Good Ecommerce Marketing: It’s All About Balance

In our experience, most businesses tend to either be too focused on the “big picture” or “stuck in the details”. Neither extreme is good for the health of your PPC account.

The simple fact of the matter is that good marketing is a balance of big and small. You want to get in front of specific, targeted audiences, but you also want to make sure that you’re building a brand name and exploring new audiences.

Not every potential customer is ready to buy today. Not every customer will need to hear about your brand before they make a purchase. Not all audiences will follow the same customer journey.

This is why it’s so important to be diverse in your marketing strategy. You can’t just pick one platform or channel and call it good. Even within a single platform, you need to target a variety of audiences in a variety of ways.

If you aren’t balancing all of these factors, don’t be surprised if your results aren’t what you’d like them to be.

A Case Study

For example, one of our clients came to us because they wanted to reduce their Facebook Ads acquisition cost. Their average order value was $29, but it was costing them $18-25 to land a new customer. As a result, they weren’t profitable until the third purchase.

Now, thanks to their business model, they got a lot of repeat purchases, so their advertising was actually working—just not very well.

Our goal was to get the client profitable on the first purchase. To do that, though, we knew we were going to have to balance a lot of different things.

The client had a large potential audience, but their products were fairly specific. To balance things, we decided to simultaneously test broad and general display campaigns along with highly targeted campaigns based on specific products.

With the broader campaigns, we would be able to build out the client’s funnel of prospective customers. At the same time, the specific product campaigns would allow us to deliver targeted messaging and ads that would turn those prospective customers into paying customers.

By combining these two approaches, we were able to drop their acquisition cost from $18-25 down to just $2-4. That increased the return on ad spend for the first purchase alone to 3.65x.

Taking the lifetime value of their customers into account, this combined strategy produced an incredible 21.2x return on ad spend.

As exciting as these results were, they weren’t rocket science—it was just good marketing. We balanced big and small and gave the client’s customers exactly what they needed to convert.

Conclusion

Good marketing isn’t about extremes. It’s about identifying your customers’ needs and meeting them. When you balance the big picture and the details, your marketing campaigns usually work out for the best.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to improve your ecommerce campaigns.

For eight other proven tactics we love to use with our clients, check out this eBook. Or, simply let us know you’d like some help here or in the comments and we’d be glad to show you all the hidden potential in your campaigns.