Dabrian Marketing Group

What To Know Before Setting Up WooCommerce

October 3, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

In my last blog post, I went over how to use the popular ecommerce platform Shopify. Today, we’ll focus on another popular ecommerce tool used by millions of online stores: WooCommerce. WooCommerce is a free WordPress plugin used to power a large portion of the ecommerce industry. It can be easily applied to any WordPress website.

Why Should I Use WooCommerce?

One thing that sets WooCommerce apart from platforms like Shopify is that it’s completely open source. This means that you have as much control over the site as you please. In this case, with great freedom comes great opportunity — you can design your site any way you think would best appeal to your customers. Apart from web design, you also have control over most of the ecommerce process, from the kind of products you sell to shipping, and then to payment and checkout. This allows for a good amount of optimization on your part.

How To Create a WooCommerce Store

In order to take your first step on your ecommerce journey, you have to download and install the WooCommerce plugin. You should be able to do this from your WordPress dashboard. Then, run the WooCommerce Setup Wizard, which will help you build the basic framework of your site.

From this point forward, it’s up to you to manage your site’s settings. You have power over things from your default currency to the logistics of your checkout page. You can also choose from WooCommerce’s huge selection of themes for your site in order to build an attractive store for your future customers.

WooCommerce’s Product Options

With some ecommerce platforms, you’re only able to sell physical goods. This isn’t the case with WooCommerce. With this plugin, you can sell anything you put your mind to. Things like downloads, access codes and services can all be distributed through WooCommerce, on top of good old physical products. This is another example of what makes this plugin so open-ended. No matter what your specialty is, WooCommerce will help you take it online!

Once you choose what to sell, you must then make sure that the product pages are as helpful and informative as possible. The more product information you give customers, the more likely they’ll be sure whether or not they want to make a purchase. More information also makes your store look more credible.

Adding Additional Content

Like any other website, it’s always a good idea to provide your users with rich content when it comes to ecommerce. Things like product reviews, case studies, blog posts and more all help to enhance the user experience for your online store. After all, 82% of consumers have a more positive view of a brand after reading its custom content. From an SEO perspective, it will also increase your search engine visibility, therefore bringing in more potential customers.

Best WooCommerce Plugins To Start With

For those of you who have less experience with web design, WooCommerce’s freedom may be frightening. Never fear! There are plenty of plugins available that make setup manageable for anybody regardless of experience.

YITH WooCommerce Ajax Search
This plugin helps the user find exactly what they are looking for with a handy search bar at the top of the page. Reducing the time it takes for the customer to find what they want leads to more sales!

WooCommerce Checkout Manager
Checkout Manager allows you to play around with the layout of your Checkout page. Having a Checkout page that is as easy as possible to maneuver will reflect well on your conversion numbers.

Stripe Payment Gateway
Stripe is another way to streamline your checkout page. It does so by allowing users to pay on your site instead of being redirected to a different one, e.g PayPal. You’d be surprised how finicky users can be, and keeping them on your site throughout the payment process will make it more likely that they stay focused on making a purchase.

Dynamic Pricing and Discounts by ELEX
This plugin will allow you more creativity with the pricing of your items. Discounts based on many different factors are enabled by this plugin, which will help you increase your sales. You’re also able to implement Buy One, Get One Free deals.

YITH WooCommerce Wishlist
Many of the ecommerce stores you have visited probably had some sort of wishlist feature. This is a great thing to implement in your own store. It gives people who don’t want to make purchases immediately a reason to come back once they’ve made up their mind. With the YITH WooCommerce Wishlist plugin, they can also share this list with family and friends for holidays or birthdays.

WooCommerce Currency Switcher
If you plan on selling your products globally, the WooCommerce Currency Switcher is a must-have plugin for your site. It allows your international customers to easily switch between currencies. It even calculates the conversion rate so they know exactly what they’re spending.

WooMarketing Bundle
In ecommerce, marketing is one of the most important areas you have to consider if you want to make sales. The Woomarketing Bundle is a plugin developed by the WooCommerce team that gives you control over things like email marketing and remarketing.

Conclusion

In closing, WooCommerce is a great way to sell your products and services online no matter who you are. It grants you the freedom to go in whichever direction you want with your online store and can be finely tuned to get the best conversion rates possible. With a quality product and a quality site, you’ll be making money in no time!

If you have further questions about WooCommerce or need help developing your ecommerce store, contact us or leave a comment below!

The 5 Questions Everybody’s Asking About Shopify

September 26, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Increased internet access means one thing for your business: it’s easier than ever to make money online. A variety of ecommerce platforms are now available to connect merchants with potential customers. Popular choices include WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and X-Cart, but which one is the best for you?

