Welcome to the winning with shopify podcast, the podcast that will teach you to take your shopify store and turn it into an automated sales machine with the latest marketing emails, sales and social media advice, strategies and tips from experts without the fluff. Your host, Caroline Balinski, the founder of just asked Parker Dot com, the only small marketing task agency for shopify owners with over 10 years experience in marketing, manufacturing, design, and ecommerce. She shares her knowledge and interviews the experts to help you in your journey to success. Now, here's your host, Caroline Balinski. Hi, welcome.
:I'm everyone. I'm so excited to have a lovely guests here today. It's Chloe Thomas and chloe and I have first met a few years ago and in that couple of years we have been trying to get together and do some stuff. Chloe actually runs her own ecommerce marketing business and she's been doing it since 2003 and just recently I was actually on her live summit and she's invited me on as a guest and we realized that we have so much in common and we have so many different things to talk about. So I wanted to get her here today to talk about what she's doing, what she's seeing in the industry because being around for so many years, she definitely has a lot of information that she can share with all of you. So chloe has actually written five books now, get her to give us a little bit more information about that, but she works with the old types of clients.
Caroline:She's actually had a couple of clients in Australia as well, which is fantastic and she works with a lot of clients in the UK but also around the world. So let's welcome chloe and I'll get some more information from heather. Hi chloe. How are you? I am good. And think it's really nice to be chatting with you again because I always enjoyed our conversation so hopefully your listeners will too. Wonderful. The last time you and I just go to on a cold, just the two of us privately. It was meant to be all. We'll just jump on a chat for 15 minutes and it ended up being nearly an hour. So let's see how long this interview goes today. I know that I've got so many questions that I know that things that you talk about in general are very, very helpful for people. So first start off with you telling us a little bit about you and your history and what you can actually, what you do with people when it comes to ecommerce. Oh my gosh. So much to tell. I'm so. I've been working in ecommerce since, as you said, about 2003. I've done. I've done client side, the big kind of Omni channel or multichannel retailers. I've looked after paper mailings, I've it comes to email marketing, affiliate Atwood's, all that kind of stuff. Then I'm back in 2007, I started a marketing agency focused on helping retailers market their business online of the 10 years of running that. I finally stopped doing that and sold it last year and that meant I got to focus completely on ecommerce masterplan, which was, um, was absolutely brilliant because at eco was mostly what I do is I help ecommerce business owners and marketers solve their marketing problems. And that is the thing I've enjoyed doing most for the last, what, 15 years now is solving marketing problems, finding that nugget of data which is gonna make everything awesome. Well that marketing method that's going to transform a business or just helping give clarity on plans ready. And that's, that's what I do at ecommercemasterplan buyer, a whole range of different things. So I worked with a few people one on one, I do lots of kind of marketing audit, website audits and I also, as you mentioned, I've written five covers which are out there to help people make their businesses better. And then there's the podcast and the virtual summit as well. So yeah, I get to spend all my days doing things I absolutely love. I'm very lucky. So a question, do you have any free time actually increasing about free time, year on year? I seem to seem to have somehow managed to crack the code of working slightly less every year and then in quite a bit more, which fantastic.
Chloe:I'm not quite sure how I've done it but um, but I will share one, one little tip with your audience. There's a couple of years ago I decided to stop working on weekends because I'd reached a point in. Many of your listeners may be in this position when you, you're like, it's Wednesday, Thursday, get all that big project. I'll leave that for Saturday. I'll leave that for Saturday when I've got no, no distractions. And I realized that if I stopped saying I'll leave it for today, I could've got it done on Thursday and then I get a bad Saturday off. So I gave myself a barrier. Um, I said, you are not allowed to work weekends anymore. And I think that in almost within about two months, sales started going up despite the fact I was now doing my weekends free. So I think putting barriers on your time is quite a clever way of improving a wet black violence because it doesn't do it by itself. You have to actually do something to make it better. Yeah.
