Small Business Advertising

Getting Exposure for your Business

Small business owners are sometimes split when it comes to the subject of online advertising. On the one hand, it enables you to get your products in front of people outside of the marketplace or sphere of influence you are currently selling in. On the other hand, it can be intimidating to set up, and if the results are hard to measure (which they often are), the costs can be hard to justify.

Ever since the dawn of time (well, 2008), we’ve been working to change that. We’ve built a suite of risk-free, easy-to-use advertising tools and options to benefit your business on Bonanza and beyond.

Whether you’re new to advertising or have been doing it longer than you can remember, the holiday season is the perfect time to maximize your use of these tools and options. Many sellers see greater returns on advertising during this time of year due to the high volume of shoppers who are already in a ‘Buy’ mindset. Additionally, there are strategic adjustments that sellers can make to their normal advertising efforts to maximize gains during this time.

In today’s workshop, we’ll first cover the advertising tools available to you on Bonanza, and then provide a checklist of things you can do to ensure your advertising performs at its peak this holiday season. (You can skip to the checklist if you’re already familiar with our advertising tools).

Let’s get started!

Bonanza's Advertising Tools

The Broadcaster

During the holiday season, shoppers are more likely to 1) have a specific product in mind, 2) be motivated to complete a purchase, and 3) use a search engine like Google or Bing to find out who’s offering the item. This means that you’ll want your items to be showing up in those search results. The Broadcaster makes this easy.

Consider the Broadcaster to be the cornerstone of your business’s advertising on Bonanza. It has the highest ratio of effort-to-return, and it is zero-risk. Here are the basics:

You choose from 5 tiers. The lowest tier is Bonanza’s base fee (3.5%) for sales made through organic traffic without paying any additional advertising fee — for example, if someone comes directly to Bonanza and finds your item through our site search.

Each successive tier includes additional advertising channels where your items will be featured.

The 5 advertising tiers of the Broadcaster

Each consecutive tier charges a higher fee on resulting sales, but Bonanza doesn’t charge you this higher fee until you make a sale. You read that right – we cover the costs upfront for your advertising, and you only pay for it when it works. Additionally, these fee levels represent the maximum amount you’ll be charged — it often comes out as less.

As an example, let’s say you’ve opted into the ‘Basic’ (9% max fee) advertising tier. This unlocks Google Shopping advertising. The Broadcaster will then publish your items in Google Shopping search results, putting your items in front of millions of shoppers who search for items on Google. When a customer’s Google search matches keywords in your item title and listing, your item is displayed in their search results. If a purchase is made as a result of these Google Shopping efforts, you will pay up to a 9% fee on that sale. Depending on how quickly your item sells, less advertising may be required, possibly resulting in a lower fee than 9%.

You can learn more about which Broadcaster level is best for your business on our Advertising FAQ page. Concerned about how advertising will affect your bottom line? We discuss how to alleviate this in the 2nd half of this article, "How to adjust your advertising for the holidays".

TurboTraffic and TurboTraffic Packs

TurboTraffic is like a specialized version of the Broadcaster that specifically targets Google Shopping. It increases our bids to display your products on Google Shopping, so that people searching for items like yours are even more likely to see them and click through to your booth. Since people often go to Google Shopping when they’re eager to buy, this translates to an extra burst of high-intent, high-converting shoppers coming your way.

The impact of TurboTraffic will vary from seller to seller depending on their price point and the type of merchandise sold – if people aren’t searching for your type of item on Google Shopping, there’s not much TurboTraffic can do for you there. Similarly, if your item’s price is significantly higher than other sellers with the same item on Google Shopping, you may see less success there. However, since 2014, we’ve typically seen an increase of over 300% in daily pageviews for merchants receiving TurboTraffic. Here are some real-world results showing pageviews before and during TurboTraffic:

TurboTraffic is available as a perk for our Platinum and higher membership subscribers, but you don’t have to subscribe to a membership to take advantage of its benefits this holiday season. All sellers can purchase TurboTraffic in individual packs for $24.99 per pack.

