Why does going after a broad niche kill a new store?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Ecommerce Marketing Chats with myself Charles and the main man Jimmy. Jimmy, what’s going on, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: And good to be back in e-commerce. A few interesting chats this week. So ⁓ yeah, it’ll be good to kind of share a few of those and and dive in. But one of them before we even get stuck into anything was ⁓ around backlinks and digital PR. So I think we mentioned it last week too. But if you haven’t already, go back and listen to the podcast episode that we did with Chris from Linkify. ⁓ really good episode on backlinks and digital PR. So we won’t go too deep on that because we’ve done a pretty much an hour masterclass. picking Chris’s brain on that. But the other thing that’s come up for me this week, and I just I was reminded how important it was today when I was I was I was speaking to a new student and he asked me, ⁓ Jimmy, am I am I price competitive for these products? And there’s one way to check if you are and that’s to Google search it and then have a look in the shopping network to to see if you are actually price competitive. Like if you’re selling If you’re selling SKUs that other retailers are selling and you want to know whether your price competitive, that’s one way to do it. The better way to do it is there is actually a report in the Google Merchant Center and it’s called the ⁓ the price benchmark report. And it will actually Google will actually tell you in a percentage term how far are you how far you’re off the benchmark price for all your particular SKUs. So you can download a report. Now the the catch is They don’t always have data on every single one of your products. So it won’t be your whole product catalog, but if you have uploaded your GTIN numbers to Shopify and you’ve uploaded all the data and Google can match them, you’ll get a pretty high match rate for your products. And what I’ve done in the Google Ads account is basically created a script that pulls all that data from the merchant center and gives it to the client in a in a Google Sheet and it updates for them daily. And they can then see, hey, where am I where am I losing out on pri like price? ⁓ but I want people to also be aware of like it’s not a it’s not a race to the bottom on price either. Like you don’t want to you don’t want to eat away your margins just to be the cheapest. It’s like, hey, am I too far off on this product? And I’m driving a lot of clicks here, and these this is why the conversions aren’t coming through. Because I’m like, for expensive products as well, I’m Potentially two, three hundred dollars more than the competitor. And in in this case, for the student, ⁓ he’s like, ⁓ I’ve got plenty of margin on this. Maybe I can just be the benchmark price for this week and see how it goes. Anyway, about 15 minutes after the call, he’s like, Hey, Jimmy, I sold one of those products like already. Hadn’t sold, hadn’t sold one in like two weeks. Changed his price. He still had margin, he still had product ⁓ profit on the product, changed his price to be the benchmark.

Charles Travers: you

Jimmy Dalgleish: For that particular product, ⁓ and sold one within like five minutes of our call finishing, and it was a $2,000 product. So it just it just reminded me, and I thought I thought it’d be a good thing to share with the audience. Sometimes it’s not your ads, sometimes it’s not your landing page, sometimes people are price shopping and you’re just too far outside of where everyone else is, or They you are price competitive and they get to the checkout page and your shipping prices are ridiculous. So they’re ⁓ I’m better off going to that other company because they’re free shipping and with the price of this shipping ⁓ on the cheaper product, ⁓ I’m gonna go shop somewhere else. So it can be high shipping prices can be a big drop-off for kind of checkout abandonments, but Yeah, if you’re selling like high priced items, it’s definitely worth having a review of all your product prices. And that doesn’t mean going to search every single one on Google to see where they are. You can use the price benchmark report inside the Google Merchant Center itself to kind of to kind of see where you sit.

Charles Travers: Yeah, that’s really, that’s a really good insight there, Jimmy. I wasn’t aware of that. And I think you’re 100 % right. You sometimes you could be driving traffic to a product and either your pricing might be completely off and you’re just unaware of it, or there just may not be the demand there either. yeah, I think it’s important to look at these things and it sounds like, what did you say that that feature is? It’s within the merchant center. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: It’s in the Google Merchant Cent Mer Merchant Center and it’s called the the the price benchmark report.