Caroline:That is such good advice. I'm in the livesafe since I've become a step mom of four kids. I was before that I was single. I was doing my own thing and I was exactly the same as you and I said, hey, we've got the kids, only Ken's and I'm gonna. Keep that time aside and it really does change everything and I think it's no, yeah, you get nervous of if I do this I'm going to look like someone who doesn't work as hard and I'm going to lose clients. I'm going to lose, um, you know, the time to work. But it's like you say the exact opposite. So great advice from you and that's exactly what I wanted to talk about today. That was actually one of the topics, but with you, I have so many different. I don't know where to start because there's so many different things. So what I really thought today could be about was ecommerce now and then what's next? So I've got quite a few questions that I want to ask you, but I'm really so everyone knows we want to talk about finding time, which is what you mentioned planning, um, and then marketing ideas that you have seen some really cool ones that you've seen recently. The industry does
Chloe:change so much, so it's great that there are great ideas out there. So I guess let's start off with planning. So what are the main things that people should think about and do when it comes to planning their marketing for their business? Oh Wow. That's such a good, good question because I find a lot of people growing their business like they should because they're just cut a firefighting with the marketing, you know, you wake up Monday and go, but again he went out. Um, that's not a route to success a certain, you know, you may be doing fine but you're not doing as well as you should be or could be. A little bit of planning goes a long way into helping you do things a lot better. So top planning tips. Well I guess the first one, let's, let's bring it back to time as we were just talking about. The first one would be actually person time in your diary to do your marketing can be. It can be really easy when you're running an ecommerce business to, to kind of just add marketing in with everything else, you know, and it's like, Oh, you've got this order, this customer service, this bit of product buying today, and all those other things that have to happen that marketing can end up getting squeezed into the last hour on a Friday. Um, so what I suggest doing is working out when the best time you, your marketing is for me, it's the beginning of the week. That's when I've got the most energy. That's when I can be the most creative. So I try and keep Mondays free for doing my marks, which is particularly difficult because you've got all that stuff that came in over the weekend wanting to distract it. But were we out what it is view and plan that into your diary. That's the first thing about marketing planning. So the number two and nobody will be properly getting into marketing planning, is to sit down and do a calendar. I called them a promotional calendar. It's a spreadsheet where you got across the top, you've got each of the weeks of the year, and you may want to sketch this for a year. You're probably gonna wanna, do it in detail for about three months at a time, so across the top you've got week by week as the year goes by, down the left hand side, you've got various rows of information you want to capture. Now, the very first one of those rows should be big things that are happening in the world. Okay, so it could be Christmas, it could be devale, it could be if the Olympics is happening that year or something big that was relevant to your business, put those in there, kind of like the pegs. You're going to be hanging your marketing calendar off, and then under that key things which are happening in your business. Maybe when products go live, maybe you've got a new store opening. Maybe it's your one year anniversary of being in business, but those in the second row, the third row is then going to be the promotions that you're running. So what are you talking about? What's the big message? This might be a financial message that might be a 10 percent off, it might be free pnp. We or it might be something where there is no discount. It'll just talking about what's new in or you're focusing on a particular product range and then the rows underneath that or one for each of marketing methods and I suggest you start off by putting email in there and that plan as you work through it, it will start to give you a really clear idea about what you need to be talking about when it will give you a plan. You can follow week on week one in that marketing time that you've identified to make sure you're making happen. What you need to make happen to make your business grow. And it's, um, I find that it's a process. I take all the great majority of my clients through and it's still like I've been using this method