The most popular ecommerce platform on the Internet is Shopify. Shopify is great if you’re just starting out in ecommerce. The platform makes setting up your online store simple and painless. With Shopify, anybody can become successful selling products online. Here you can find the answers to some of the most common questions people have about Shopify.

How Shopify Works

Unlike other retailers, the Shopify merchant (you) doesn’t need to have their own inventory. Instead, you’re able to buy a product from another retailer after the customer places an order for it. This is a model called drop-shipping. This is great if you are starting out with little in terms of money or products. The retailer ships the products to the customer without you ever coming in contact with them. Shopify then pays you the difference.

What if you already have an existing line of products you want to sell? Great! Shopify can still work for you. Also, if you’re worrying whether or not the platform is secure, worry no longer. Shopify uses the most advanced security features in the industry, meaning yours and your customers’ money is safe. Shopify is a fantastic platform for getting a website up and running to give your business an online presence.

What To Sell On Shopify

The most important decision you will make for your Shopify store is picking a product to sell online. If you already have products, you can use what you know about your business and transfer it to ecommerce. If you’re going with the drop-shipping model, we recommend choosing a specific niche. For example, sell men’s golf clothing instead of all kinds of men’s clothing. This will keep your store from being buried under all the others selling broad categories of products.

How To Make Money On Shopify

You need to take the different products and prices of your competitors into account when running your ecommerce store. You should also put your best foot forward in terms of marketing. This is in order to attract enough clicks and impressions to keep your sales numbers up. Social media, SEO and Google Ads are all good ideas in terms of marketing since competition in ecommerce is high.

How To Set Up A Shopify Store

The Shopify platform makes it very easy and intuitive to start building your store. After creating your Shopify admin account, the first thing you need to do is start adding products. You add a product by going to the Products page, clicking “Add Product,” and entering a title and description.

Once all your products are added, you then need to pick a theme for your site. Pick a theme that you think best represents what you’re selling. For example, you don’t want to use a black-on-black theme to sell flower seeds. Finally, you must choose a URL that your customers can reach your store from.

DaBrian Marketing recommends that you use words in your URL that are relevant to what you are selling. If you want to sell flower seeds you should include either “flower” or “seeds” in your URL. This is so customers who click on a link to your site know what they’re getting into. There are detailed instructions on all of these steps on the Shopify website.

From this point, it’s all about organizing your ecommerce store for the customer. You should make your site as easy to use as possible so customers can find exactly what they’re looking for. This is an extremely important aspect of your online store. You’ll miss out on a ton of sales if the customer can’t find what they’re looking for.

You also have to think about making your website mobile responsive. A mobile-friendly design is extremely important in today’s market. Nowadays more people surf the Internet on their phones than on a desktop! Making your site the best it can be requires knowledge of web development and design. You can find free tips and resources for these areas in other DaBrian blog posts such as our recent articles on WordPress and Content Management Systems.

How To Find Shopify Stores

For the potential customers reading this, there are countless stores on the Shopify platform that sell a variety of products. You can find anything from clothing, watches, and eyewear to teas and electronics — and that’s just for starters. There are plenty of blog posts and resources available to help you find the perfect store for your needs. If you want to open your own store, it’s also a good idea to check out others that are successful. Shopify even gives out awards for the stores it considers the best in specific categories.

In conclusion, Shopify is a great option for people new to ecommerce. It’s simple, effective, and popular with people looking to shop online. With good marketing and strategy, you too can become an ecommerce success story!

Still have questions about Shopify or ecommerce as a whole? Contact us today or leave a comment below!

DaBrian Marketing Visits South Mountain YMCA

September 19, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

The DaBrian Marketing team recently had the privilege of visiting South Mountain YMCA for a day of team-building activities. Operating as an independent YMCA Camp and Conference Center since 1983, The South Mountain YMCA Camps have been providing youth recreational and educational programs for over 60 years.

The YMCA serves over 8,500 individuals annually with participants predominantly from the local area and surrounding communities. Their mission is to provide a camping experience as well as educational and other programs that build personal leadership, character and life skills while developing caring, honesty, respect and responsibility in young people, families and communities.

The beautiful 600 acre landscape of the South Mountain YMCA delivered a picturesque setting for a day of team building activities. Typical team building programs include a high ropes course, climbing tower, zip-line, and a low ropes course. Traditional programs can be expanded around a team-building goal.

Most of our staff conquered the climbing tower and enjoyed the zip-line trip back to ground-zero. But for those scared of heights another adventure awaited: Paintball. Because what better way to show your coworkers you appreciate them than to shoot them with a paintball!? Thankfully, South Mountain Adventures provide modified versions of paintball guns which pack a lesser punch; making this a safe and enjoyable time for all.

