There is no need to stress how important it is nowadays to have a marketing strategy for a business. Especially in the dropshipping industry, a highly competitive business model due to its low risk and relative ease. Traffic is the key, the more people go into your store, the higher chance your store become popular.
Today we are going to discuss how to start a paid advertisement and how much to spend? Here is the Youtube video we made for this topic, feel free to check it out.
Before we go further, we need to know that there are different online advertisement platforms, mainly Facebook ads and Google ads. These are the two main ads platform you may want to put your ads on, and they are different from each other.
If I use simple words to tell what’s the main difference between Google ads and Facebook ads is: Customer's intention.
Google ads
Google ads are ideal for reaching the customers showing high buying intent. The goal of ads on Google is to show an advertisement that matches exactly what people are searching. For instance, if you type “kitchen wear” on Google, an ad of a kitchen knife product might appear to you, they appear because you have the intention to buy. A kitchen knife ads will never appear to people who are searching “the best toy for kids”.
Facebook ads
But Facebook Ads are different. Facebook enables you to advertise to people who aren’t necessarily searching for your product, but they still get exposed to your ad in their news feed. For example, if you are a mom of kids, it makes perfect sense that you see both knife product ads and toy ads, and even other products you have never intended to buy.
Up to this stage, we already had a basic understanding of the differences between these two platforms. Google ads are great for reaching customers at the point when they are showing a high buying intent. It helps them what they already want.
On the other hand, Facebook Ads offer powerful targeting capabilities and allow you to reach people who don’t even know your product exists. It helps you target those who may possibly become your clients. They haven’t got the intention to buy your products yet, but your ad could be interesting to them.
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So which ad platforms should I choose? Google or Facebook?
Well, It depends, you choose based on your objective. I want to address that there are no exact “the best” platforms, they all have their pros and cons, there are a lot of factors that vary to different scenarios. But in general, if your business is a B2B model like your product is catering to other business, I would suggest you choose Google ads to start with. But for most drop shippers, Facebook advertising is an ideal choice to start with.
Do the ad test
Before you invest hugely in ads, you must make sure the one you want to advertise is the product that people want to buy. Otherwise, you could waste thousands of dollars on ads but get no sales. You can find winning products by running an “ad test” to your product. For example, you have some new products in hand, you can create different ads for different products to find out which products work the best. In general, I would suggest you invest $5/day for each product, and last for 4 days to see the result. After 4 days, if this product doesn’t make you profit, just stop that ad and run another one.
So each product test will cost you $20. Let's do the math. If you have 20 products in hand, that will be $20*20=$400. This is the amount you spent on ads for products testing.
Control the variable
But bear in mind you need to control the variable when doing the test, otherwise, you are not testing anything at this point of time. Make sure you have the same products or the same audience in the test so that you can figure out issues in one of them in order to make adjustments. You can either test one product with multiple audiences or you can test multiple different products with one kind of audience.
Trial and error
If you’re just starting out, it can take a while to find that winning product and focusing on those top performing ads, it is a process of trial and error. You need some money for the whole process of putting out the ads first and then you kill some ads which don’t work, and focus on ads which get success. What you can do is to put $5 a day for a product and target to different audiences, see if any of those ads are making any conversions and point out which are getting a maximum number of clicks, most engagements and diverting traffic to your website. Stop those ads which are not getting you any benefits.
The goal is to collect data
You have to know that the goal of your ads is not just to make sales. The goal is to do market research, to be familiar with your audiences. In the beginning, every dollar you invest in the ad is to buy the data you need, and the best data you're going to get is when you turn your ads on, watch what's happening and feeling out the market.
Keep running ads which are making a profit. Duplicate and scale these ads up. For example, if you are sending $5 per day on an ad and it is making a few sales and giving you profit, make a similar ad and spend $10 a day on that ad which is making money. The second ad will most likely get success.
Final words
Some final words. The amount of money you should invest in ads really depends on how much your budget is. $5 dollar is enough and cost-effective way to start, go and test the products, gain the information you need, what works and what doesn't, feel out the market. $5 won’t provide you $10,000 daily profit, it is the experience that is important. The way you learn ads system is thru you experiencing it. It’s like learning how to swim, you will never learn how to swim by only watching youtube videos, you have to actually jump into the swimming pool, feel out the water. The more you experience, the more you will know-how. It is the same for doing business.