for about 10 years now and it still brings a smile to my face when I walk into a client's office and see it up on the wall. On the big whiteboard. I do a very similar one with my clients. I know what you mean, but what you're saying, and I want everyone who's listening to think about this, what chloe is saying right now is so amazingly important that if you don't do this, the rest of it, it's a foundational part of Your Business, isn't it? Chloe? Like without this, you get the rest of it. He's like, well, you know, if you don't know what's coming up in the next couple of weeks or what's coming up next month that you need to plan for and that you ought to be talking about, you know what, you're missing so many opportunities. It's a bit like going on November the 20th. Oh, black Friday is about to happen is that, you know, that's just, you're not setting yourself up for success. And it's not like it should be a surprise. I, the amount of clients that say to me, ah, it's Valentine's Day tomorrow. What can I do is a promotion. Um, it's over a month ago. Um, but then the other awful thing is people who, because they don't have a plan, they sell. I don't know ironmongery, you know, so I've been looking at that this morning. I am angry, so door handles and they go to you, it's Valentine's Day next week, what should we do? And like you saw door handles really there are better things for you to be talking about this week and Valentine's Day. So it's kind of, it can be your plan to the stuff you should be caring about, but it also means you have more time to realize. Actually Valentine's Day just isn't relevant for me. That is so true. And there's all these little days and this is what you're talking about in that first line I talk about with publicity, like um, people can do pr and you're sort of putting everything together and people don't realize how many little special days there are. That would be so much more important to them. Like, you know, um, door handles, there'll be other things that they can sell other days the year that would actually tie in with door handles much better than Valentine's Day. So true because one of them, one of the people thought of my podcast this year, they've actually gone to the extent of creating their own week for their products, um, which is pretty cool because they create a company called green and blue and then met create be bricks which like bricks with lots of holes in them which are great for solitary bees are really important of the ecosystem. And they created solitary bee week that happened a couple of months ago and get well planned enough. And you can even create your own week.
Caroline:No, and I have heard of companies. I actually worked with a, um, a, a charity that did the same thing. They created their own day. Yeah. So it's definitely something that people can do. And You giving people ideas that a lot of people are gonna sit there going, well that's too hard. But that is an example. How much would it cost someone to create their own week? Nothing is that. It's just got to, you've just got to stop telling people about it.
Chloe:It's a webpage, an email in a couple of tweets, the most simplest or you could contact a few people and try and get them to do things, but you know, all the, all the big days start small, you know, movember is now huge. But the first year that ran it was really unusual to see someone with facial hair, Sacramento, big, big, big oaks grow.
Caroline:Yeah. Fantastic. So the calendar, is this something that you recommend that people set up? You said I'm a year in advance, but just work on three months at a time. So don't feel overwhelmed at something you have to think about for the next year.
Chloe:I, I have on occasion recommended people just to look at three months, but when they get into it, loads of ideas tend to spin off and they're thinking about stuff that's going to happen in six months time. So I think it's worth having the full year in front of you so you can at least put it in the right boxes, which makes it a lot easier when you come to do the next three months. But I think in this, because things move so fast and businesses of all so fast these days to decide on what we're talking about this in August to decide exactly what you're sending out on November 24th is probably a bit too detailed, but you should know you're definitely sending an email on November twelfth or December 24 rather. So it's kind of within the next month. I'd always want to know what my subjects lines we're going to be and be a bit more kind of tied down to what's going into those emails. But beyond that it becomes ever more sketchy and penciled in I suppose a sketchy as in like you're sketching it out work not as in
Caroline:awful. It's just an outline, which is fantastic. And a question on that. How many times do you think a ecommerce store should be sending out emails?
