if you do not have over 50% margin in your calculation. Otherwise your POAS will clearly show that there is hardly any money left in the pocket. So increasing the ROAS/POAS mid term should always be the real goal when you work with any Ad setup.

Leads: generate, capture & nurture

Often I've heard: "We cannot generate enough Leads, because we do not have enough traffic." Total wrong logic approach. Lead Management is one of the biggest issues in todays online businesses. The right Content enables you to generate Leads. Segmentation allows you to talk to them. MQL & SQL Leads need different Content approaches at different stages. No optimized automations can lead to wrong approaches. Cold Leads are no Leads at all because they are not data based. Online performance is pending on what Content you provide to your Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and to your Sales Qualified Leads (SQL). No segmentation - no performance.

E-Mail Marketing
automation

Very often the installed automation leads to spamming the visitor. Automating some things is a good approach. But it definitely needs a solid setup. The main reason for that is that the involved department is not aware of the technical processes behind it or no proper lead segmentation is involved in the background. There are different leads and they need different attention within the funnel. To define with different flows who gets what when from you - fully automated can be challenging. Bad lead segmentation if you are dealing with 3rd party providers like klaviyo, MailChimp, Omnisend or similar is one of the main reasons for a failed automation process. One of the main flows that should be created in an automized email setup is an "ABANDONDED CART MAILER". Also a creative form of a "POST PURCHASE MAILER" setup can be pretty helpful. Even if challenging, try to create all your mailers as personalized as possible.

Social Media Strategy & Management

Wondering which social networks are right for your business? The golden rule to win business via social media is to be where your potential customers are. The aim is to grow the presence online through gaining more followers via social media, then engaging and nurturing those followers to become fans or customers. It can be used for business as well as brand awareness. But in Social Media it needs a clear plan and strategy to prevent that irrelevant Content is only created for the sake of creating Content. Use Social Media channels doing best for your business. Pending on the industry you are in it can be a very frustrating process as well because creating a relevant audience in any social media setup as an ecommerce project takes time and needs patience. Just try to simply generate 1000 followers 100% organic (not the bought artificial followers) within 3 months on any relevant social media platform as a new eCommerce project - it is pretty obvious that this is always a challenge. Whether you consider those followers as potential customers buying anything or more like an audience and consider it more as brand awareness doesn´t really matter - if you gained 1000 followers 100% organic as a new eCommerce brand you achieved already something good but don´t forget: they follow you on a social media platform - they are not visitors - so it also needs a different strategy and tactic to turn those followers into visitors as well.

(UI/UX)-User Interface & User Experience

User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design have a huge impact on your performance. Is the experience for the user on your website smooth and intuitive or clunky and confusing? In short: a UX design decides how the user interface works while the UI design decides how the user interface looks. Both together have definitely an influence on your conversion. That's what makes UI/UX always a huge factor and gives it a certain importance within an online business performance. In eCommerce one of the best samples how important this is is when you start scaling. A lot of conversion issues get instantly solved by simply going through your actual checkout process in each and every aspect - many small adaptions in there can directly lead to a better performance. Sometimes it just might be a tiny little thing - but if you change 4 tiny little things it can lead to an improvement.

Influencer Marketing

Influencer can bring any eCommerce in front of an audience. The key is who is following them. If you sell home decor and the followers of this influencer are mainly under 20 years old you will hardly sell anything becasue most of them simply still live at home. So it needs a proper data set of who is following the influencer first. Videos of unpacking your goods is always good content - but it needs some proper evaluation first, what you can expect from it. A lot of promoters say it is always a good idea to start Influencer marketing with influencers that just started recently - well, I am not really convinced by that - what to expect from anyone who has 300 followers? Is that any kind of influencer at all?

Affiliate Marketing

As everywhere - using this marketig form cuts a good chunk of your margin. If you want to create reach and a lot of generated visitors to your shop you have to pay for it. To start it you can begin with a smaller budget and see how it performs. The bigger problem is to get the right partners when you are not already generating proper revenue - because affiliate marketers are not really interested in new shops, without relevant visitors and revenue. So you might need to spend either money or time to find partners that will work with you if you have no relevant revenue. Also if you sell products that are sold by many others as well, most relevant affiliates already have those in their portfolio and mainly won´t canibalize their own partners by just adding more new shops in the same niche or with almost the same products. It sounds pretty good having a team market for you but it sounds way easier than it is in reality

Blog- & Guest Posts

Generating content in your own environment is the easiest thing to do. Finding topics related to your products/niche is as well. Creating blog posts is the easiest way to get certain rankings in Google. To gain a bit more domain authority - which is a very important criteria if you want to rank in Google - you should consider to generate a few Guest posts. Sometimes you can get those even for free, offering a discount code or create a little contest for the readers of the site you plan to post on. But you need to search for those sites that already have any relevancy for the keywords you are interested in.

