We talked to an e-commerce entrepreneur named Emma Reid who suggests that you leave a hundred comments a day within your niche if you’re really serious about growing a community on a channel like Instagram:
“I suggest a hundred comments a day in the relevant hashtags on the relevant people’s posts, it has to be real human interaction okay otherwise people aren’t gonna buy from you because there are so many BOTS on Instagram, just spamming people’s posts”
This is something that we talk about a lot if you want to get started on a super low budget with dropshipping it’s possible Emma Reid built a half a million-dollar store like that, but she invested a ton of time and energy instead of ad dollars to get to that point.
“A lot of the beginning was me just grinding away writing Instagram comments building ambassador programs from the ground up to try and really get other people to like promote the product organically and all of that before I moved on to paid ads”
You can also grow these on say Facebook groups (which are best for shopify product research) just keep in mind that you have to wait a while to grow the community before you start advertising to them if you advertise too early the group will leave.
The next low to no budget marketing strategy that will drive traffic to your store is exploring new marketing channels you’d have to be living under a rock not to have her of tick-tock by now it’s the newest social channel on the block and it involves creating quick videos with music or sound effects that showcase something whether it’s a joke or a dance or a product there are 400 million daily active users on tik-tok meaning there’s a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to get in front of this audience early the only thing is that tick-tock is not optimized for people who are advertising on it yet there’s no way to link directly to your site but the hustling entrepreneurs won’t let this stop them they’ll be one of the first movers so they can figure out how the platform works.
Then as tick-tock evolves and makes it easier for people to go from a tick-tock account to a store, those first movers will have an advantage they’ll already have an audience on this new channel now tick-tock is the most popular new kid on the block but it’s not alone there are other platforms that are coming out all the times for example just last week we heard about a new channel called bite we don’t know if it’ll grow yet but we know that the first people to be on the channel will have the most chances of succeeding on it if it does grow.
This next low-budget marketing strategy is really best for dropshippers that’s because dropshippers can ship their products to anywhere in the world thanks to e packet shipping this strategy involves advertising to international markets
Most people when they set up an online store immediately start thinking about advertising to the US (due to the enormous potential that dropshipping product research indicates) and that’s because u.s. is a huge e-commerce market however where there are a lot of advertisers there’s a lot of competition and where there’s a lot of competition on the marketing platform the marketing costs are high if your drop shipping consider going after international markets it’s cheaper to advertise to these countries and you can still ship to them the only thing I have to be aware of is whether or not you’ll need to translate your ads and your website in order to convert this traffic. Luckily there are free apps that help you translate your website.
Now on to our last strategy – this strategy is something that got a lot of attention when we posted about it on Instagram. This strategy comes from a six-figure drop shipper named Emma Reed, what she recommends is that you soft sell to customers first and by soft-sell, she means don’t tell them to come to your store and buy but rather create a Facebook ad that tells people to, for example, pick out a color of the product that you’re advertising.
This soft sell is a bit more enticing if someone sees an ad that just says pick a color they don’t feel like they have to decide whether or not they want to buy before they click it they may just want to browse the colors now you might be thinking I don’t want a customer to just browse the colors and leave but here’s the thing the Facebook pixel will pay attention to who’s clicking on your ad and who’s interested in browsing colors in the first place once customers are familiar with your product because they visited your site in the first place you can use retargeting ads to go after those customers again with the use of shopify chrome extension.
Retargeted traffic is often much more effective at converting than cold traffic so this is a great tip for people who want to do low budget Facebook marketing and they want to do it smartly. Starting an online store does not have to cost a lot of money and marketing can be done for cheap or for free.