How to Market an

Ecommerce Store
on a Budget
Traffic is the key
● When it comes to marketing on a budget, first think of driving traffic.

● Refine your research and thinking, by separating traffic from sales.

● Once you think about things in terms of driving traffic, you can come up with dozens of
creative ideas as to how you can market your ecommerce store.

● If you’re running a PPC campaign, you have to think about sales right away, as each visitor
costs money.

● Though with low budget marketing strategies, you need to figure out how to get attention
first, and later worry about optimizing for sales.

● But don’t forget about the sales, you should definitely do the bare minimum to ensure your
ecommerce store is setup to convert, so that sales should begin to rack up once you drive
traffic.

Content marketing on a budget

● Budgeting means you’re going to spend a lot more time on your content marketing
campaigns.

❏ Begin by picking one format of content, and understand how to get the best results from
it, and then create a lot of high quality content around that one format.

❏ To make the best use of your time, therefore, it helps to do focus your efforts.

❏ Once you find comfort building a content from one of these formats blog posts, videos or
podcasts yourself. You then have to create content that is engaging for your target
audience.

● When you’re creating engaging content, take these two approaches:

❏ If you want long term content marketing success, create a catalog of evergreen, highly
useful content, that covers issues your target market cares about.

❏ In depth blog posts/videos/Podcasts are also an example of this, these types of contents
provide a lot of value in a single piece of content.

● If you want some short term content marketing success, then create some content that is
highly unique, engaging, and somewhat unusual.

❏ It’s hard to say how you can create ‘short term content’ but what you can do think about
how you can be unique and interesting enough, so that you can draw visitors attention.
 ● Another kind of content marketing you might also want to take a look at is ‘User Generated’
content.

❏ If you already have some fans of your product, reach out to them, and see if they’d be
willing to create a video that will show them, using and highlighting the benefits of your
product.

● When doing any form of content marketing, it is also important that you master promotion
too.

● Since, you’re on a budget and you can’t use PPC advertising. So, you can email people to
promote your content, who’ve shared content similar to yours, in the past.

Build a community first

● Another way you can market your store on a budget, is by placing a focus on building a
community around your brand.

● You can build community by promoting your content to Facebook group. Ask people to
engage with the Facebook group, with the help of content marketing.

● You can also host live webinars, or ‘Facebook Live’ videos, to provide some kind of value for
your audience.

● You can also provide value to the community by making it a place where people can get
quick answers to any questions that they might have.

Find the Influencers who share the same audience as you

● There are three kinds of Influencers you’ll want to get the attention of:

❏ Bloggers

❏ YouTubers

❏ Instagram Users.

● Finding bloggers is easy, just type in a keyword that relates to your niche, and then type in
‘blog’ next to it.

❏ In some cases, you can pull up a list of the top blogs in your niche, by typing in ‘top 50’
next to your keyword.

● Finding YouTube Influencers is also same.

❏ Just head over to ​YouTube​, and find people who are covering a topic related to your
ecommerce store.
 ❏ When it comes to finding YouTube Influencers, it helps to think in terms of audiences,
rather than niches.

❏ When searching for content on YouTube related to a certain niche, use the word ‘Vlog’
with the keyword, that relates to your niche.

❏ When you look for such content, look for YouTube channel that has a lot of engagement.
High engagement channels are going to provide better result, than the YouTube
channels with lots of views.

● Approximate the engagement levels for a YouTube video, by taking a look at its ‘Video
statistics.’

❏ You can find this information, by clicking on ‘More’ and then ‘Statistics.’

❏ If you find a video that’s driving a lot of subscriptions, shares, comments and ratings are
signs that engagement is high.

● To find Instagram Influencers, the process is a little more tricky.

❏ Trawl through a large list of Instagram accounts, by using this search string on Google:

inurl:Instagram.com “Your Keyword”

❏ If you want to make it easier to find accounts that are openly accepting of people
approaching them to do deals, add ‘enquiries’ to your search string.

inurl:Instagram.com “Your Keyword” + “enquiries”

● Then go through these accounts Google search result shows, and see if they’re a suitable
match, in terms of if they have the right kind of audience, and if the accounts are large
enough to produce results.

❏ Obtain the contact information of an Influencer, by using a tool like M

​ echanical Turk​.

❏ Make the process of finding Instagram Influencers more ‘foolproof,’ by using a platform
such as ​Whalar​.

● After you find influencers that have a good match, sponsor a show/blog/Instagram account
from an influencers.

● Different Influencers are going to have different rules. Respect these rules.

❏ If you’re sponsoring a YouTube show, let the Influencer do a small talk related you at the
start, and end of their show.

❏ For an Instagram account, just ask that they put a link in their bio, and occasionally post
pictures, announcing Sponsorship.
 ❏ Sweeten the deal for an Influencer, by providing a coupon code that they can give to
their audience.

❏ You can also arrange an affiliate deal with the host, so that they get money on the
backend, in relation to how many coupon codes were used– making it a better deal for
both parties.

❏ Provide the Influencer with a giveaway that their fan base can take advantage of.

❏ Increase the odds of ‘virality,’ by mention the person who shares the most, gets the most
entries into the giveaway. Use G ​ leam​ tool to do so.

❏ You can also email the Influencer and ask them to review your product, in a non-pushy
way.

● When you do this make sure you highlight why your product is a good match for their
audience.