Charles Travers: know for those listening in.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, so it’s a really good one because sometimes when you’re looking at your Google Ads and you have a look at the product report, you’ll see that you’re driving a lot of clicks for a product, but you’re not getting any sales. And usually the usually the default is to ⁓ update the landing page, make sure that’s as conversion focused as as possible, and then you know, work on the product title, try to pre-qualify them a little bit more, or just get in better keywords in the product title. But what a lot of people don’t test is the actual the price change. Like, are you just off by a little bit and you still have margin if you were at that slightly cheaper price? This is where I don’t want people to get stuck. You don’t always want to be the cheapest. Now, I don’t I don’t have one single client that has over a hundred skews where they’re the cheapest for every single skew that they offer. But There are some SKUs that they might have sourced at a better price from their supplier than other people can, and they’ve got a little bit more margin. ⁓ so they can go a l a little bit lower than what’s out there and still have healthy margins. I think where e-commerce stores get in trouble is they want to drive a lot of sales, but if they do it at the price that they’re going to and they don’t have like a high repeat customer rate, then margins are so thin they can’t operate their business off that. So where it would make sense is if you were in a supplement industry or whatever and you were willing to take almost potentially even a small loss on the small order in the hope that they become repeat customers. They’re on your email list and you can sell to them multiple times. Now like it’s an okay strategy. I don’t I don’t like it for smaller businesses. I personally like to be profitable on the first order. But I know some coaches even that I work with that have lifetime I I’d call them lifetime value businesses where if they can get the first one on, they know the lifetime value. So they’re willing to potentially lose money on the first order. So these are kind of all different metrics and numbers that you need to experiment with to factor in your price. and yeah, and what a lot of people will notice too is If you have a 10% off, 20% off sale, like it’s usually their busier months, right? You get a lot more sales coming through. Now, people still need to protect their margins during that period as well. ⁓ so they might just do it on some products, but you’re almost by running those sales, you can almost prove to yourself, hey, like if I’ve got a little bit more margin, if I am slightly cheaper on some of these, it it may bring in more revenue. Where it where you definitely wouldn’t want to do this is if you’re positioning positioning yourself as like the premium brand. ⁓ and other people don’t sell like what you sell. Think about like higher fashion, like Louis Vuitton. They’re not gonna try to compete with like the, you know, the lower end kind of handbags or whatever or whatever fashion they’re selling. They’re gonna stay at the top. Think Rolex too. They’re never coming down. So

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: It depends on your business model, but if you’re selling things that a lot of other people are selling and you’ve got the margin to do it, so sometimes you can experiment with price. Sometimes also the kind of suppliers, they don’t let you go under like a recommended retail price. So you’ll notice that a lot of the suppliers have the exact same price because under their agreement, they can’t go any lower than what they’re advertising it for. The way to get around that is to offer coupon codes site-wide. So, and have that show in your Google ads as a like a little promotion extension. Because if all the prices are the same and yours sticks out with like a 5% off discount code, then you you can still advertise the full price that you’ve kind of agreed to, but you may have ⁓ an incentive for first-time buyers. Now, I don’t know the legality of that around the agreements that you have with people, ⁓ like suppliers about price that people are paying for the products. So you this isn’t legal advice at all, but if all they’re concerned about is how you show ⁓ the recommended retail price on your site and the price that you’ve set, then yeah, you can have ⁓ potentially ⁓ first time customer incentives or sitewide sales, however you want to run it with your Google ads. But yeah, just some just some little tips there for people that are advertising products on Google. Sometimes it’s sometimes it’s not your ads. Sometimes it’s not your landing page. Sometimes you’ve got competitors heavily undercutting you and it just makes sense to go with someone else rather than purchase off you. So there’s a lot of variables, but Yeah, I thought I thought we’d just discuss early in this podcast like your pricing strategy, whether you have room to move or whether not, whether you’re too cheap, sometimes people are far too, far too under the benchmark and they have like room to increase their prices. So pricing is a a very powerful lever to pull in ⁓ a lot of e-commerce stores.

