How to stretch an Ecommerce marketing budget

Take Advantage of Social Media

Count this tip as a double: Social media is key to harnessing today’s shoppers. And the best part about it? Setting up a social media account is completely, 100% free. If you haven’t set up Twitter and/or Facebook accounts for your company, we highly recommend you do so, as Facebook is the number one source amongst social profiles for sending shoppers to websites. Posting to these accounts is a great way to turn customers into a community, and create a legion of brand ambassadors.

Setting up Pinterest and Google Plus won’t hurt either, as Pinterest especially is making a huge impact on e-commerce. If you’ve heard not-such-great things about Google’s foray into social media, well you’re not wrong. However, it will help with your google search engine optimization, so even if you don’t see a lot of action on your Plus page, it’s still worth it to post there regularly.

Improve SEO

Speaking of SEO, there is a multitude of different things you can do to improve this vital aspect of your business. The concept of SEO amounts to where you appear on a list from a search engine, the most common and most important one being google. Do a quick search for terms that should trigger your business’ appearance in the results.

Is it at or near the top of the list? No? Then you’ve got work to do. If you need help identifying these key terms, try a service like Google Adwords. This will show you the terms that you should optimize in order to drive traffic to your site.

You’ll also want to check out your website’s mobile experience by bringing it up on your smartphone and/or tablet. If your site doesn’t look clean (text/images are compressed, links are broken, etc.) then you’re going to get penalized by search engines, and you’ll be pushed further and further down the list of results.

Content Marketing

Playing a huge part in the role of good SEO is content marketing. Make sure you’re updating your website content regularly, as search engines reward sites for fresh information. If you’re having trouble coming up with new products/content to put on your site, try running a blog that will be of interest to your shoppers.

Do it Yourself

You’ll notice pretty much everything we’ve mentioned you can do yourself, and most of it is absolutely free. It’s important to recognize your limits, but there’s plenty that can be done without hiring outside help or paying for expensive services.

If you hit a roadblock, google is just about the best tool out there for finding step by step instructions on the aforementioned services and advice. If you hit a snag, don’t worry, it’s almost guaranteed someone’s been there before and provided instructions for people going through the same thing.