Hi GeEcom,
I would greatly appreciate some help and advice to kickstart my new website. I previously had an e-commerce business that mainly sold on Amazon, eBay, and our website. The business went into liquidation in November, and I have decided to start again on my own without my partner, as he let me down in the last business. I have steered clear of dropshipping due to concerns about delivery times, reliance on dropshippers who may send poor quality products, and the potential for subpar customer service. I would love some advice regarding social media marketing, as I believe this is the best way for a start-up to generate sales.
Thanks in advance.
Hey Gibson46,
Thanks for your message! Your concerns about the dropshipping model are totally understandable. Delivery times, product quality and customer service are neglected by many dropshippers which has given the model a bad reputation in recent years. It is certainly possible to dropship and avoid these problems successfully (i.e. build a relationship with a supplier close to your customers, order samples and hire a dedicated virtual customer service team), but if you are set on building your business with another model which you have prior experience with that makes a lot of sense.
In terms of social media marketing, I would definitely recommend a large focus on Facebook, TikTok and Google ads and I'll give a brief breakdown of what to expect from each:
Facebook:
Facebook/Meta ads are like the original gold standard of social media ads. Despite this, they have become a lot more expensive and difficult to run profitably (unlike back in 2017 when they apparently were like a license to print money). Still, if you are able to test a wide selection of ad creatives and audience-targeting settings, you should be able to generate some useful data for your business and hopefully turn the ads profitable. Also, once established, Facebook ads take very little management (they can run successfully for months without any edits and remain profitable).
The big downside of Facebook is their trigger-happy approach to banning and restricting accounts. They rely on an automated system to try and prevent scams and poor advertising. Unfortunately in practice, this means that almost every advertiser will have multiple horror stories of their entire ad account being banned for no fair or logical reason (which is what has happened to us dozens of times) and their advertiser support is terrible/ non-existent.
TikTok:
TikTok ads are like the new shiny toy that every marketing department wants to crack. There is an incredible amount of untapped advertising space on the platform which leads to lower advertising costs and an incentive for them to treat their advertisers well (great client support and resources). TikTok requires a lot more attention; you need to be constantly uploading new ad creatives, testing angles, audiences and ad setups which can be very time-intensive (several hours per day). Despite this, my team and I are all-in on TikTok as we are seeing amazing and profitable results across our stores. It has been so good that we have actually ditched Facebook because the banning and terrible client support just isn't worth our time any more and we are seeing a better return on TikTok.
Google Ads:
Google ads can be used in many different ways. For our business, we use them as a tool to sweep up any potential customers for our brands that have ventured over to Google Search. We split our campaigns into branded and non-branded keywords and run passive-style ad groups. Our branded keywords can easily catch a good handful of customers every day at ultra-low CPAs.
Hope this info is useful to you and I'd be happy to help you with any social media ads you need! I'm looking to get to know more people in the entrepreneurial/business space so I hope to chat!
