Portfolio Project: Complete

This month has been a tough one in Praxis. A lot has been done and a lot has been learned.

I decided at the beginning of the month that I wanted to do a marketing project. I had a lot of options, and struggled to choose between starting a Podcast or opening a Shopify store and running Facebook ads for it.

Ultimately, I decided to go with the Shopify store. I thought it would be the best way to learn more about marketing and showcase my marketing skills. I did not expect to make any sales from my store, but I was willing to spend the money to set it up and run the ads. I knew when I started it that the likelihood of making any sales were slim at best; people are reluctant nowadays to give money to a website they’ve never seen before and that doesn’t have any reviews they can search online. So I went into it with the mindset that my main goal was to learn.

In hindsight, I think if I were to do it all over again I would still run Facebook ads, but I’d try to find out how I could run advertisements for an actual company or small business for free. However, I’m still fairly pleased with what I learned and what I accomplished.

Shopify Dropshipping

This was quite the task. Researching was overwhelming due to the vast number of dropshipping guru’s writing blog posts and selling online courses. There was a lot of talk about choosing “trendy” products and “how I made $20,000 in 30 days with dropshipping!” which I was skeptical of.

Trendy products are just that, trends. There is a lot of research that goes into finding them, and that research is usually based on popular Google searches and not the relationship between product and consumer. The come and go, and when they come the market is quickly flooded, and when they go you’re left with a useless store you’ve put time and money into.

As for the “get rich quick” courses and posts, from what I could tell those people had a private supplier, a team of people, and a larger budget. I dropshipped my products from Aliexpress, I worked alone, and as an eighteen-year-old getting ready to move out of her parents’ house, I had a much less luxurious budget.

I’m a fairly spontaneous person, but at the same time I know how easy it is to get sucked into the void of researching. Knowing I didn’t want to spend too much time reading too many different people’s opinions, I decided to jump right into the important stuff.

First, I had to choose a product. Like I mentioned before, I wasn’t really interested in selling anything “trendy” for several reasons. Fidget spinners and fit tea were not things I even wanted to consider. I found a blog post that actually stuck out to me and made sense. It basically said to sell something you yourself would want to consume. With that in mind, I started thinking about things I needed. I live in Maine, and it’s really cold here for many more months than it is warm. Therefore, I’m almost always in need of new sweaters and warm sweatpants.

Even though women’s clothing is a highly competitive market, I decided to stick with it anyway. I felt it was a fair balance of mainstream and niche, since women living in places like Texas or Alabama wouldn’t need sweaters as much as women living farther North would. I already knew the feel and message I wanted the brand to have, and I was excited.

I found a simple walkthrough video on YouTube that was my main resource when it came to setting up the store.

I used Oberlo and AliExpress to stock my store with products. At first I was mainly interested in just getting my store stocked, and picked products that had images that fit my overall mood. Oberlo told me how many times a product had been downloaded into other stores and how many times it had been purchased in the past 30 days. I stayed away from products with a high download count and a low purchase count. Later on in the month, I started adding a few products based on the reviews they had on AliExpress.

I also set up discount codes and used a plugin to encourage people to give me their email addresses for the chance to win a discount.

All things considered, I’m fairly happy with my store.

Facebook Ads

I had run Facebook ads in the past to promote my books, but I hadn’t really gone too far into it.

One of the first things I did was contact a Praxis alumnus who was also in marketing and had experience with Facebook ads. She gave me lots of information and it was helpful to ask an actual person my questions instead of trying to find it on google. Aside from her input, I used a Praxis course by Gordon Leslie to help me through the nitty gritty.

Like I mentioned earlier, I did not have the budget to really push my ads in front of hundreds of thousands of people. However, I am happy with the results I did earn.

1. Reach: 7,364
2. Impressions: 14,479
3. Link Clicks: 97
4. Total Amount Spent: $110.80

I ran five ads, one of which was a split test with the variable being the creative, so I was kind of running six ads.

For the split test, I ran one ad with a picture for the creative, and the other being a very short video made up of some product images and my logo. I expected the video to do better, but Facebook claimed the single image ad took the lead. I believed it was because my brand was so new, and I didn’t do any retargeting with it. However, when I looked at the actual numbers, I realized that while the single image reached over three times as many people as the video, it only had seven more results.

Here are screenshots of all the ads I ran, as well as their final numbers.

I used a lot of the same images so that if people saw my ads more than once, it would be more familiar and hopefully they’d be more willing to click my links. I also noticed on my Shopify analytics that a lot of people were looking at the thigh-high socks I offered, so I created the split test ads featuring them specifically.

Around week three, I started to tap on the breaks with the Facebook advertising. I’d already spent over $150 on this project to set up the Shopify store, add the extensions, and then run all the ads. But I didn’t want to stop learning. To compensate, I wrote a blog post explaining how to run Facebook ads. I even found it really helpful for myself to go through some of the simpler stuff. It reinforced it in my brain and I had to make sure I understood every detail of what I was writing before I could publish it.

Instagram

This is something I wish I had done earlier in the month, but I originally thought I would be too occupied with Facebook and Twitter to bother with it. So, in the last week, I started an Instagram page and tried to see if I could grow a small following.

I made a total of eight posts and as of right now I have only nineteen followers. I had a few more but I’m not upset about it because I know that new profiles will get lots of attention and follows from people who only want you to follow back. Growing a genuine following of people who actually care about your brand is a slow process.

I ran one Instagram ad, just so I could know how to do it. I spent $10, reached 2,434 people, and got 72 likes. 14 people visited my website, and two people viewed my profile.

Personally, I think I prefer Instagram ads. Yes, Facebook gives you a little more control, but there are also more variables to consider on Facebook. I think that Instagram has a more active community at the moment, and I know that I personally am more likely to respond to an Instagram ad over a Facebook one.

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All in all, I really enjoyed this month. I constantly added new challenges and tweaked my goals to push myself, and I learned a lot. I’m going to delete my Shopify account for financial reasons and therefore delete the Instagram page and any other social media presence as well. I’m so excited to do more marketing for a much bigger business in the future.