Charles Travers: Yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense. Talking about pricing and sales, Jimmy, I just did an audit for one of my clients today. Pretty large store. They’ve got 400 to 500 collections and about collection, no collections and about 4,000 plus products. One thing that

Jimmy Dalgleish: ⁓ collections. I thought you were about to say products.

Charles Travers: ⁓ I flagged today and I think it’s worth mentioning is so they run a lot of sales. They’re constantly creating new collection pages for various different category product category sales in their collections and What I noticed was on many of those the sale had ended but they still had that

Jimmy Dalgleish: No.

Charles Travers: Page live and index so they had the even within the URL they had You know the product category and then sale at the end now Obviously, that’s not great from a customer customer experience perspective And I don’t think it’s something that they realize because they think okay, it’s not Linked to the navigation but just because it’s not linked to the navigation. It doesn’t mean it’s not ranking and being indexed on Google. So What I established was that Some of these pages were still being found within Google search and we need to build a strategy to to deal with that And it’s just the case when you’ve got a company of this size as well. They’ve got multiple people involved in launching new collection pages, they got a product team and some of these things just go under the radar whether that’s just You know, sometimes it just comes down to not lack of understanding on on how a page is indexed and the fact that it’s still live So there’s a couple of ways you can approach

Jimmy Dalgleish: Is it is it is the discount is the discount still alive, Charles? Like you or did they have it Yeah, okay.

Charles Travers: No, the discount, that’s the thing. you, yeah, so basically what they’ve got is they’ve got, you know, a sales page where it says in the collection description, you know, 30 % off, and then you look at the products on that page and there’s no discounts. It’s just not a great look. And I think there’s a couple of ways to approach this. And it’s something that they’ve already kind of got in place though, is that they’ve just basically got a banner landing page for some of these sales collections whereby it basically links to their master sales page which they run throughout the year of current deals. So that’s something you can do is just set up a banner once a sellers end to keep that page alive set up a banner. and then link it to your current deals page. So they’ve got somewhere to go and they’re not landing on a broken page basically, or even worse, a live page where the sales have ended. So yeah, that’s just something to look at. And it’s obviously something I’m gonna be raising with them is,

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: When your sales have ended, make sure that you have a strategy in place with that collection page that is still live.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I think we’ll we’ll probably talk a bit ⁓ much more about sales probably in ⁓ September ⁓ podcast leading up to Black Friday. ’Cause I think it’s ⁓ like every year we usually have a ch ⁓ like a pretty in-depth chat about Black Friday. But yeah, there’s probably ⁓ probably a few different strategies this year and different ways you can use coupon codes and ⁓ how you can effectively run your sales. And I think ⁓ yeah, where a lot of people miss opportunities, everyone stops at the end of Black Friday. There’s a few brands that do like the 12 days of Christmas. I reckon those companies cash in. See, everyone stops advertising after Black Friday. The biggest month, they all drop off at the start of like December. So yeah, there’s we’ll talk much more about that leading into Black Friday and ⁓ around those Black Friday sales. But yeah, ⁓ and I probably early September, because yeah, we’ll talk about the setups, the apps that we’re introducing, how to how to start. how to how to get started to ⁓ to run those. But yeah, pri pricing strategy is gonna be super important. And then how you run your sales is probably gonna be even more important, ⁓ which plays into those parts and your email strategy too and how all your advertising platforms are gonna work in sync to to kind of give you the best result leading into ⁓ leading into Black Friday this year. I’m actually really excited about Black Friday this year because a lot of the businesses that I that I’m Coaching and and working with as ⁓ Google Ads Managing, like they’re just primed this. I don’t know what it is, but they’re all just kind of primed this year for a for a big year. So ⁓ got a lot of clients raising budgets, got a lot of clients getting exceptional results, a lot of students. I’ve I’ve had a I’ve been working with a lot of new students lately. So the Brendan, the owner of that community,’s done a a really good job in kind of the AI ⁓ space in e-com to like really drive high quality businesses to his academy. And yeah, I’m ⁓ I’m coaching some really good businesses now. But ⁓ there is there are businesses there doing like million dollar months and their Google ads are horrible. Like I’m just like, ⁓ my gosh, it’s it’s ⁓ like we only but one of those one of those businesses doing a lot was the one that we just changed a couple of the prices of their products today and they were able to just sell like a lot more of them really quickly. So but I looked at the account and I was like, ⁓ my gosh, you’re probably like wasting like fifty percent of your budget here. and there’s just massive opportunity. So ’cause I think ⁓ when you listen around to other people in e commerce, like, ⁓ the economy this, the economy that. I’m like, I’m not saying that. Like I’m I’m working with people that are Putting the economy and the conditions aside and just trying to better their business every day and they’re the ones winning. ⁓ I think ⁓ as soon as someone has a bad day and starts blaming the economy, it’s just like, ⁓ this person’s gonna be hard to work with because it’s like I don’t know if it’s I don’t know, like we’ve been in both of us have been in business channels for like over 10 years. So I don’t think I’ve ever had a like a slow month and been like, ⁓ it’s a really like in terms of getting clients or working with clients or Or lost some clients and been like, ⁓ it’s just a really bad economy at the moment. I don’t think I’ve ever thought that ever.