After a quick training session on the equipment, we split into two teams and developed our strategies. The red team was victorious almost every match, largely because the blue team was saddled with agency owner, Danny Laws.

There are so many valuable reasons for a business to hold team building events or activities. Not only do they give your staff a break from the usual grind, but team building events can have serious business and personal impacts. If you’re looking for something special to do with your team the South Mountain YMCA is an excellent choice. Whether your team would enjoy paintball like DaBrian Marketing, the rock climbing wall, or a leisurely hike, there is something for everyone at South Mountain.

South Mountain will work with you to plan an event that your whole team can participate in and will remember for years. For more information contact Greg McCrohan at 610-670-2267, ext. 250, or by emailing gmccrohan@smymca.org.

3 Web Design Essentials for Business Owners

August 10, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

A good web design is essential to the success of any business. Business Owners and executives have many choices but limited information to make the best decision. The average lifespan of a website is about 3-5 years so you’ll be making this decision often. Here are 3 ways to break down your next web design project:

Invest in Your Web Design based on Needs & Goals

The initial investment for a new website will range from an estimated $3,000 to $20,000. It’s just a matter of getting the features and functionality that you need for your business. The list of options for your web design project included:

Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Web Design: WIX & Squarespace are famous examples of a DIY website. It will cost you about $15 per month for a domain and access to easy to use software to build the website yourself. It will require your time to create and launch the website.
Customize Web Design: A custom web design project usually requires that you hire a freelancer or ad agency with the expertise to make recommendations as well as differentiate your business from the competition. They are often compensated based on design skills, technical skills, time, and cost. WordPress & Magento are popular platforms for custom web development with an hourly rate ranging from $50-$250.
Ecommerce Web Design: Bigcommerce, Woocommerce, and Shopify are a few popular examples of customizable ecommerce platforms. The cost of the platform start as low as $9 per month and some of the ecommerce platforms take a transaction fee (1-3%). Additional functionality sometimes requires the purchase of apps.

Most of these options include responsive websites and support mobile-friendly websites. Consider your businesses users and covers all devices, views, and resolutions that are most common. Don’t confuse a responsive site with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project is built on top of existing web technologies to enable blazing-fast page rendering and content delivery. The implementation of AMP often requires customization and additional time for programming which will impact the cost of your web design project.

Limit Security Risks with Good Website Hosting Services

Building your new website in the best environment and protecting is many cases is an afterthought. You need the necessary storage and security to support your website features, functionality, and volume of users on the website. It’s not a one size fit all scenarios. There are 3 common types of hosting environments:

Shared Website Hosting: Your website is located on the same server as hundreds of other websites. You can have it for as cheap as $2/month with the average cost in the $5-$10/month range.
Private Website Hosting: A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is still a shared environment and is usually limited to 10-20 websites per server. Price ranges from $25-$250 per monthly
Dedicated Hosting: You have a server all for yourself. Prices start at $50/month and go all the way up to $500+/month.

Hosting environments may include the cost of daily backups, SSL certificate, Content Delivery Network (CDN), staging or testing environment, free migration, and more. Based on your business needs, some of these features are more important than others so consider the quality and limitations such as visitors per month or bandwidth of the additional features associated with your hosting service.

Plan for Website Maintenance: Hourly vs. Plans

The website maintenance can be separate from hosting services and after the website has been launched to the public. Your website will no doubt need to be updated, change graphics, photos, text, and the code. There are 2 standard approaches to website maintenance:

Hourly Rate (“Pay as You Go”): the maintenance is charged at an hourly rate and can range from $100-$300. We charge only per quota (capped every 15 minutes), but this is not the case for every web design agency. Pay as You Go website maintenance clients generally are less of a priority than fixed cost website maintenance plan clients.
Web Support Plans (Fixed Cost Plans): are usually more economical because they are for a prepaid block of hours. The fixed cost web support plans are often discounted by 5-20% off the hourly rate. There is usually a service level agreement that states the how long it will take to implement your requested changes (48 hours).

When evaluating your website maintenance options, consider what’s included in the web support plan vs. pay as you go. Some web maintenance and support plans are limited to content, images, etc. while hourly rate changes usually apply to a longer range of these such as landing page creation, email subscription implementation, etc.

Don’t think your business is covering the 3 web design essentials, give us a call for a free consultation.

Introducing Responsive Search Ads

August 3, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group 2 Comments

How Responsive Search Ads Are Transforming Ad Writing

Google Marketing Live 2018 event was only a few weeks ago. One of the “big” announcements was a new Search Ad Format – Responsive Ads. This is still within Beta, but will be fully available soon. Whether you are able to begin testing Responsive Search Ads now, or just want to be prepared for when it is available, let’s discuss some strategic approaches to these new search ads.

