Have you just started using your online store and wondering what promotion channels to choose?
Or, maybe you just want to accelerate sales of your existing dropshipping business? Making money and dreaming of your first million dollars?
In both cases we have something interesting for all drop shippers – both experienced and just starting an online business.
This is the story of a successful SMM strategy for a dropshipping project that brought us $4,587 in just 3 months.
Now World of Harry, an online store for Potterheads, brings us income that grows day by day – and we are more than satisfied with that.
A brief note about our project
World of Harry is a WordPress online shop based on the AliDropship plugin. It offers a wide range of Harry Potter movie related merchandise: costumes, clothing, gifts, gadget stuff, posters, jewelry jewelry, and other dropshipped products. Such ecommerce store is a true paradise for Potterheads, isn’t it? Here they can find products of their dreams. The only question was: how to make this audience and our project happily meet each other.
We have no secrets! Our strategy was as follows:
If you sell online, there are different ways to find your audience. We used several promotion channels for dropshipping stores including PPC and on-page SEO, but the main focus was on working in social media – Facebook fan groups.
Instagram, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest were also involved, but on an additional basis. After we tried it all ourselves we are happy to share with you our tactics of how to deal with dropshipping on Facebook.
First look at the brief description of the simple steps we made
Step 1: Create a Facebook fanpage for your dropshipping online store and fill it with product posts and entertaining materials. Don’t forget to add calls-to-action, hashtags and enticing captions. Visual content is always the winner!
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ep 2: Find and join dozens of niche fan groups with as great a number of subscribers as possible.
Step 3: Share your entertaining fanpage content in these groups to get likes, shares and subscribers to your fanpage.
Step 4: Watch all these activities turn into rich social traffic to your ecommerce store. You should see high conversions, great revenues and happy clients!
Anyone can do it without any special skills and expertise, don’t you agree?
How we followed these 4 steps
Step 1:
We created the website’s fanpage on Facebook and filled it with primary content before starting the promotion.
What was the content?
We published a mix of product (commercial) and entertaining (neutral) posts. The second category included actors’ shots, citations, movie related humor, etc. Photo captions contained calls-to-action, links to worldofharry.com and popular relevant hashtags to grow the reach.
Example: “Like if you remember! Love Harry Potter? Visit us: WorldOfHarry.com. #HarryPotter#Potter #HarryPotterForever”.
Product posts contained a merchandise image, several calls-to-action (“like”, “share”, “tag a friend”), a product name, a note about free worldwide shipment and a link to the product page.
Example: “Like and Share if you want this Severus Snape Magical Wand! Tag a friend who would love this! FREE Shipping Worldwide. Get it here /link/”.
Step 2:
We found numerous closed and open Harry Potter related groups – the biggest ones with most active subscribers (our target audience).
Social networks are a densely populated meeting place for any movie fans, with Potterheads being no exception, and so it was not a problem at all. We joined these groups, although sometimes it took time for us to be approved as members.
Step 3:
Having become approved group members, we shared posts from the World of Harry fanpage in these groups. It is simple – you can easily do it yourself!
Just follow these points:
A. Select a post to be shared in a FB group. Click the “Share” button and select the second option – “Share…” (the first one will make a repost in your personal timeline, not a group).
B. Select the “Share in a group” option.
C. Start typing the group’s name in the “Group” field until you see the needed group name offered by Facebook below the field.
D. Click the offered group name – it will appear in the “Group” field. Click the “Post” button. Done!
Your repost is already published in the group or is waiting to be approved and published (depending on the group’s moderation policy).
Our reposts were published right away or quite soon after pre-moderation. Since all the posts were visual, entertaining and non-advertising (commercial product posts were not shared in groups), about 99% of them were approved by the groups’ admins and appeared in the subscribers’ feed. Sometimes (in the biggest and most popular communities) we had to pay a little fee, which was about $25 for the post to display in the group for 3 days. These expenses always paid off many times!
The posts about Harry Potter got a substantial reach on FB, with numerous likes and shares. The reach grew every hour – just look at these numbers:
Step 4:
And then came the time for CONVERSIONS!
Since the post captions contained backlinks to worldofharry.com, the webstore’s traffic stably made up 7,000-9,000 sessions per month.
Look at the number of paid orders in the website’s dashboard – they were all received within a couple of weeks:
And these are payment notifications in our mailbox:
The Results
In the first three months of SMM activities in Facebook groups, the dropshipping webstore got 353 orders from social traffic. Fulfilled orders brought $4,587. The average monthly income is currently $1,500.
The Conclusion
Promotion of your business activity in the field of dropshipping on Facebook is very simple and extremely effective for any fan online store. Taking into account that FB boasts billions of users, every merchandise store can find its audience here.
And every dropshipping store owner can easily follow the steps we’ve described – and repeat our success. Everyone who wanted to start their own drop shipping businesses and now are reading this are on the right way! Using this business model, you don’t need great money to start selling products. Shipping costs – if any– are included in your price.
Through your built in direct fulfilment system, using marketplaces like Aliexpress makes it very easy to find reliable dropshipping suppliers for your ecommerce business.
