CJ had its first successful free live video training on CJ’s Facebook Group yesterday. Demi from CJ was the host and David Popovich, leader of the biggest eCommerce community in Israel, was the speaker.
This training was mainly focused on niche and product finding, and eCommerce brand building. David kindly shared many valuable experiences with the audience, and people asked a lot of considerable questions and left many great comments as well. We all believe it was a meaningful event for everyone.
What is Branding
Before talking about branding, positioning is the basis of understanding how to build a brand. According to Wikipedia, positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors and different from the concept of brand awareness. The key was to find ways to differentiate your brand from others and leave an impression on customers.
Another concept was the difference between marketplace (Amazon, eBay) and independent brand (Shopify, Woocommerce): Impulsive buying VS. Intent buying. Impulsive buying is the tendency of a customer to buy products without planning in advance, while intent buying happens when customers know what they want and actively search for it.
With that being said, you should try to implement different branding strategies for your online shops on different eCommerce platforms. For example, if you are selling a very unique product that a customer does not even know existed, impulsive buying is the way to go.
Maintain the repeat customers
The big money is mostly from repeat customers. David showed the audience screenshots of his store orders where the same customer had placed several orders in a short period of time. It is important to explore new customers; nevertheless, maintaining the customers you already have is somewhat more crucial. And the value of a brand is to bring these customers back to your stores with less advertisement needed.
Build the brand to leave impressions on customers
How to build a brand and branding your stores were the most compelling topics for audiences. Keeping consistency in messages and visualization is important when building your brand. In fact, no matter in which aspects, consistency is important when creating a brand. David showed his stores to the audience during the live training. The theme color of his store is white and blue, which is consistent throughout the store; the product type and descriptions are also consistent. This is a good way to leave images and impressions in customers’ minds.
Find the niche that can attract customer
This niche-finding method is practical and worth learning. Firstly, you could open some profiles of random people on Facebook, to begin with. Then you can go to the Likes section in those profiles. By browsing the pictures in their Likes, you will be able to discover the person’s hobbies and interests.
For instance, if you see a lot of pictures of puppies in one of the profiles you randomly chose, you could easily tell that the person is really into dogs or pets. Therefore, this person would be a potential customer of pet or dog-related products. However, it is not possible to decide on a niche only based on one customer. In order to make the final decision, it is more than necessary to collect more information.
You should consider this information-collecting activity as a daily activity, and when you have around 300 pieces of information, you then could look for the patterns in the list, and the patterns are the niches you could choose. By choosing the niche this way, you can see the actual interests of people so that it will be easier to find or even create demand.
Build a community to keep potential customers
Building a community to attract and keep customers. And you really need to feel what the passion is in the community. He suggested to start with a narrow and focused community where everyone has common interests, and you can share relevant contents for people to view, and create discussions. All the people in the community would likely be your future customers.
Find winning products and alternative ways to improve AOV
How to find the winning product has always been a popular problem in the dropshipping industry, and here are two useful articles that might be helpful:
- 12 Websites to Find Trending Products for Dropshipping
- 5 Amazing Websites to Spy on Product Data-Product Research
Moreover, there are some alternatives, even if you cannot find many winning products. A winning product can help you to gain a lot of money, but after a couple of days, the competitors would start selling the same products and take away part of the profits.
Then you would have to find another hot-selling product to repeat the process. However, finding winning products is not easy. Creating a special and unique offer for the customer would be helpful sometimes. It could be an extra value-added bundle or a discount or free shipping for the order. The final goal here is to differentiate your stores from other competitors and improve the AOV.
Excellent product + great shopping experience + fast shipping = beyond expectation (and a nice gift or coupon code can always help). This formula includes the three most important factors in the whole dropshipping process, and David explained it during the live training. More details can be found in the recorded video training.
Last words
If you missed the live session and still want to see the complete video, we have it recorded here. Please join CJ’s Facebook page first before accessing the video: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cjdropshipping. Additionally, CJ will regularly host free live video training in the future, and we plan to have the next event on March 18th, 2021.
The topic for the second live video training is listed below and it will be on how to find winning products and dropshipping Q&A. Please come and join us to share and learn. Hope you will have an easier and better dropshipping career!
CJ Facebook Group Live Webinar with David Popovich EP.2
How to find winning products | Dropshipping Q & A
Language: English
Date & Time: 5:00-6:00 pm (GMT+8, Beijing Time)March 18, 2021
Question-master: Demi from CJdropshipping
Mentor: David Popovich-Leader of the biggest eCom community in Israel
