All indicators are that the next several months are going to be a difficult time for anyone who sells physical products, with supply chain disruptions affecting the entire sales channel of countless products, marketing what you have in store and communicating delays will be more important than ever.
On this week’s Manage Comics Thoughtstream, we talked to Craig Oliphant of NorthIQ about marketing. Craig is a 20+ year veteran in online marketing, with specific focus around marketing conversions, marketing automation, and ecommerce marketing. He’s got a wealth of knowledge and Brian asked the hard questions that stores want to know the answers to.
What we talked about:
- What is Marketing (spoiler alert – Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing)
- How can I do marketing on a budget?
- What kinds of things should I focus on?
- What is integrated marketing?
- Trial and Error, and making what works for you work.
Takeaways
- Build an Email Database (Shopify makes this super easy)
- Integrate marketing with a combination of off-line (print), social media, and email communications all driving the same event.
- Make sure your Google My Business is up to date!
Examples from Manage Comics
Guess what? You’re being marketed to right now, and we will blast this marketing message across our social media, and to an engaged list of people who are segmented as “Interested in Manage Comics 2.0).
What we did this last two weeks:
We closed out nearly 40 bugs and enhancements.
Read the big list on the post – So Many Bugs Stomped
We also squashed a few new bugs including a weird edge case when removing all publishers, some new PRH invoice issues (for both Classic and 2.0), updating FOC numbers, updating images when you add products, and adding a URL to add new images (instead of needing to download the image and update it).
What’s Next:
- We’re focusing on our GeekFetch Data
- Imports for Manage Comics 1.0 customers into the 2.0 platform.
- Focusing on ratioed variants with data support and figuring out the best way to display ratios.
We’re planning a major refactor of code right now, as we have come to some realizations of ways that we could optimize the pulls process, improve the checkout process, and decrease our reliance on 3rd party Apps (like Draft Orders).
Stay tuned in two weeks for the results
On the Next Thoughtstream:
We’ll be off next week (October 14th) because Brian is participating in the Comics Data Summit from Comics Pro.
We will be back on the 21st, where we’ll talk about the data summit, as well as what’s going on with Manage Comics 2.0!