Chloe:Oh, it's one of those million dollar question, isn't it? The very few businesses. Is there an argument to be sending less often than once a week? Because I think very few businesses don't have something interesting to tell them or what do you. It's about every week and I think if you go, if you go much below twice a month, so every other week then people aren't going to remember you and you fall foul of all those spam and deliverability and all that techie stuff. So there's a real benefit to going out regularly. So my general recommendation is once a week for some businesses, I think it should be more often, but only if you've got the customer interest and the reason to be sending it more often. Yeah, no, that's really good advice. It's exactly what I say. And um, I, I keep on hearing some people that are giving this advice of I must be everyday no matter what, which I really like. And I think that's why you and I connect so well is because you have that same understanding that not every business is the same. Like not every ecommerce store is the same, but don't be scared to email people. Yeah. It still amazes me. It amazes me back in 2007 when assess out the marketing agency that I'd go into a business that was turning over large sums of money in those days, um, who had never sent an email. That email is to$60,000 and they never sent an email. It amazes me that still in 2018, I can speak to people who've got a couple of thousand people on their list who just on sending the money thing, I saw these emails should be the bedrock of your sales. And if you're not sending an email every week to your list, you are missing out. It's so true. I noticed it from my emails when I email my list, I straightaway get people replying. Hey, thanks for that. How can I sign up? Well, how can I work with you? If people really hate your emails and they think that you're a terrible person, then they'll just take themselves off the list and always have the answers scribed button. So I think that's what a lot of people say to me. And uh, you probably get the same as up, but I'm scared I'm going to upset people. It, you've just got to. The only, the only real way I think to prove someone you're not going to upset people is to send an email. You kind of have to prove to yourself that you're not going to upset people and it's either, you know, I, I, I find this fascinating. It's amazing to see what resonates and what doesn't resonate. And it's often not what you think. So a nice buried email marketing calendar is really important as well. Or that's a really good tip. So varied emails because the same thing every week ends up becoming. You don't actually know if it's working because you're not sending anything that's different. Exactly. And it, you know, different people will respond to different things. If he'd go out every week talking about the same product and you've got, I know four different product categories and the only other talk about one of them, why don't you talk about one of the other three and mix up the message a bit to attract some different people to respond to open those emails to click through and to buy so it not only does actually make the job of putting emails together a bit more interesting and it also leads to more to a wider range of your customers coming back in and buying from you. Good idea, good idea, and some other mistakes that people make. So email is definitely one of them. Emails a big mistake people make by not sending them. Do you have two or three other mistakes that people are making in their ecommerce stores when starting out? Oh my gosh. Oh, where to go with this one? I think one of the. One of the big things I find, and I, I've done a website review for someone this morning. This one's a little bit front of mine is not putting any kind of personality or trust building content on that first few home page, you know, it's, it's a homepage, which is just his products. Is that right? Why should I buy from you? Why does it matter? And even, you know, you could give me the argument as much as you like about the fact that you only set your business up yesterday and you've got no customers, but you've got you. You've got the reasons you decided to create the business. You've got the fact that you're running on a free pnp, you've got to fight. You've got some kind of guarantee. You've got the fact that you've, you know, you've really researched this and the whole story, the business you've got, probably the fact that you've been at, been interested in this area for several years before you launched it. All of that can help convince someone to buy from you. And there's just those blonde, emotionless homepages that I find is be somewhat, which a lot of new ecommerce businesses in particular fall down. And I was like to say to them, would you buy from a website like that, that has no trust factors, has no information, you're sending someone to your website that doesn't know you, and then you want them to buy something and they don't know if this is a real business or if there's any real person behind it. And you mentioned about Pale earlier and that's a great way as a brand new business of getting something trustworthy that you can put on the homepage if you, you know, you can get mentioned even in local press or in, you know, just a, a niche blogger in your area and you can get that onto your, you know, get them to say something nice about you. Quite get grabbed that quote, grabbed their logo, put it on your home page, you're showing someone else with some level of influence actually likes your product. And that can be hugely beneficial in the early days. Yeah, that's so true. And do you have other mistakes people make all the money? Which one? Which ones we talk about. Oh, uh, not optimizing. That will be the big one company yet. I nearly forgot about that one. I'm putting advertising live and not looking at it, which I mean facebook ads or Google ads. Google ads in particular, people are awful at doing this. You build some keyword ads. You put some adds up, you turn it on, spending on 10 pounds a day, 20 pounds at 800 pounds a day, and then you don't look at it for a fortnight. It's. It's crazy because I'm the MOXIE agency around. We specialize in facebook ads and Google ads