How are Responsive Ads Different

First, stop thinking about Ad Copy as a whole ad unit. We need to start thinking of Search Ads as plug-and-play components. There are Headlines, Descriptions, URL and paths. The current Expanded Text Ads (ETA) allow for a maximum of

(2) x 30 Character Headlines
(1) x 80 Character Description
(1) x URL (your final URL root domain)
(2) x 15 Character Paths

While that was an increase over the Legacy Ads, the new Responsive Ads are even longer. These new ads allow for up to:

(3) x 30 Character Headlines
(1) x 90 Character Description
(1) x URL (same as ETA Ads)
(2) x 15 Paths (same as ETA Ads)

What Else Is Changing?

In addition to the increase in characters allowed, the other, more drastic change is how Responsive Search Ads are constructed. You no longer write a single (full) Ad Copy. Instead, you write multiple (max of 15) Headlines and a few (max of 4) Descriptions. Google Ads (formerly AdWords) then “constructs” the final Ad Copy by using 3 of your Headlines and 1 of your Descriptions.

It is important to know that any of your Headlines could appear as the first, second, or third Headline, but will not be repeated within the same Ad Copy. There is however a “Pinning” option which allows you to pre-select a Headline to only be shown in a given Headline position.

Why The Ad Copy Change

This new approach to treating Ad Copy as components as opposed to a single Ad unit has the biggest impact on Ad Copy Testing. You no longer need to have multiple unique Ads within a single Ad Group. Instead having just 1 Responsive Search Ad in which you write 5 Headlines and 2 Descriptions with a Final URL and (optional) paths, is equivalent 120 Ads. The testing is then automatically done within Google Ads.

After this Responsive Search Ad runs and it becomes clear that certain Headlines and/or Descriptions are being shown more often due to maximized performance, then it is time to start a new test. Rather than writing a completely new Ad or making a subtle change to a current Ad, by replacing a few Headlines and/or Descriptions the auto testing starts all over again.

Are Responsive Ads Better

Since these Ads are still in Beta, the verdict is not in yet. Longer Ads allow advertisers to say more, which going from Legacy to ETA ads seems to be very helpful. The real question here is “Will writing the components of an ad (Headlines and Descriptions) separately and allowing Google Ads to auto create the actual Ad Copy that will be seen by searchers lead to a performance boost? Only time will tell.

Let’s us know your thoughts on or experience with Responsive Search Ads. Are you a fan of the segmented approach to Ad Copy writing or do you prefer to have more control over how your final Ad Copy will look?

Before You Use Google AdWords…

June 13, 2018 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Although creating an Google AdWords account is easy and free, there is a good amount of preparation work that should be done before paying for your first PPC click. Before you put your company credit card info in AdWords, make sure you can clearly answer the following questions:

What Is The End Goal For Your PPC?

Stephen Covey wrote it best in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” Knowing if you want to build a subscriber list, generate leads via form submissions, or increase online sales, will change your campaign targeting and setting as well as your keywords, call to actions, and extensions.

Who Is The Target Audience For Your Google AdWords Ads?

Know who you want to reach and engage with online. This will impact audience targeting setting including which network(s) to target (Search and/or Display). Are you trying to generate new traffic or focused on driving return visitors via remarketing? This would drastically impact the verbiage of your ad copy and landing page(s). Pairing the answer to the first two questions, will help you write targeted and clear Call-To-Actions within your ad copy and landing pages.

Why Should Your Audience Click On Your PPC Ad?

Without knowing your company’s value proposition, your ad copy on Google AdWords will be very generic and unlikely to get clicks. Make sure you highlight features and benefits that you (and only you) can offer your customers. Give them a reason to click on your ad. Here is the example (with my notes) from Google AdWords Support:

The Headlines hint at who they are targeting – someone looking for insurance within their budget.

The body/ad description line builds trust, offers and discount and the suggested call to action is request an online quote. (Sidenote – don’t forget to leverage Ad Extensions to add more specific details to your ads.)

How Will Your Customers Reach You After Their AdWords Click?

Go through your customers journey yourself. What are they searching, does your ad catch your own attention, and is your landing page relevant and easy to use/navigate? After you have done that once, consider doing it again on a different devices (computer, tablet, or most importantly mobile.)

After, going through these quick questions, you will be prepared to setup and begin running your Google AdWords. As you go through the setup process, keep in mind your target audience and what their needs/wants are. Use your ad copy and landing page to speak directly to their problem/pain points and your solution to them. Ensure your landing pages are as mobile friendly as possible and that your conversion funnel/path can be easily completed on any devices. Once you are ready to go live, start collecting data and reap the benefit of all your preparation work.

Have any questions, or think we missed a crucial piece of preparation work for setting up a PPC campaign, let us know in the comments or via twitter or facebook.