E-Commerce: How to Sell Online Without Google and Facebook
Have you ever read Google’s advertising policy? How about Facebook’s? If you look closely at each of these, you’ll find an interesting paragraph that can make or break your e-commerce success:
When you sell pocket knives online for a living, this is a major issue. Google and Facebook won’t take your advertising money, so you’re locked out of the biggest display advertising networks in the world. That’s my reality as the Marketing Manager at knife retailer, Blade HQ. And I love it. I’ve spent 7 years in the digital trenches learning how to capture eyeballs and attention in an environment where we live or die by organic traffic. And the interesting thing? The principles we use in this e-commerce ecosystem will work for any business. Learn them, implement them and maintain them for success in selling online.
The principles we use in this e-commerce ecosystem will work for any business.
I presented these concepts in front of an audience of 75-ish marketing peers at Internet Retailer Conference and Exposition (IRCE) in Chicago, June 2018:
Presenting at IRCE. Photo by Tony Passey.
Here is a great writeup from the folks at Digital Commerce 360, or you can listen to all 26 minutes of the presentation here (I recorded it from my pocket as I presented, so my heavy breathing comes standard, but it’s functional):
Feel free to flip through the slides, and I’ll try to unpack a few of the most important ideas down below in this post:
Without the luxury of display advertising on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and AdWords, we’ve had to get creative with our marketing at Blade HQ. There are thousands of tips, tricks and ideas that we implement in our marketing, but the primary way we sell pocket knives online looks like this:
Niche marketing is our honey hole. We know our audience. We know how they talk, what they’re talking about, and where they hang out online. And we feed that niche. The result? They come to Blade HQ first to spend their hard earned money with us.
ORGANIC TRAFFIC for E-COMMERCE
Rumor has it, the average e-commerce company sees about 30% of their traffic and revenue from organic. Ours is 60%. Every dip in our search engine results rankings hurts, so we spend a lot of time, energy and money doing white-hat SEO to make sure we’re ranking high. Here’s what that looks like through the lens of our butterfly knives (aka balisongs) category:
Seems like a lot of work, right? It is. Each piece of this initiative took hours and hours of time. Here’s the onsite Butterfly Knife Buyers Guide, and here’s the video buyers guide on the same topic:
And here is the shop tour we did with one of our manufacturers:
Winning with organic traffic takes time and consistent maintenance, but it’s worth it. The difference between ranking 1st for these keywords or ranking 5th was a 47% increase in Items Sold and a 25% increase in Revenue. Boom.
EMAIL MARKETING for E-COMMERCE
Email marketing has always been a significant revenue driver at Blade HQ. That said, it’s also an important contributor to improving and increasing our rankings in search engine results pages. Look at the power of email to help us climb the rankings on the important keywords “Bowie Knife” and “Bowie Knives.”
You’ll notice that when we launched this campaign on April 13th we sent thousands of eyeballs to this particular category. Google loves eyeballs and it will reward you for sending legitimate traffic to your category pages. Our email marketing is the backbone of that traffic. We win when we combine our email marketing with our other channels to create rich, multi-faceted content.
YOUTUBE for E-COMMERCE
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world, so we use all the same keyword optimization techniques on YouTube that we’re using for our organic search on Google. It works beautifully for e-commerce. We run two YouTube channels: one dedicated to lifestyle video content and the other dedicated to product overviews of our pocket knives. In many instances, video is the cornerstone of our campaigns. I spent a lot of time writing this blog post about Video Marketing on YouTube, so dig through that one at your leisure. More than anything, YouTube is about feeding your niche and learning to game the algorithm. Here’s what learning and utilizing the algorithm looks like on a video project:
This video resonated within our audience and outside our core group of knife knuts– it broadened the base. Not every video we create sees runaway success like this one– it was a bit of an outlier for us. That said, we’ve seen excellent success with consistent, knowledge-filled content like our series, Knife Banter:
We’ve completed 50 episodes of Knife Banter now, we’re averaging 120k views per video, and we’ve seen a total of 5.5 million views. These are pocket knives, people! This is as niche as it gets, but we’re seeing millions of views by feeding the niche. A few tips for YouTube:
Take some time to learn how YouTube works.
Learn how to make effective thumbnails. Casey Neistat and Mark Rober are thumbnail geniuses.
Put Google UTM tracking on the backlinks from your video to measure the ROI on your video program.
INSTAGRAM for E-COMMERCE
Rumor has it, there are 800 million active monthly users on Instagram. You should be utilizing it as a marketing tool for your e-commerce. Here’s a case study in the numbers we see from three different types of post on our Blade HQ Instagram:
See that middle one? We had a fan art contest where one of our fans hand painted a Van Gogh with a Spyderco Paramilitary 2 knife. And he did a rockin’ job! We traded him a knife for the painting, and we display it proudly in our office. This is the sort of fanaticism we see from our niche. And we love them for it.
REDDIT for E-COMMERCE
Using Reddit as a company is hard and frowned upon by the various communities on the platform. But in our niche where you’ve got sub-Reddits like r/knifeclub, r/knives, and r/balisong with thousands of contributors, it only makes sense for us to be involved there. So, how do you avoid ending up on r/hailcorporate? Here’s a case study in how we feed the niche:
To review: we weren’t looking to “shill” on Reddit. We were being useful to the community and the community rewarded us with links and traffic from our content. Feeding the niche creates good will and effective marketing.
BONUS TOOLS
Here are a few tools and tips to implement into your marketing program:
Use Google UTM links on all e-commerce content: Instagram link in bio, YouTube links, blog links, Facebook links. Your boss is likely going to want to see a positive ROI from the content your create.
This is a base model of the Google Doc we use as our editorial calendar to coordinate our marketing. It works very well for what we do. We have additional tabs to coordinate each category of content we create.
This is the tracking spreadsheet we use to measure our marketing success. There are tools that you can pay thousands of dollars monthly that will do all of this automatically. Small business = this is our cheap workaround.
Consider hiring an agency to do the critical busywork of SEO (updating page metas on PDPs, category pages, blog articles, etc.). We hired local Salt Lake City SEO agency, Firetoss, and they’ve done an extremely good job for us.
Read this book: The Art of SEO