and I've done google ads for ecommerce businesses with big budgets personally run them since about 2000. Oh, I think it was the first time I got my hands on an actual account and the the first 24 hours after you put some keywords live, you can slash your costs. I know 20 to 30 percent by doing the quick optimization and then it's going to. It takes you about three months if you're properly dedicated to it, it's three months before you really understand how those keywords are going to work for you and that's where at least a weekly optimization session and it's, you know, you're just throwing money away. If you just put it live and go, oh, that's done. I can ignore it until the next month just sorry. You can tell I'm quite passionate and it really frustrates me, you know, because you're just giving money away for no good reason. And the other thing was, I'm on the optimization of ads. Hobby horse is on this one. Oh, this bugs me is boosting posts on facebook. Okay, tell me suddenly it's just such a waste of money. If you're going to spend money advertising on facebook, you should be creating a proper advert and deciding properly who it goes in front of and the things you put your craft into an advert. I'm actually drawing this out on the desk in front of the things. You put it in a facebook ad, the type of image that type of copy, the way you do the links is completely different to the things you put in a facebook post to try and get interaction. So you create specific content for adverts and specific content for your page. So why spend 10 pounds here and there on some facebook boost post, stopped doing it for the next 10 you normally would do that gives you 100 quid, go and run a proper facebook ad test with 100 pounds and you will get much, much, much more bang for your buck. So why do you think that facebook always suggests to do them just to make money? Yeah. Yeah, and it's like the entry drug into facebook ads properly if they could, because if you start doing peer boost posts, you'll see you get increasing messages from facebook to try and get you to go and log into ads manager and start doing it properly. So it's their way of advertising you into that advertising area. But it's, it's such a, it's such an inefficient way of spending your advertising budget. There are so many. So much better if you go and actually do a proper advert on facebook, you will learn so much more. You will be able to optimize so much more than your next hundred pounds would be spent so much better. No, that's great advice. I sort of, um, stay away from, not for everyone, but I usually tell people to stay away from facebook ads in general, but that's a really good tip of staying away from the boosted posts anyway. So on that topic, how, which businesses do you think work on facebook ads and which ones don't these days because I'm sure you've been very, um, close to working with facebook ads for a long time, so you would know the difference, how things have changed, what have you seen the differences are, what do you see now when it comes to facebook ads and what sort of ecommerce stores work well on facebook and which ones don't? That's a good question. Um, it's rare I find a business that I can't think of. Something that will be useful for them on facebook ads or that might, I shouldn't, I shouldn't say would be, I should say, might be useful for them because you've got to test it to know if it's gonna work or not. Um, so it depends on the strategy that you are deploying and the, the, the strategy being, for example, Oh, you're doing a brand awareness video to try and identify people to put more call to action driven marketing in front of. Or are you running some remarketing ads to get people back to your, to your website to buy. So the strategy really depends on who it's going to work for and who it's not going to work for what, you know. You've got bright, shiny, cool, destructing, silly, beautiful product that's going to distract someone as they're looking at their pictures of cats and um, you know, builders doing silly things or whatever it is they're looking at us on facebook. If you've got a product that's going to distract and be that impulse purchase, then you're, you know, you're probably going to do really well on facebook. It can be easy to work out the right facebook ad strategy for you. If you've got a product that's more considered, that's more, that's more complicated, that's more niche than the chances are you're going to be better off with the remarketing. Um, so I mentioned door handles earlier. I don't think you're going to distract anyone from a cat video who's never been to your website with the picture of a door handle. I may be wrong. Feel free to tell me and say it's target market is. Yeah, exactly. You know, feel free to tell me if I'm wrong on that front. Um, but that sort of business, the door handles, if you're trying to change the door in the house, it's something you think about for awhile and it kind of molds around the back of your head. So it may be that remarketing is going to work well for you. And then I'm just an example of a company. He came on my podcast actually to talk about this, who I would never have thought facebook ads we're going to work for them is a business called Taylor and Hart who do custom engagement rings. So you go on their website, start designing your ring, and then you book a consultation with them. Now I would have thought I'm an engagement ring site, would, uh, would not go in for remarketing, for ads on facebook, etc. Because, you know, on facebook, you know when someone is engaged, but you don't know when someone's planning or getting engaged, there's no status signal for that so that they'd be on there. And then you know, how aBout if you're, if you're plotting the ultimate engagement moment and your girlfriend picks up your ipad and then suddenly gets bombarded with adverts for engagement rings. I would have thought if they did come to me and said, how should we be advertising? I would not tell. I've told them to touch facebook with a barge pole, but it's one of their best channels because they put out a video to to the whole of the uk that simply says this is who we are and this is what we do. Just explains the engagement ring design