Ask HN: Any specific marketing tips for an e-commerce startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any specific marketing tips for an e-commerce startup?

8 pointsanujkk9 comments

I need some advice on how to promote an e-commerce startup both online and offline on low budget. It will be similar to http://www.flipkart.com but it will focus only on selling musical instruments.

How and where would you market it? Facebook? Google Ads? Myspace? Youtube? Twitter? How will you get first few customers?

I have read "The Noob Guide to Online Marketing" but would like to know if you guys have any tips specific to this kind of business.

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There are some Mixergy interviews which should give you some good pointers. For example, this one - http://mixergy.com/trevor-ginn-interview/

Note the transcripts are free even for the paid interviews.

Edit: I'm guessing you are aiming at the Indian market. There is a lot of good budding music talent there, but I haven't seen a good social network for young musicians. Maybe you should build one and then your store around that.

Watch this talk by Andrew McDonough of Tribesports, which started out as a sports goods ecommerce platform, but then started really taking off when it transitioned to being a sports community site - http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/dogfooding

Edit 2: Have a look at http://fandalism.com/home/ for inspiration. If you don't want to build your own network, you could probably use one such upcoming network.

Yes it is for Indian market. I would love to build social network for Indian musicians. That's also one of my several ideas but due to my last two unsuccessful attempts to build a community I know it is a difficult, time consuming and painful process(not impossible).

According to you which one is a better strategy - a) Build a community and then a store around it. b) Build a store and then a community around it.

One such site that has both e-commerce and community is http://www.bodybuilding.com

It's hard to say which is a better strategy, but I would answer that by asking which one provides more value to your users.

Are there specific problems with buying musical instruments that you are going to solve much better than existing stores? Or better, is buying musical instruments the biggest problem musicians have in your market?

Or are you more likely to increase their chances of success by connecting them with other musicians?

According to me there are mainly three kinds of problems young musicians(in India)face -

1) Buying musical instrument is a problem here because there aren't enough physical shops even in Delhi(capital). You can count them on fingers and they aren't conveniently located(too far). Also, they may or may not keep instruments you want. Their margin is also high(30%-40%).

2) Unlike west there are very few music bands here. There are individual musicians and most of them don't take it any further than hobby because they are unable to form a band or they are more interested in bollywood. So, there is a need of good platform for musicians to meet and collaborate.

3) They also need a platform to showcase their talent. They use youtube but it isn't that effective. I believe a combination of video/audio sharing, community voting and rewards for top artists(like producing their first album) may do the trick.

You must talk to Paras Chopra of Visual Website Optimizer. He once built a platform for indie musicians (http://kroomsa.com) and he's based in Delhi too. From what I remember, it didn't really work out for him. He's written about it on his blog - http://paraschopra.com/blog. I'm sure he will have some valuable experiences to share.

Music and dance talent shows seem very popular on Indian television these days. A more open internet-based version of such contests could be quite powerful.

I need some advice on how to promote an e-commerce startup both online and offline profitably. (FTFY)

In my business (PPC), we speak in terms of two main metrics: market demand (measured by potential revenue), and cost per acquisition. We can take just about any company that has a large enough market demand, and run a profitable campaign for them. The first month or two you should have a reasonable budget to allow for testing of the market and optimization, and from then on it is smoother sailing with reducing conversion costs.

To compete in PPC, you should have a pro work on it every day. I really recommend outsourcing it if you dont have the time or knowledge. Costs in India are probably much cheaper; around here it would run you 12% in management fees (with a $1500-$2000 monthly minimum fee).

If you think your business is worthy of targeting a large market, I guarantee you that you can run a successful PPC campaign, while spending many thousands of dollars a month in ads.

In order to get sales, you need traffic of course. I would focus on two channels at first and then look at others. This keeps you more focussed. These channels would be SEO and SEA.

SEO: Start writing about your topic. Both on your own site, a blog and try to get articles on external sites as well (build up the amount of links to your site). Try to include as much relevant terms in your text.

SEA: Start with a small budget, and maybe even one instrument. Set up a dedicated landingpage to point people clicking on the ads to. Keep it focussed on that topic. There are a lot of good articles about landingpage layouts and texts. Try to analyse the traffic coming from SEA and keep optimizing the landingpage and the flow throughout the website to maximize the amount of orders you get from this channel.

Hope this helps!

I suggest first find your niche market then go for bigger market. who are your target customers i.e. first time buyers or professionals. Each set of customers have different kind of issues and need different way of marketing.

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