The days of warehouses are long gone, replaced by dropshipping, an e-commerce business model specifically designed to cut storage and logistics costs. However, the dropshipping market is a vast and highly saturated area of e-commerce, which means adopting a completely different set of marketing strategies for dropshipping.
One key element on how to promote dropshippping store is considering the competition. There are many dropshipping stores and businesses out there, two or more for every dropshipping supplier. If we add that every dropshipping store has its own outreach and promotional strategy, it’s easy to become just another drop in the ocean that is the dropshipping market.
This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get ahead, far from it – it just means out-of-the-box thinking is required to stand out. In other words, if you want sales to soar, you need to have a carefully crafted marketing strategy for dropshipping stores.
Importance of Marketing Your Dropshipping Business
“How to promote dropshipping business” is the key question in the minds of dropshippers entering the market, and for a good reason. Products don’t sell themselves, no matter their high quality or how good the deal you’ve made with your dropshipping suppliers is.
While physical stores have windows and banners, digital dropshipper stores require a completely different approach for a different market, even though they might appear simpler to manage.
Dropshipping marketing is a battle on all digital fronts. It requires writing captivating and unique narratives for your store, brand, and logo design, as well as showcasing and reviewing products. All of these should be just cogs in a well-oiled marketing machine that, when functioning properly, can make your business truly take off.
12 Strategies to Market Your Dropshipping Marketing
Depending on your dropshipping niche, different marketing approaches will yield different results in the global dropshipping market. There is no harm in casting a wide net when starting out, and our outlined strategies are worth trying regardless. After all, there is no wrong step in marketing for dropshipping, and every mistake is merely a marker of success.
Let’s look at some ways your store can stand out in today’s vast dropshipping market.
Content Marketing
Blogs have become an effective marketing strategy in recent years. Curiosity combined with information availability has made people willing to search the Internet about the products and media they consume. This internet search revolution has brought about the advent of blog posts and informative guides, which are beginning to find their place in dropshipping marketing strategies.
Regarding how to advertise dropshipping businesses using this tactic, the answer is content writing. Creating informative blog posts like guides, tutorials, manuals, or even listicles about a certain type of product you sell can greatly increase your website’s reach and traffic.
This helps market your products by offering more information, but it also has the positive side effect of gaining customer trust and loyalty for your store. These, in turn, serve as a great organic boost to your sales.
How to Optimize Your Dropshipping Blog for SEO
Blog posts are only the beginning. If you want your content to stand out amidst the sea of dropshipping websites, SEO can take your blog posts to the next level. SEO stands for search engine optimization, a marketing discipline that concerns how content is displayed on the Internet, particularly search engines.
Modern search engines index websites based on their content and the metadata it produces. This is done by analyzing keywords on a web page, how often they repeat within it, and their placement. When users search for certain types of products, a search engine-optimized article ranks higher among all the other search results, which makes it more likely for users to click on that website.
Developing an SEO strategy is useful for making your products stand out in the global dropshipping market. When your articles rank higher, it means internet users searching for information are more likely to click on your dropshipping website instead of a competitor’s. This creates a chain reaction of product-placement hyperlinks, leading to users checking out your store, not just your articles.
Youtube & Video Content
With the advent of TikTok, videos have become the norm in both entertainment and marketing. This has expanded to TikTok’s spiritual predecessor, YouTube, though the two video content sites take different approaches to marketing products. TikTok favors short and snappy previews, while YouTube targets full, detailed reviews.
Depending on your dropshipping niche, different types of video content can produce different sales results. This can range from product reviews to unboxing videos to listicles about certain types of products.
An effective strategy is to look for channels or creators within your niche and collaborate with them. Alternatively, you can create your own affiliate channel and test your skills in front of the lens! As we said before, there is no wrong step when it comes to marketing your dropshipping store, so feel free to experiment with what works and what doesn’t.
Develop Your Email Marketing Strategy
Emails may seem like an outdated communication method, but they have remained a staple in information sharing and marketing. Depending on the type of dropshipping product being sold, there are several ways to develop your email marketing strategy, the two most common ones being newsletters and promotions.
Newsletters are a useful and direct way to inform your customers of any new products that have become available in stock and to notify them that already existing ones have been restocked. This is useful for customers who do not frequently open your dropshipping site, as they can be reminded, and their interest in your products becomes reinvigorated with the arrival of a newsletter.
On the other hand, promotions focus on showcasing your already-present dropshipping roster. They can be targeted, meaning if a user has purchased an item, they are sent special recommendations based on that purchase. They can function similarly to a newsletter, showcasing the roster of available products or even ongoing sales.
Social Media & Community Engagement
Social media is the default way of communicating today, making it a powerful marketing tool, especially for dropshipping. A creative social media strategy can put you ahead of the competition and more easily capture people’s attention. A consistent social presence can add to this, boosting reliability in customers’ eyes and making you stand out in the vast dropshipping market, increasing sales as a nice side benefit.
Choose the Right Social Media Platforms
Social media-oriented marketing aims to share information but with a human face behind it. This means informing your customers about the products your dropshipping business sells and showcasing them effectively. Depending on them, different social media presences will give different results and require different approaches.
Pinterest is the most straightforward site for focusing on the aesthetic, be it home decor or fashionable clothing. Video-oriented sites like TikTok or Instagram skew towards displaying the product being used in action. Facebook, meanwhile, facilitates conversations with users through comments or direct messages.
To find a great example of managing social media for your dropshipping brand, pick a dropshipper store brand and check all the social media sites you can find, paying close attention to their content. While copying their methods verbatim is discouraged and will produce less-than-ideal results, knowing how your competitors operate helps you put your own spin on the social media equation.