process. People who watched the video, they turn into an interested audience and they put ads in front of that audience and it's one of their best recruitment channels for new clients, so there's. You can find the right strategy, then it's great, but for a lot of small businesses you can spend an. If it's not an immediate no brainer, you can spend a lot of money trying to find that right strategy so it has to be approached with care. Just like most marketing channels need to be interesting and that's exactly it. Yeah. It's comes down to trying things out, but also taking a look at where your audience is and I'm testing before anything else and understanding that, trying any of these out. It's not just a case of, okay, on wednesday I'm going to give facebook ads and go, oh look, it didn't work. I'll ignore that. It's, you know, you've got to give it a couple of months of often of testing and trying to really understand that it's going to work for you. The nuances tend to come in a lot quicker, but the answers tend to take a couple of months of testing and optimizing and trying. so you've got to be committed if you want to give something a good test. No, that's really good advice because what I find with a lot of people, especially through just as parker there, I'm in that lower budget, they've got a lower budget so they go in and someone told them to do facebook ads. They're put in 10, 20,$30. It doesn't work. And then they go, I've just wasted all that money and now facebook ads is not working for me. But they didn't think it through. They didn't have planet and yet they put$30 into something that was never going to work under those circumstances. Exactly. And it's like, um, you came on or you blew the on the summit with me talking about influencer marketing and it's like you can't just send one email to one influencer and then go, it doesn't work for me because they never replied. It's like, well, you've got to send them at least several emails and you've got to, um, you know, you want to try multiple influences, not just the one. It's you have to persist at these marketing methods to know if they work or not. Not just go, I sent one email. It doesn't work. Yeah, exactly. That's really good advice. And so we spoke about, you touched on it earlier, you spoke about, um, the bright shiny objects. What other dangers with bright, shining objects that you can give some advice to the listeners about bright, shiny objects? I just, in case you're wondering what bright shiny object is, it's one of those things that land in your inbox. I don't as many of them around at the moment, a big mouth and maybe chat bots or live chat or facebook messenger or something arrives in your inbox and you go, oh my god, that sounds amazing, and, and so you, you disappear off and you spend the next three days working on that rather than what you'd already planned to do and what you know would work. And then you realize, actually this isn't going to work for us. We haven't got the volume, whether the wrong product has a great our customers don't want it. So it's those things which look really nice and exciting. That distract you from what you should be doing. And what I should also say is that bright shiny objects and not necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is when you drop everything you should be doing to focus on them rather than evaluating them and deciding when you should work on them. So the danger of the bright shiny object is it distracts you from what you should be doing and lead you to invest money, time, and effort in things you shouldn't be doing right now. Um, but the good thing about bright shiny objects is if you see one and you're like, that is definitely something for me. Put it on your list, put it on your mArketing calendar, put it on. I mean, I keep a list, um, in, uh, in one of my spreadsheets of things I'm going to do next quarter, and if I see a great bright shiny object that I know well that I really want to do, but I'm like, I must have touch it now because I've got more importantly to be doing. I'll put it on that list, my list of things for the next quarter and then I can come back to it then and properly evaluated and decide is it something that gonna be worth my time working on for the next quarter. So bright shiny objects or real danger. It doesn't mean you should stop getting excited about things, but it does mean you should. You shouldn't stop everything and drop everything in order to go and chase after them. It's so true. And we bought that from personal experience. Like you said, there's things that you wanted to do it on the same, but we also know that from clients. Yeah, that get too wrapped up in that, you know, the new thing that's out there and then forget about the things that they should be concentrating on that they're already making some money on or we're still testing things out so it's a good idea to stick to what they're doing. And I think that that's just human nature. I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's just the way we are as people that we see something and we think that it's going to help us. And unfortunately a lot of our industry is set up to put bright, bright, shiny objects in front of us. And one of the things, I think it's particularly tough for an ecommerce business is if, if you're, you see a lot of things put in front of you that are actually relevant for you. Um, either things which actually are ecommerce focus, but quite often things which are about lead generation, you know, every so often I get a client coming to me who are really excited about linkedin ads because they've been to a networking breakfast where someone was gay, this fantastic presentation about linkedin ads and they're selling dresses to teenagers. It's not relevant for you, but yeah, just reading courses is really cool. I love that you're excited about it, but you're not going to find your audience on that. And we've got these other things that you should be working on that we know are either starting to give you, bring you money bringing you money or have a lot more potential for you. So it's, so in some ways the, the, the wider digital industry, it can be set up a little bit to um, to put too many bright shiny objects in front of you. Be careful.
