Outside of providing your customers with a curated inventory of boutique items, the most important aspect of your revenue driving operations is marketing. It is no secret that there is a substantial amount of competition that both online boutiques and brick-and-mortar locations face when they are establishing their operations. As a startup entrepreneur, you will most likely complete most the marketing required by your business initially. This will require that you become an expert among a number of different topics including search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, social media advertising, affiliate marketing, and influencer marketing. This page is our list of boutique marketing services.
As your business expands, you will most likely work with third parties in order to make better use of your time. Depending on the size of your boutique’s organization, you may also consider hiring employees that will directly manage your business’ marketing. In order have your boutique’s marketing budget operate as efficiently as possible, many up and coming businesses will typically outsource functions. This reduces costs for a number of reasons. First, maintaining an in-house marketing staff comes at significant expense. You will need to pay a salary as well as payroll taxes (which will add 7% to 10% as a function of the salary). Second, your boutique will be bound by a number of laws that guide employment. This can cause legal liabilities if you seek to terminate employment or have any other type of human resource issues.
Through this page, we are going to discuss the types of marketing services that you can acquire that will boost your boutique’s visibility while driving sales.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising Management
When you first launch you online boutique’s operations, you are gong to want to drive as many people as possible to your website. The most effective way of doing this is by engaging in pay-per-click marketing, which is commonly called PPC. Through this type of marketing channel, you’re advertisements will appear among search engine results when specific keywords are entered into search queries. Generally, you can expect to pay $0.50 to $3.00 per click.
One of the most important things to note when working with this type of marketing is that you will need to understand your conversion rate. For most businesses, a successful conversion rate of 1% is standard for most ecommerce platforms (although specialized boutiques can often have conversion rates of 5% or higher). You will also need to know how much your average customer will spend at your online boutique. For instance, if your average customer will spend $100 per order and your conversion rate is 2% then you will produce $200 of revenue for every one hundred people that visit your website. Once these metrics are proven, you will be able to know exactly what you will need to spend on PPC marketing (including the bid cost per keyword).
This type of marketing has become more complicated over the past five years. Each search engine has its own proprietary program for engaging in this type of advertising. The platforms, at times, can be difficult to navigate. There are numerous companies that can help you manage your PPC campaigns. Most importantly, these entities can help you discover new keywords while concurrently refining your campaigns over time.
Search Engine Optimization
For many boutique entrepreneurs, having traffic come as a result of organic search results is the holy grail of online marketing. In these instances, your website will naturally appear in search engine results when specific keywords are used. There is no fee associated with having someone click on an organic link. However, this type of marketing takes a substantial amount of time. This is due to the fact that major search engines will need to build trust with your platform. You can expect that it will take three to six months to see meaningful results for a SEO campaign.
In regards to this type of marketing, this primarily entails the creation of new content for your website. Most importantly, you will need to draft numerous articles regarding fashion trends, décor trends, as well as other relevant content specific for the types of products that you are offering. Typically, you should make sure that the content you write is engaging with your audience. Of course, this is a major labor to do. It can often take several hours just to create one article. For many busy entrepreneurs, this is simply not doable from a time standpoint.
There are a number of firms that specialize in search engine optimization as well as content creation. These companies employ highly skilled writer and professionals that will ensure that your platform is more frequently found among search engines. As discussed on a different article on this platform, these costs can range from $1,000 to $2,000 on a monthly basis.
Influencer Marketing
Similar to pay-per-click marketing, the usage of influencers can send traffic to your online boutique immediately. These individuals will create videos that discuss your boutique and the unique products that you offer. For many new entrepreneurs, this can be a very high impact way of creating an immediate draw to your platform. Typically, these costs will range from $100 to over $2,000 depending on the number of subscribers that the influencer has on their video and social media channels.
It should be noted that if you have an affiliate marketing program in place, some influencers will accept a smaller upfront fee while receiving a portion of any sales that are directed to your website.
One of the ways that influencer marketing can be done more effectively is by sourcing a number of up-and-coming internet personalities. These people are often referred to as micro-influencers. They will typically do their work for $100 to $500. The benefit of using multiple influencers is that you can see which retained professionals produce the best result for your online boutique.
Affiliate Marketing
If done properly, affiliate marketing can be a major way of generating substantial revenues. Through these programs, third-party website owners are able to receive a portion of each sale that they drive to your online boutique (which ranges from 5% to 20%). There are numerous ecommerce software suites that allow for the quick integration of an affiliate marketing program, which typically couples with your existing checkout programs. One of the most difficult aspects of this type of marketing is the recruitment portion of the work. However, there are a number of firms that can help you market your affiliate program to the general public.
Social Media Advertising
Very similar to PPC advertising, social media marketing allows you to specifically target individuals that are browsing popular networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Generally, most people focus heavily on maintaining their online boutique focused targeted advertisements to Facebook and especially Instagram. Again similar to PPC, it can be difficult to manage these operations on your own. There are numerous campaign manager portals that you will need to navigate in order to ensure that your target audience is addressed properly. Luckily, there are a number of companies that have an immense degree of expertise as it relates to creating and refining a targeted advertising campaign on social media platforms. There are even businesses that tailor their efforts specific for the needs of boutiques and apparel firms.
Video Production
One of the best ways to create a lasting impact on your audience is through the use of video based advertisements. As has been discussed numerous times on this platform, online boutique viewers cannot try on the clothing that you offer. As such, you will need to find ways that will make the shopping experience as easy as possible for your customers. Professionally created videos will not only drive sales and improve your conversation rate, but they will also drive new traffic to your website. When you upload your videos to YouTube (as well as other video sharing platforms), you will further contribute to the number of links that are associated with your platform. Professionally created videos for a boutique typically cost $200 to $1,000 depending on the length and depth of content that is created.