The Best Advertising Channel for Ecommerce Startups

Acquiring customers as an ecommerce startup is challenging. Quickly finding the best advertising channel to acquire customers and scale spend is imperative.

Most things being discussed today have been around for a while (e.g., organic, cost-per-click, email, referral, and AdWords). When it comes to ecommerce, not many people are talking about Social Advertising for direct response marketing. These other channels all have their place, but when it comes to a startup the results usually don't compare to Social Advertising. Especially when you look at the relative cost between search and social advertising. Additionally, the 'shares' and 'likes' from social provide reach to even more people without costing anything extra.

Benefits of Social Advertising for Ecomm Startups

1. Relative low cost: in relation to the other channels that have been around for so long, social ads are relatively low in comparison.
2. Interest targeting: knowing what people 'like' allows placing your product ads in front of the right people.
3. Identity targeting: knowing an identity allows for cross-device targeting, whereas Cookie-based targeting cannot.
4. Direct response marketing: producing sales faster than brand marketing for startup ecommerce.

A Quick Case Study: Social Advertising

One of our recent customers, SimplyCook.com, a startup that provide simple home recipes kits, recently spoke about their experience with Social Advertising:

“We can acquire customers for very little on Twitter and Facebook. The best channel by far has been paid advertising on Facebook."

SimplyCook provide easy-to-cook restaurant quality food in under 20 minutes by "aligning people's interest with their behavior." In a similar way, acquiring customers through social media channels is accomplished through an alignment of people's interests and behavior. Identity and interest targeting is what allows this on social channels, where people's identity is known along with their personal interests.

With only five full-time and two part-time employees, social media has been integral to their growth. By changing optimization for social advertising from Cost Per Lead to Cost Per Checkout (CPC) they were able to decrease CPC by 44% and increase ROI 1.54x.

"As a start-up with a small, stretched team the ability to rapidly create and launch campaigns with saved targeting and creatives has saved us heaps of time. This has meant we can try new things and test at a faster pace with a much lower time commitment. As a result StitcherAds has already helped us to scale up our spend."
— Oli Ashness, CEO at SimplyCook

The Best Advertising Channel for Ecomm Startups

The combination of low cost with interest and identity targeting, makes Social Media Advertising perfect for ecommerce startups looking to grow rapidly. Optimizing advertising for CPC is a great way to achieve great ROI, while scaling spend. To learn more about scaling spend read our blog post on How to Scale Spend on Facebook.