No matter how good-looking your WooCommerce Store might be, attracting clients might still be demanding. With intense competition among numerous online outlets for almost every niche, it is essential to get the word out if you want your webstore to succeed.
Fortunately, you do not have to spend in excess to get more people to see your products. You can market your WooCommerce store on a budget via many channels, with the option of scaling up these same methods for better results when sales improve.
For instance, social media platforms like Instagram can be used to market your products, for absolutely free.
In this chapter, we will discuss and walk you through four simple ways of marketing your store without going above your budget.
1. Getting the Word Out through Social Media
Social Media has proven to be one of the best mediums through which a WooCommerce website can build an audience and market their products. Currently, more than two billion people now use at least one social media platform. Hence, tapping into just one of these popular platforms is capable of making you reachable to a massive audience of potential new customers.
On the platform of your choice, you have an option of paying for ads services, but we are interested in a more budget-friendly and automated marketing approaches. Below is a simple guide on how to promote your store using social media:
- Create accounts on all the platforms related to your store and its audience.
- Use a tool to ensure automatic sharing of your contents to social media, e.g., IFTTT.
- Employ popular hashtags associated with your niche, and keep the engagement high by replying to comments.
- To achieve maximum efficiency, it is smart to focus your efforts on the most prominent social media platforms, e.g., Facebook and Instagram.
2. Contact Influencers in Your Niche
You stand a better chance of getting more conversion activities with more followers on your account, hence, the need for influencers. Influencers are social media accounts or users that have thousands to millions of followers and with very high engagement. These users can give you a mention or endorsement, hence netting you a lot of sales. Using influencers is cheaper and more effective than using other forms of advertising. Most times, you could be fortunate enough to do barter with them instead of payment.
Here are a few steps to help you kickstart the negotiations:
- Outline the influencers present in your niche.
- Reach out to them to see if they are interested in advertising your products.
- Negotiate an exchange or a rate of service.
- Agree on the message you want them to post for you.
- Be mindful of the need to reach out to influencers in your specific niche. It is a fundamental criterion, after all, their followers are more likely to be interested in products like yours.
3. Improve the Search Engine Optimization of Your Store
One of the most reliable sources of customers is the search engine traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of optimizing your store with the aim of achieving better results on search engine platforms like Google and Bing. Though it is demanding, it is one of the most effective ways to secure long-term traffic to your store. An additional advantage is its free cost; you do not need to spend any money to achieve the improvement. You can employ a wide range of plugins to help you improve the SEO of your WooCommerce store. However, you should keep these tips in mind to get maximum results:
- Carefully select adequate keywords for your products
- Create thorough and useful descriptions for each of your products.
- Optimize your product images alt and title tags.
With these measures in place, it is easier for search engines to locate your products and rank them at the top. It is worthy of note that SEO work pays off over the long term. Hence you might not see results right away.
4. Employ Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is another medium to reach a massive audience while setting your marketing budget. PPC means the running of ads on a particular platform, while you pay for each click on those ads. It is an effective way to target users who are interested in your niche or your products. Also, it is effective in setting up your budget, and often a click costs just a few cents.
PPC advertising is not an easy field to master, and results might not be forthcoming if you do not invest some time and money. However, below are few steps to get started:
- Select a platform of choice to advertise on, e.g. Adwords, Facebook or Bing.
- Set a budget and spread it out among different ads. This will maximize the amount of data you get.
- Run test on variations of your ads to see the better performers.
- Increase the level of your top-performing campaigns.
If your budget is very tight, it is recommended that you wait until your products have a healthy profit margin before implementing these products. You should note that little money is needed to make PPC work, whereas, the results are massive.
Conclusion
Time is an important factor to consider in turning your WooCommerce store into a success story; it is not just done overnight. To achieve this, you will need to grow your audience slowly, while coaxing each lead into becoming a repeat customer. Though cumbersome, the results of this investment are well worth it. Once your store has gained enough popularity, you will make more profits and hence more marketing budget to work with.
Here is a quick recap of four of the most efficient ways to market your WooCommerce store on a budget:
- Getting the Word Out through Social Media
- Look For Influencers in Your Niche
- Increase the quality of the Search Engine Optimization of Your Store
- Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising
All that is left to discuss is what happens when you have started making enough money from your store, such that you can work on it full time. At this level, you can engage in the outsourcing of some or all of your management duties, giving you more time and space to focus on growth and development.