Implement Retargeting Campaigns
A fact of all websites is that most people who visit the site will most likely not purchase an item right away. What happens is similar to window shopping in a physical store: most of your traffic is people perusing and letting their choice sit for a while before deciding for or against getting it. This is where retargeting campaigns come in.
Retargeting means displaying relevant ads to people who have visited your site before. This involves tracking customers’ choices through website cookies and displaying items they might like based on what they’ve clicked on or bought. These types of ads have become a dropshipping industry standard and offer a great advantage in the number of sales over in-person stores.
Run Giveaways & Promotions
Let’s face it – everyone loves a good giveaway. Most dropshippers don’t consider them because their products come from an outside retailer rather than having some of their stock on hand. Still, a well-organized social media giveaway can put your dropshipping business on the map and bring in customers you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Dropshipping giveaways can take many forms, but the goal is singular — spreading the word of your business far and wide and eventually increasing sales, bringing back the money lost from the product given away. As the adage says, what you put into the world comes back threefold, and that is especially true for giveaways.
Some popular giveaway ideas include reshares on social media, which allow you to pick a winner who would win either one of your products or a discount coupon or code. It doesn’t need to be in the form of a contest, either: you can organize online events in which participants get a discount at your store.
Paid Advertising for Targeted Reach
Paid advertising is a great idea that is often underestimated in the dropshipping market when starting out (or even when you simply need a boost in website traffic). While organic outreach is a great way to grow your dropshipping business, the targeted reach can help people who otherwise wouldn’t interact with your content learn about your site.
It’s no secret that everyone uses paid advertisements for their content, whether influencers or dropshippers. Market research is an effective way to optimize your advertising and ensure it reaches the right people. Not only that but taking a peek at your competitors’ tools and tactics is a useful approach, especially with software like our custom dropshipping tool – Koala Inspector, which can help ease the process of knowing which dropshipping marketing strategy would be the best for your business.
Looking at what the others in your niche are doing can help you fine-tune your paid advertisements and make them stand out. Hiring a specialized marketing team can further give you even more of an edge: marketers are skilled in analyzing audiences, reach, design, and knowing what your business needs at any point in its growth journey.
Work with Influencers
Influencers are the new celebrities, and that’s a fact. But they’re not called influencers without reason. These interesting and captivating internet personalities make money by collaborating with brands and companies. They showcase a company’s products to their own adoring fans.
A common mistake most who want to collaborate with influencers make is discounting the smaller ones and chasing only the bigger, harder-to-reach ones. The right approach is always somewhere in the middle. The right influencer for your niche can increase your sales and make you stand out on the dropshipping market a lot more than a bigger one can.
The reason for this is audience alignment. If your chosen influencers align with your dropshipping product niche, there’s a big chance they’ll enjoy what you have on sale. Of course, reaching a diverse audience is also a step in the right direction and the most obvious way to increase potential sales. It all starts with people ready to enjoy what you have to offer.
Add Reviews
If you’ve ever visited a dropshipping site, you’ll notice that you feel more at ease after finding the review area and reading about customer experiences. This gives the site an air of legitimacy — it shows real sales have occurred. Real people have bought these products and reviewed them. This, too, is an effective tool for increasing the traffic on your dropshipping website and gaining customer trust in the long run.
Adding reviews to your website does not involve fictional ones, of course. Prompting your customers for reviews can be a challenging endeavor but not an impossible one. One idea is to reward customers with a website boon or discount code should they leave an honest review. And if you’re just starting, it can help if you share a screenshot of reviews from your dropshipping suppliers’ sites, if possible.
Even negative reviews can net a positive outcome. Customers getting the full picture is important in building trust, and how you respond to a negative comment or review matters to everyone watching. Having a professional writing voice and offering resolutions instead of fostering further dissatisfaction go a long way.
Upsell & Cross-Sell to Increase Average Order Value
Cross-selling is the art of convincing customers to buy something else along with their usual order. This can benefit buying more things in one go but also increase customer satisfaction, especially if certain benefits come with placing a larger order. For example, free shipping can be allowed if the price of the order exceeds a certain amount, or a discount can be offered for every subsequent item placed in the cart.
Upselling, however, means suggesting a higher-priced version of the same product the customer has placed in their cart. This can include items with more features or specifications or the same item from a different brand, nudging them to look and compare between items. This also increases customer satisfaction, as they can pick the product that best suits their needs.
Both approaches are highly prevalent in the global dropshipping market. It’s easy to get lost in the vast number of products available on dropshipping sites and the different brands and what they offer. Hence, algorithms have been created to track just this, benefiting both the dropshipping retailer and the customers themselves.
Build Loyalty Programs
Customer retention is paramount in the vast digital space of the internet. Even when it comes to physical stores, people are most comfortable sticking with only one or two they visit regularly, making them feel safe and cared for when visiting. Digital stores accomplish this differently through loyalty programs that reward the regulars with discounts or special offers for their products.
While it may seem like a simple concept, loyalty programs can go a long way in fostering customer retention and, as the name suggests, customer loyalty. This can put you higher on the dropshipping market and can even be a more effective business and marketing strategy than just maximizing your number of visitors or clicks on your dropshipping website. Loyal customers can buy from your dropshipping business repeatedly and spread the word when they’re satisfied.
Public Relations and Media Outreach
A brand identity is the basis for any business, but even more so when it comes to dropshipping. Defining your core values and mission early on can help customers feel a kinship with your dropshipping business, especially if your stated values align with theirs. A good basis for your brand can allow you to expand more easily, crafting and curating more bespoke marketing strategies and promotional material.
This can include press releases for new products or even being interviewed about your dropshipping brand in a local newspaper or media outlet. Doing this not only brings awareness about your dropshipping business to more people but also leaves a digital and physical footprint that can help with online search results – thus making your entire dropshipping marketing strategy come full circle.