Caroline:Yes. I hundred percent agree. So great advice because that's definitely something people need to think about. It does become harder. What is important, but I think that's why working with someone like you or someone like me when we went across the board on many different areas, we give the advice of what's best and while there's some people that specialize, which I love and I think it's fantastic and specializing is great. Some of those specialists, like you said, linkedin, and I've been to a conference for extended as well and that person says everyone has to be on linkedin. It works for everyone, but that's because that's the only thing they can sell. So then they selling it. So I think for the listeners, it's good to get that advice from someone who specializes, but also from someone like us and like what your doing is, hey, let's find out what's this field business?
Chloe:Well, it, it's like the, um, the virtual summit that you mentioned at the beginning and that you're part of. I, you know, at the beginning of each set of videos, I do a little intro video which will be, here's what's coming up in this set. Please remember. Not all of this is going to be relevant to you. Please do watch it and we'll see what your options are, but it's just as good if you watch those videos and go, this is definitely not for me, or this is a 2019 projects or this is when we hit 100 k turnover project. That's awesome because you know there's something there to help you when you reach that point in time, but you've got to, you know, anyone who comes on the summit, you watches the summit and tries to implement all 20 marketing ideas that deemed to failure. So you know, this bright, shiny objects thing, it's very important to be aware of when they're happening. Oh, bright, shiny objects. Or she'll put you on my next quarter to de lis or sometimes bright shiny object. Oh my god, why haven't I been doing you already? You all follow a better marketing strategy than what I've already got written down, which, which does sometimes happen with those bright shiny objects because often the source of our growth lies in the things we don't know. We don't know all of that so deep, but it's so true.
Caroline:Tell us as well. Um, the latest marketing techniques, I, you know, you're one of those people that especially you've got this summit coming up and that summit, like you said, there's 20 different topics that you're talking about and you did one last year as well as summit and you, you're across so many different areas. So I think you're a great one to ask. what are the latest marketing ideas, techniques that you're seeing that you think will help people that are out there listening? Well, my favorite no brainer marketing message at the moment is a free one and this is a bright shiny
Chloe:object which is if you've got a decent product feed, you know something you're sending into google merchant center or something. This is an utter no brainer for you. It's a business called price searcher. Who are your tagline themselves as the biggest search engine? You've never heard of an ar and a product search engine. They're in most countries around the globe, but have a look and see if they are in your area and they will take your google product feed, add you into their database and send you traffic for free. There is like some paid stuff coming in a couple of years' time or something, but at the moment and then the main bulk of the database, the main bulk of the search engine will remain for it. You know, at some point that had like google have ads around the edges so that one is an absolute no brainer. It doesn't cost you a penny, will bring you some traffic that wants to buy your products if you've already got that product feed setup. It's like kind of put that in. So I've got one of their team talking about that in the summit because I was asking like as soon as soon as I had to, I was like, you have to be on the summit because more people need to know about you. So that's kind of like the quick no brainer. Other things, it's um, as we've already talked about, I think facebook ads, if you can find the right strategy and it can be a brilliant thing for your business, but there's certainly a lot to be said for getting someone who's got some experiences point of view on what that strategy might be. Because just like you can waste a lot of money, just boosting posts, you can waste a lot of money chasing the wrong strategy and as we've said, you really need to commit to it to get the optimization done and happening. Uh, there's some really interesting things in google ad words at the moment