Charles Travers: Yeah, it’s the of the day. It’s an excuse, isn’t it? The economy goes through peaks and troughs. It’s a natural progression, but there’s always going to be opportunities and there will always be companies that doing well and there will always be customers at some point. I think there’s a million and one things you can do before looking and blaming the economy on the success or failure of your business.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. I think ⁓ another thing I’d like to discuss, which kind of came up today as well, is ⁓ working in the niches for your business. I think this is starting to come up a lot more. So especially in the health space. So someone, for example, might have a really good like ⁓ a meal meal replacement shake product, for example. Let’s use that as an example. And They’re like, ⁓ how do I get this out? And you know, the first thought is, ⁓ you know, I want to bid on ⁓ meal replacement shake keywords. Yeah, but so does everyone else. And it’s so competitive. But, you know, if you’re looking at I saw a company called Cunnies Gummies, which is quite big here in Australia, like they’re literally targeting grandmas at the moment for their creatine gummies. And I think it’s awesome. It’s like they’re giving all the reasons why creatine is beneficial for people at that age, especially like cognitive functions. They’re targeting mums too, which I don’t see very often in the creatine space, but they’ve they’ve got this product. It’s good for a lot of people. They’re just letting certain niches know why it’s good for them. And like other businesses need to do that. If you’ve got like a a really healthy food replacement shake, it shouldn’t just be like a food replacement shake. It could be like, ⁓ you could be targeting potentially like entrepreneurs for ⁓ you know, are you super rushed in the morning, can’t get breakfast? Like just ⁓ take this shape for ⁓ like ⁓ an early breakfast on the go. It’s got all your macronutrients, everything you need. So that’s one angle you could do. ⁓ it could be really good for people with gut health, could be good for people with ⁓ like menopause, that kind of stuff. So you can target like all these different niches for the same product, but just tell that niche. why it’s good for them. and the conversion rates improve so much. And I think it’d probably be an SEO dream for you, right, Charles, in terms of having different landing pages and organic organic content ⁓ for kind of each individual niche and targeting those keywords. And you can also track the organic traffic that you’re getting. And it may very well indicate which audience do you go to with ads on on Meta or Google too based on Kind of the organic search volume that you’re getting through as well.

Charles Travers: That’s a really good idea. think kind of what you’re saying Jim is it’s The way I would describe it is it’s not necessary. It’s being more granular so you have your The niche market that you’re in and then you you really target a Pacific Pacific demographic within that market And yeah, I think that could be really effective because you said because you’re right if you’re going after

Jimmy Dalgleish: A hundred percent.

