Episode 12 · Strategy & Marketing
Ecommerce marketing strategy — nail your message and pitch
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What’s covered
- 01:15The difference between a marketing strategy and a list of tactics
- 06:40Defining the customer precisely enough to write to one person
- 13:00Problem, promise, proof: the structure behind a message that converts
- 19:25Why 'high quality' and 'passionate' are not positioning
- 25:10Testing your message on cold traffic before you scale spend
- 30:50Carrying one message consistently across ads, site and email
Show notes
Most ecommerce businesses do not have a marketing problem. They have a message problem that shows up as a marketing problem. In this episode Anna sets out what a marketing strategy actually is, why a content calendar is not one, and how to build the messaging layer that every tactic depends on.
The distinction drawn early is between strategy and tactics. Tactics are Meta ads, Google Shopping, email, TikTok, influencer seeding. Strategy is the decision about who you are for, what you are promising them, why they should believe you, and what makes you the obvious choice over the alternative. Tactics executed without that decision are expensive guesses, and it is why two stores can run the same ad platform with the same budget and get wildly different results.
Anna then works through customer definition. Not demographics — situations. What is happening in this person's life at the moment they need what you sell? What have they already tried? What are they worried about getting wrong? A message written to one specific person in one specific situation always outperforms a message written to a broad segment, and the fear of narrowing is almost always misplaced.
The core framework of the episode is problem, promise, proof. Name the problem in the customer's own words, state the specific promise you make about solving it, and back it with proof that a sceptical stranger would accept. Anna is direct about how rarely this is done well. Claims like premium quality, passionate about what we do, and Australian owned are not positioning — every competitor says them, so they carry no information and do not influence a purchase decision.
There is a practical section on testing. Before scaling spend behind a message, run it against cold traffic in small amounts and watch what happens to click-through and add-to-cart rates rather than sales alone. Cold traffic is honest in a way that your existing audience is not; people who already like you will forgive a vague message, and strangers will not. Anna talks through how to read early signals without over-interpreting small numbers.
The episode finishes on consistency. Once the message is right, it has to appear everywhere without dilution: the ad, the landing page, the product description, the confirmation email, the packaging insert. When the ad promises one thing and the site says another, conversion drops and most owners blame the site. Usually it is the seam between the two. Getting this right is unglamorous work, and it is the single highest-leverage project available to most ecommerce businesses.
If this is the constraint in your business right now, it’s what our ecommerce growth program is built around.
Transcript
Transcript coming soon
The full transcript for this episode hasn’t been published yet. In the meantime, the show notes above cover everything discussed. Need it sooner? Email us and we’ll prioritise it.
Resources mentioned
Questions this episode comes up against
In most stores we look at, the problem is upstream of the ads. If the offer, the margin and the product page don't do the work, more traffic just magnifies the leak. We fix the constraint in order — offer and margin first, then the funnel and product pages, then the ad accounts, then email and SMS.
It depends on margin and category, and anyone quoting a universal number is guessing. For context, the results we publish range from around 3x to 8x — Be Bangles has held a consistent 8x on Google Ads, Bravery Co runs about 7x on Google and 3 to 4x on Meta, and Montissier has sat between 3x and 7x across multiple months. A 2x ROAS on 70% margin beats a 5x on 20%.
Two quick tests. If your click-through rate is healthy but your conversion rate isn't, the promise in the ad isn't being kept by the page. If neither is moving, the offer itself probably isn't compelling enough yet. Messaging problems show up as traffic that arrives and leaves.
We work with stores from around $150K a year, or roughly $12K a month in sales. Below that, the money is usually better spent on the product and the offer than on marketing help — which is why we publish the $150K to $1M Roadmap free rather than selling to businesses that aren't ready.
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Prefer to talk first? Call 1300 634 230 or email nikki@theelevatory.com