with rlsa, which is remarketing lists for search engine engines even, but that's quite tacky. So if you want to know more about that one, I haven't listened to the session and the suburb because I will bore you all if I try and explain it here without the joy of graphics cause graphic's going bought them for that one. I'm just to realize I'm in danger just reading your list because I've got the list of who's in the summit in front of me. So let me pick. I pick one more really good too on. Yes. Perfect. Let's do one more. Okay. This one's a bit left field. This is one I find quite exciting. It's a lot of work, um, but not necessarily a lot of money. And it's crowdfunding, which I know most people think of in terms of product launches and business launches, but if you do a crowd funding project, right, it can be an amazing way of building an audience who are super excited about your product, super bought into your business and he will keep buying from you for the month after a crowdfunding. So I know of the ecommerce businesses who now have you now run a crowd funding project every year and that's their major piece of maxing activity, like one product they designed ready for the crowdfunding. So that's a bit of a left field one. Um, and it's, it's a big project is totally not something you can do on wednesday. They go nuts. That's quite a, a new and different methods, which if you can get it to work for you, if something's just going to return for year and year and year, each time you do it. Fantastic. But you actually told about that more in the summer. You actually cover that topic. Yeah. I've got, um, a guy called giles on who runs an agency called hyper starter, who is, he spends his days running crowd funding campaigns and growing crowdfunding campaigns and he's done something like several million pounds worth of business use, driven through it, so he comes on and talks about how to do it successfully because something like only it's a tiny percentage, it's less than half of crowdfunding projects actually get funded. So there's a lots of opportunity to win at crowd funding if you actually know how to do it. Um, because it's, it's a, there's a bit of a blueprint to follow, let's put it that way. No, that's true. So tell us a little bit more about the summit before we finish up because I think that you've wasted a lot of people's appetites there with what you're talking about. So what's in the summit? When does It start? How can people sign up? Because I know it's free because I'm one of the speakers at it. So I know that people can sign up for free and there's so much amazing content. So let us know about it is you definitely come along. If only for carolina session, because I'm all about influencer marketing, um, okay, so the summit is the ecommerce masterplan virtual summit eat contains 20 ways to improve your ecommerce marketing, say 20 separate sessions all about a different ecommerce marketing tactic. It is completely free and it is available over two days. We're putting all the sessions live. You'll have 48 hours to watch each session and it's happening on september the 18th and 19th as a tuesday and a wednesday. Um, and it's, um, last year we ran the summit and the audience, we've got over a thousand delegates and they loved it giving us an overall review score of four point eight out of five. So it's, it's high quality just in case you haven't worked that one out yet. It's really high quality content. It's going to be really useful for your business, for the rest of the year and beyond. And you can find it all by heading over to ecommerce masterplan.com, forward slash summit.
:Fantastic. So we're going to finish up there because I think that you can people a lot to think about and they're probably going, I need to write notes, I need to go and stop that calendar spreadsheet, get the whiteboard, let me start a calendar and I think that's the first thing. Two things everyone should do. Go away and create a calendar and also get on that summit. Sign up for it because it's completely free and it's been amazing having you here. We've got a million other things that I'm sure we'll have you back at another stage later on after the summit so we can talk about, you know, maybe a wrap up of everything that happened and yeah, that'll be great to have you back. But it's been great having you here. It's always a pleasure to chat to you and I hope it's been useful for your listeners. So thank you very much. Definitely has. Thank you so much chloe and thanks everyone for listening and see you on the next episode. bye.
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