Market Places

Can be very challenging in a smaller setup because you always lose a chunk of your margin in a bigger market place environment. Also sometimes you have to spend a lot of time to set it up, fight certain technical issues on these platforms and getting disappointed when they deliver beyond any expectations. Going on market places - especially the bigger ones is not THE ultimate solution - if you are a dropshipper, fulfilling the amazon Prime requirements is almost impossible. German market place kaufland.de also challenges you with their AI based product and collection integration or merging total different products into their filtering. Many people left this market place for this reason - so if you spent ages to set it up and get no results it is a waste of time & money. So a market place is not for everybody. If you are in a highly competitive niche with low margins you generate revenue but the market place fees will really cut your money off. Keep that in mind when you plan to go this route. It will influence your whole calculations and data sets. If you sell for 100€ by more or less on a given price range (google shopping eg) and you have a 40% margin but paying 14% market place fee means it lowers your real margin dramatically. You just generate revenue but keep hardly any Euro in your pocket. And revenue NEVER pays the bills.

Linkbuilding

Google loves Linkbuilding - but.....to become relevant with that and gaining relevant and worthy links, you are going to spend a fortune today. A lot of marketers promote Linkbuilding and say that you can do that also for lower costs. But in reality, proper Linkbuilding is pretty expensive. It can turn into good results but it needs the bigger budget to do so. Probably Linkbuilding is the main reason, why most smaller shops can´t get through these big players on top of each Google ranking.

No matter if you´re routing for a more organic- or Ad-based approach - these above mentioned things -

let´s call them Digital Marketing Basics - will sooner or later come up. It will turn into a way more complex setup as soon as you combine different approaches for Strategy & Tactics to optimize and scale in eCommerce.

Strategy is asking for the "WHY" - Tactics are asking for the "HOW"

Way more important than constantly twisting and turning several Ad-approaches -
you might need to understand how to influence your relevant KPIs...

Webshops need to focus and work way more intense on certain KPIs and other data to create further growth strategies or tackling potential single issues data based one after another. So if you work in eCommerce you should definitely know what different KPIs mean and way more important - how to influence them which means improving the results. A few samples for eCommerce related metrics every marketer needs to understand and being able to offer solutions, ideas, strategies and tactics for

CLV = Customer Lifetime Value

CAC = Customer Acquisition Cost

SCR = Sales Conversion Rate

ROAS/POAS= Return-/Profit On Ad Spend

ACV = Average Cart Value

ACR = Abandoned Cart Rate

VPD = Visitors Per Day

AOV = Average Order Value

12 thoughts:

Revenue never pays the bills
Never focus and rely 100% on Ads
Focus on your margin(s)
Focus on one country as a market first
Unless you have big pockets do not focus on brand
If your ROAS is too low you do not earn relevant money
Running out of money & having no organic strategy = game over
Make all your decisions data based
Gaining relevant converting traffic today is the hardest part
More visitors doesn´ t mean more or even same conversion rates
Be aware of delayed payout times on market places
Cancel often returned/broken products - immediately

12 questions you should always ask when running a webshop:

IS MY CHECKOUT PROCESS SMOOTH?

DO I HAVE THE RIGHT MARGIN(S)?

WHY TO FOCUS MORE ON ORGANIC GROWTH?

DO I USE THE RIGHT ADS?

DO I CREATE ANY STRATEGIC CONTENT?

IS MY PRODUCT QUALITY OK?

CAN THE SHOP PAY THE MARKETING BUDGET?

DO I NEED PROPER LINKBUILDING?

HOW TO INSTALL A UPSELL STRATEGY?

HOW DO I GET MORE DAILY TRAFFIC?

HOW TO INCREASE MY CONVERSION RATES?

WHAT IF I DON´ T GENERATE ENOUGH SALES?

The main problem in eCommerce projects is the complexity when you try to scale it

I consider any eCommerce project more like an organism. Everything is connected. So it needs an holistic approach. Means, you can't really disconnect your content from your marketing and vice versa. An holistic approach for eCommerce projects contains the individual direct shop related things, all digital marketing activities and all its content related things because they simply belong together.

ad-spend influences the amount of your daily visitors
prices and upsell strategy influence your average cart
payment options influences the customer trust
checkout process influences your conversion rate
return rate influences your POAS
Good email-flows with bad content are useless
Customer Service without "people-first" approach won't work
etc etc

And Content influences the overall Performance as well - theoretically and practically - big time.

all Ad-texts...Social Media posts...product descriptions and category texts...every reply from your Customer Service...all E-Mails being sent out...etc etc...are simply nothing but Content...

Means optimizing and scaling any eCommerce project can only be done with any kind of a holistic mindset.

Let´s talk

eCommerce, Digital Marketing & Performance

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Strategic Content

An overview of how I can help & support to get your Content, organized, structured, planned and managed.

Kay Auster | austermedia®

"If you can’t measure performance - you can’t manage performance" Peter Drucker

Target Group Analysis