E-Commerce Essentials for South African Campaign Managers

E-Commerce Essentials for South African Campaign Managers

This simple guide will give South African Freelance Campaign Managers all the eCommerce platform bare essentials to advertise products and get them straight to their customers.

What remote campaign managers need to know in eCommerce is that marketing products require a good understanding of the channels they use to advertise merchant or clients’ products.

eCommerce for small businesses requires that you also have a fair understanding of the market and where it fits in the global market. Here are some of the booming sectors right now:

Once you understand the product in its global context, it’s necessary to get a good understanding on how to market your product(s):

• Who is your target audience? What are their ages, gender, demographics and psychographics?
• Identify your unique selling proposition (USP)
• Identify your advertising goals: are you looking for higher traffic? More leads? Conversions?
• Identify the budget for your campaign
  
  
  

Platform Essentials

Campaign Managers who work from home should have a basic understanding of the merchant’s platform. The major eCommerce platforms are Shopify, Magento (now Adobe Commerce), and WooCommerce:

• Shopify’s streamlined approach allows you to set up your store in minutes. Shopify is an easy-to-use, affordable, open-source platform with 11% total eCommerce market share.
• WooCommerce is user-friendly, secure, and great for developing, small or new businesses. WooCommerce also boasts 28.4% of the market share.
• Magento is highly secure and is known for its scalability. It also has a strong SEO setup and access to a large community resource base.

More channels:

• PrestaShop
• OpenCart

Set up your Campaigns Easily

Managing your campaigns can take place on several different channels, but here are a few of ShoppingFeeder’s top converters.

PriceCheck

Established in 2006, PriceCheck is South Africa’s leading product and financial services platform. Its price comparison model allows customers to compare the prices of identical products from different stores.

Managing a campaign on PriceCheck is free! However, a small fee is charged for every click through that redirects a user to your website. Cost is varied and depends on multiple factors, such as your campaign’s page positioning.

Perks of PriceCheck:

• Optimized for desktop, tablet and mobile
• Campaigns form part of a collection of several products and millions of active users
• PriceCheck handles payments, delivery, and customer service
• Accurate prices are updated multiple times per day
• You get detailed reports of your performance
• Immediate ‘add to cart’ function

Google Ads

There are two types of ways to create Google ad Campaigns: Campaigns according to your merchant or clients’ specifications, and Performance Max campaigns, which form part of smart feeds. Google ads adhere to bidding payment schemes.

Perks:

• Any business, small or large, can set up a Google Ad campaign
• Google Ads have streamlined targets based on location, budget, and targeting distributions
• Your campaigns can appear on various locations such as Youtube and Google Search
• There are several types of Google campaigns like Google Shopping ads, Display Network ads, Search network ads, Video campaigns, and App campaigns

Facebook

Facebook Dynamic ads appear on customers’ Facebook feeds and have additional integrations with Instagram. Your Facebook Catalog is a Meta Business Manager feature that allows you to set up all your product information and images in one portal.

Perks:

• Facebook ads have some of the best targeting features in the game, where you can feed your product ads down to the mile.
• Facebook adheres to a paid feature (unlike Google’s bidding feature) where you can spend as little as R20 per campaign.
• Facebook ads are particularly useful for brand awareness, getting leads and gaining traffic

View some comparisons between Facebook and Google ads here.

South African Marketplaces

South Africa’s extensive list of marketplaces allows you to advertise merchant products to the local arena. Here are some fundamental perks to integrating your campaigns on Takealot, BidorBuy, Leroy Merlin & Gumtree:

• Customers trust local retailers
• There are millions of active users per marketplace that trust these channels
• Campaigns are optimized for desktop, tablet, and smartphone
• Be part of South Africa’s fastest growing marketplaces

Subscription fees for South African marketplaces

Takealot is Africa’s leading marketplace at a subscription fee of R400* per month. With Takealot, you’re not limited by which products to sell.

Bidorbuy is South Africa’s most experienced marketplace and known for its easy payment methods. Here, there are no hidden fees or costs and you are only charged according to your success rate.

Leroy Merlin‘s niche subscribes to home, gardening, and DIY products (to name a few) with a fixed fee of R300 per month.

Gumtree is an awesome marketplace where anything goes! Campaigns on Gumtree can range from second-hand products, and low-cost goods, to new flashy products in the retail game. Generally speaking, selling on Gumtree is free but some additional services do have costs.

Need help? Chat with our experts on how to set up a campaign easily with ShoppingFeeder.

Marketing Tips

It is through these above-mentioned avenues that you can now build functional campaigns to get products straight to your customers.

It’s important that your target audience knows what they’re looking for, especially now that your products are set up on these dynamic marketplaces.

Multi-Channel Basics

Set up your product campaigns on multiple marketplaces by implementing a multi-channel marketing strategy. This ensures that the product that you’re advertising reaches the right audience.

A multi-channel marketing strategy combines your platform (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento) with any given channel (or marketplace). ShoppingFeeder

It’s perks include:

• You can create feeds that just work: This entails product feed management and feed optimization to ensure that your campaigns are the best they can be!
• Once you, as the campaign manager, connect the platform to ShoppingFeeder or FeedNexus, you won’t need to worry about disturbing your merchant or client.
• Listing your stores on multiple marketplaces allows you and your client to keep atop the metrics that matter.
• Easy to install and integrate with several channels
• No hidden fees and competitive pricing.
• FeedNexus for Agencies grants you access to ShoppingFeeder’s suite and multiple role functionality, for you and your colleagues

Try it out for yourself by visiting www.shoppingfeeder.com. Alternatively, if you’re a freelance campaign manager representing an agency, try out FeedNexus, a tailor-made platform for Agencies.

Some Simple Tips*

• Social Media helps ensure that your products are top of mind for your target audience. The key here is to engage with your audience.
• Newsletter marketing: This is how you engage with your subscribers and retain customers. Moreover, newsletters assist in turning leads into sales with an already-segmented audience.

We recommend a combination of both newsletter and social media marketing.

Conclusion

Campaign Management for freelancers requires a basic understanding of the product in the local or global market, understanding the audience, and getting to know the channels for merchant needs. Once you have a solid understanding of these basics, it’s time to get campaigning to the right audience!

ShoppingFeeder HQ has two world-leading tools – The ShoppingFeeder App and FeedNexus for Agencies – that assist campaign managers with a multi-channel strategy to optimize campaign feeds to get products straight to customers.