These one-time “booster packs” can potentially double or triple your shopper traffic for a short period of time (usually a few days). You can buy just one pack at a time, or you can purchase up to 10 packs that will run back-to-back. The coming months are the perfect time to experiment with this low-cost, high impact resource.

The Customer Marketing Tool

Did you know that on average, you are 7 times more likely to sell to an existing customer than to acquire a new one? Even if you are new on Bonanza, many of the same strategies for building repeat customers, like discounts and coupons, also work to entice first-time customers. The Customer Marketing Tool was built to make it easy for you to reach shoppers in both instances.

Customer Marketing Coupons are discounts or coupons that you send to a specific group of your choice: subscribers to your booth, past buyers, all customers (buyers AND subscribers), or a custom list you’ve created. Use one of our pre-made campaign templates to save time, or create your own discounts and rules.

Creating a new coupon with the Customer Marketing Tool

If you’re new to Bonanza and don’t have many past buyers or booth followers to reach out to this way, note that you can still set up a custom coupon code and share it in your social media channels or wherever else you are able to reach out to your shopper base.

Facebook Remarketing

Have you ever wished there was a way to remind shoppers who have visited your Bonanza booth to come back and make a purchase? Now you can do just that! With over one billion active users on their site, Facebook Remarketing allows you to reach Facebook users after they’ve visited your booth, added your items to their wishlist or cart, and more. This is an ideal way to reach people who were initially interested in your items, but didn’t complete their purchase at the time.

The icing on the cake? Traffic brought to your booth via Facebook Remarketing is considered direct shopping traffic. You will pay the lowest possible fee (a mere 3.5% for items under $500) on items sold via direct shopping traffic.

Facebook Remarketing is available to Bonanza sellers who are subscribed to the Platinum and Titan memberships. As always, you are not required to purchase a membership to enjoy healthy sales on Bonanza, but you might want to take a look at them at them to see if this perk (and the many others provided by memberships) are worth the added cost for your business this holiday season. You can always start with a monthly plan and cancel if you find it’s not working for you.

Other social media tools and tips

Building a social media presence for your business allows you to reach new customers, cultivate loyalty and repeat business, and advertise to specific types of users that you believe will be most interested in your items. Whether you’re brand new to using social media for business, or you want to take yours to the next level, be sure to check out the guide we wrote for Instasize named How to Use Social Media to Drive Traffic to your Online Brand. We’ll also be covering more in-depth social media strategy in next week’s Holiday Workshop article.

We also recommend taking advantage of these two social media tricks on Bonanza:

1. Save time when sharing items by using the 'Share' link located on the item listing page:

2. Learn about the 3 ways you can make commission-free sales, and brainstorm how you can work these into your social media strategy. For example, if you’re sharing a link to your booth in your next post, you can include the custom booth URL mentioned in that article. Any sale you make as a result of someone clicking that link will be free of fees.

How to adjust your advertising for the holidays

Holiday Advertising Checklist

1. Update your booth appearance, information, and business policies.
Bonanza booth features are designed to help you close the sale, particularly with 1st-time customers that are coming to your booth via the Bonanza Broadcaster and external shopping channels. Make sure you’re taking advantage of these features. This includes your ‘About me’ section, contact information, social media links, booth graphics and profile images, and store policies, like Returns. Fill in any gaps, ensure existing information is up to date, and check out the tips in this article, "Use Your Booth Features to Turn Browsers into Buyers".

2. Upgrade your item images.
As discussed in last week’s Holiday Workshop article, "Perfecting your item images," your item images are a crucial factor in closing a sale online. They will also help your items stand out in the shopping channels that you’ll reach through the Bonanza Broadcaster. If you have an overwhelming amount of items, focus on upgrading the images for your top performing items and any items expected to be top sellers this season.