Charles Travers: you know, something that’s very competitive that many retailers sell and you’re up against the likes of even, you know, Amazon, some of the big, big players are selling everything. It’s going to be difficult to, to be able to stand out and also often rank for, ⁓ you know, your particular pages that you’re trying to, you know, drive traffic to. ⁓ whereas if you’re focused on a

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: on a Pacific demographic, I think that can work well. And I think especially now with AI search where people’s search is becoming a lot more Pacific, you know, I think that actually is, yeah, that could be a really good strategy.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. I agree. What I What I’m trying to get people to avoid, and because I’ve seen it happen a lot now, like people have like really good products. They’ve the thing is they come from like ⁓ the people that I’ve spoken to recently, they they kind of come from ⁓ like a health background. Like they’ve got degrees in like ⁓ dietetic ⁓ like they’re dietitians or naturopaths or you know, in that realm. So they actually build or doctors ⁓ even and they they actually build really good products that are super healthy and got really high quality. quality ingredients. Let’s just say, for example, it was a collagen supplement. They’re like their first thought is, okay, I’m just going to go advertise this as a collagen supplement. And then like they’re like up against, you know, the OVS of the world or the collagen co’s of the world. Like the brands that have these massive audiences, but where they can win is like really dialing down in like who this is actually for. So collagen is great for skin. It’s great for nails. It’s great for hair.

Charles Travers: Mm.

Jimmy Dalgleish: and you can and yeah, you can kind of target those those particular demographics. Like there’s people that have horrible nails. And if you like I’m I’m a nail biter, so I’ve got horrible nails. So if I had an ad like, hey, your nails look manky like this because you’re a nail biter, like take collagen, get stronger nails, and like improve your nail health. And all that would be like, ⁓ that’s like speaking too exactly to me. But if I’d have just seen an ad like, Our highest grade collagen supplement ever doesn’t mean anything to me if I don’t already know the benefits of collagen. So I think ⁓ and like collagen targeting older people too, especially like ⁓ the older like demographic, there’s like I’m talking probably 70 plus. Their skin gets so thin at that age and it like cracks and breaks at ⁓ you know, sometimes just rubbing.

Charles Travers: Yep.

Jimmy Dalgleish: know, hitting their leg on something, their skin splits open. It happened to my grandparents all the time. Taking collagen can actually in ⁓ kind of improve the elasticity of your skin and like help prevent that. Like if you had an ad like help old people’s skin like be more durable ⁓ and you’re showing what can happen, like that’s the kind of like articles you should be writing and niches you should be going after, like to get yourself started. And once you’ve built enough of those up, then you can start going after the collagen supplement category. Like, but you need to like build a foundation of customers and an audience and you build yourself up to a point where you can start going after the big guys now because you’ve got an email list the size of King Kong and you’re you’re ready to go. So but yeah, too too many people start with zero and they wanna go after collagen supplements. It’s ⁓ it’s gonna be a very difficult game for you to play if you’re going down that route.

Charles Travers: Yeah, and I make sense. mean, you could, it’s, you know, it’s the same also with when you’re building out a kind of a blog content strategy that supports that. Yeah. If you’re just trying to go after, yeah, collagen keywords are very broad, then it’s going to be difficult to, to rank those pages. But if you’re being very Pacific,

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I agree.