3. Ensure your items are compliant with Google Shopping requirements and best practices.
Google Shopping is one of the most important shopping channels your items will reach through the Bonanza Broadcaster, and it has certain rules and preferences for how you format your item listings. Done right, your items can outperform the competition on Google Shopping this holiday season. Done wrong, your items might rank lower in search results, or worse, be rejected by Google Shopping entirely. Our "Google Shopping FAQs" has everything you need to make sure your Google Shopping efforts have maximum impact.

4. Experiment with increasing your advertising commission fee in the Bonanza Broadcaster.
If you’re worried that a higher commission fee is going to cut into your profits, just know that it doesn’t have to. You can build the cost of this increased fee percentage into your item listing price. Most of the time, this increase won’t impact your overall listing price significantly, and you’ll still make the same amount of money when your item sells. There are a few factors that go into building your fee percentage into your listing price:

• Commission rate. As discussed earlier, this is the percentage of a sale that you pay to Bonanza. Our base fee is 3.5% and we offer four additional commission rates that unlock different advertising channels.
• Net revenue percentage. This is the percentage of a sale that you keep. If you pay 3.5% of a sale to Bonanza, you keep 96.5% of the revenue. If you pay 9% to Bonanza, you keep 91% of the revenue, and so on.
• Profit. This is how much money you make after you pay your fees. Of course, there are other costs that factor into your business’s profit, but we keep it simple on our end.

As an example, suppose you’re selling a garden hose for $30.00. Bonanza’s base commission rate is 3.5%. This means that your net revenue is 96.5%. To figure out your profit, we’ll multiply the listing price by the net revenue:

Now, we want to make sure you’ll make the same amount with an increased commission rate. To do this, we’ll divide your profit (from Step 1) by the net revenue percentage of the NEW commission rate. Here’s a breakdown with the net revenue percentage of each advertising level:

You can use the net revenue percentage of each Broadcaster Level to decide which listing price you feel comfortable with. Here's a breakdown for our garden hose example. This is a fairly simple way to build Broadcaster advertising into your listing price. Remember, profit divided by net revenue percentage equals your new listing price.

5. Try purchasing TurboTraffic packs during strategic times.
As mentioned earlier, TurboTraffic packs will temporarily give your items a large boost in Google Shopping traffic, and they are low-cost. Consider your item types, the period in which you expect people to be shopping for those items, and your shipping timeframes, then experiment with purchasing TurboTraffic packs at relevant times. For instance, if you sell Thanksgiving and Christmas decor, and you typically ship within a week, you’d want to purchase TurboTraffic 2-4 weeks before those holidays so that 1) people are currently shopping for those items, and 2) you’ll still have time to ship it to them.

Another neat feature of TurboTraffic is that you can set it to work only on certain items. Since TurboTraffic works best when used on products that people are actively searching for, this helps you direct the influx of traffic to where it will be most effective. You probably wouldn’t want to purchase TurboTraffic in November and use it only on your Halloween-themed items, for example. Learn more about how TurboTraffic works.

6. Use the Customer Marketing Tool to create discounts and coupons.
The Customer Marketing Tool has customizable and pre-made offers that you can use to entice new and past shoppers. It’s free to use – all it takes is a bit of elbow grease. This article explains how to create Customer Marketing Coupons. Don’t forget – their use is not limited to Bonanza. Spread word of the discounts and coupons you create via social media.

7. Study the strategies in our guide, "How to Use Social Media to Drive Traffic to your Online Brand".
We’ll be going into more depth regarding social media for ecommerce in next week’s workshop, but you’ll have a head start if you read this now. As you learn more about this topic, brainstorm ways that you can incorporate other Bonanza tools into your social media strategy.

8. Take advantage of the ways to make commission-free sales on Bonanza.
As mentioned earlier, there are 3 ways to make commission-free sales on Bonanza. Brainstorm how you can work them into your current advertising strategy. Do you have a separate place you can share your commission-free link, such as a blog, or stand alone website? Share away and reap the sweet rewards of self-promotion.

That’s all for today, folks. We hope that these tips and checklist will help you make the most out of advertising your business this holiday season!

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