Charles Travers: about your demographic, collagen for, and you’re talking about the benefits for older people and every, you know, all the subjects you’re talking about is related to collagen benefits for older people and various different forms, maybe even talk about subtopics like ⁓ the best forms of exercise for those over the age of 70 to look after your muscles and your skin and your tissue. and you build from there and then you can link to your Pacific Collagen for Older 70s collection page. That’s going to give Google signals that if someone types in, know, collagen for older people or whatever the keywords that they’re searching for, then they’re more likely to rank and land on your site. That’s obviously just one example. that we’re talking about here in terms of a market, hopefully people get the idea of in terms of the, they always say there’s kind of money in the niches, don’t they?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Yeah. Well I I think there is massive money in the niches, but it’s not what people think. So I like for the there’s money in the there’s there’s money in the niches, don’t get me wrong, but it’s like massive scale. But like to get to the massive scale, you need to like blow up those really small niches and then attack the attack the broader category. ⁓ I that’s where the money is. Like if you can build up like really good reviews and brand equity from all those niches, then you can go and attack the the broad whole category. ⁓ I think but people try to do it the other way around. They try to attack the whole broad category and it’s just like they’re just noise in a marketplace. They’ve got no social proof yet. They haven’t built a brand. Like if you if you go the other way and start, I think about like so obviously there’s a there’s a lot of people in the gym space that start their own supplements. I think one of the biggest mistakes they make is they always name the supplement after their gym. And like it just it just it just reeks of a white label product and it doesn’t look premium, right? But if they named it something like a normal supplement brand would name, rather than naming it after their gym, I think they would have a lot more success and ⁓ rather than just tying it to their actual ⁓ to their gym name. But I think ⁓ every every gym minor and fitness person now ha is kind of starting their own line. I would actually I’d probably like to partner with one of them at some point and just see see what we could build. I think I’d like to get into that space where I had some equity in the game because I think I could really help grow grow some of those businesses. But I think there there’s massive opportunity. The money, the money is in the niches for e-com. ⁓ but for the supplement space, if you can dominate the niches, then it gives you a r a real leg up in in going after the broad the broad category. ⁓ where we’re talking like the hundreds of millions of dollars are sitting like top level.

Charles Travers: Yeah, for sure. Well, I think it’s it’s it’s it’s pick it’s pick a pacific Sub-niche and then also pick a pacific demographic You know, so it’s it’s You’re you’re finding say a product within an overarching niche That isn’t catered for for a particular demographic You know one of the examples that I have There’s guy that actually I used to go to school with and he’s launched a supplement brand ⁓ around a particular Longevity basically like longevity but longevity for younger people So like those health conscious people that go to the gym But they still don’t don’t have the energy that they they’d hoped for basically. So they’re they’re kind of eating well They’re going to the gym, but they feel that they can further optimize their energy levels. So that’s pretty Pacific, you know? But he’s kind of building a community around that and built kind of a supplement, Pacific supplement that helps with that. So that’s kind of what we, I think we’re trying to get at to those listening in. It’s like trying to be more Pacific to start with in terms of a product.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: Category that you want to sell and then going after that broader niche After you’ve built up that authority and credibility

Jimmy Dalgleish: 100%. And I think that I think that’s a really good place to leave this podcast because I think that’s probably the the gold of the episodes. and then just to recap quickly what else we covered, just like your pricing strategy, have a have a play around with your prices. and we also looked at kind of how you present your sales and ⁓ just because the sale is finished doesn’t mean that the pages are necessarily gone. So have a strategy around that. And yeah, we obviously finished up on really ⁓ diving into how to attack like really broad competitive niches. And I think ⁓ yeah, as we just touched on, the the best place to go with that is to is to start small and then and then build up your reviews, your customers from there, and then you can start to to move up that ladder and going to kind of some of those broader broader sections of that category. But ⁓ you can check us up on the every podcast. Platform at e-commerce marketing chats. You can check us on Facebook at Shopify Marketing Secrets. And Charles, I always forget, but we’ve got an Instagram now, right? Is it ⁓ e-commerce marketing chats on Instagram? Perfect. Yeah, say hello to us there, guys. And ⁓ hopefully we’ll be posting there a bit more regularly soon. And ⁓ yeah, we’ll catch you next week. Thanks, guys. Take care.

Charles Travers: Yeah, same. That’s the one. Yeah, that is the one.