Can anyone recommend some advertising strategies to bring buyers to your online store?

For a while our ads in magazines like Family Handyman and Popular Mechanics produced a strong return on investment (ROI), but the profitability of those print ads disappeared seven or eight years ago. Our advertising in those magazines' online editions and newsletters has not been successful.

Then Google AdWords worked well, but competition became so fierce from sellers of cheap, imported goods that we can no longer afford to use our own registered trademark as a search term. And, managing Google ads has become insanely complex.

We sell differently-branded products on Amazon, and their Sponsored Ads used to produce good returns and are easy to manage. But Amazon's 2024 shift away from its search box showing "relevant" results – to now showing "featured" results that are primarily irrelevant listings of cheap imported goods – has caused the ROI of those ads to plummet.

One strategy that continues to work well is to publish lots of informational pages on our website, answering questions that are relevant to buyers in a "non-salesy" way. This was suggested by a colleague with a successful online store who has never advertised with Google.

Our "Drain Cleaning Tips" pages now drive more sales than paid ads, at no cost beyond the original authoring effort.

I'd really like to hear your ideas!

I expect each business will be a bit different, but we serve product ads and as long as I only feed our op sellers, and keep it modest, I get around 8 to 1 ROI - pretty good.
As soon as I try to ramp it up though, the ROI starts to drop.
I get google reps all the time who want to show me how to improve and years ago, I stopped listening to them as each time my ROI would drop and I have to work to get things back where they were.
Click ads are brutal and can be a real money pit.

Have you tried aggressive social media? Facebook would be a good one for folks who own homes and do their own repairs - Your product(s) would probably do well there.
You can do some detailed targeting there.

David

Dave, thanks for those comments.

Can anyone recommend a good book or online resource to help a small business expand its social media presence?

ETA: it's been a challenge to produce the kind of engaging content (e.g., videos) to drive social media engagement at a reasonable cost.

And our previous experiments with paid Facebook video ads produced modest ROI - probably not worth the effort.

Direct competitors who constantly post video content on their Facebook pages seem to have at most around 2,000 followers - which suggests those efforts don't provide much return, either.

We've got a lot of email addresses from past customers, yet we've never sent marketing email because I'd expect it to create more hostility than sales.

Has anyone had good success with email marketing?

Mail Chimp charges around $700 per month to manage 30,000 contacts - and now that they're owned by Intuit its users seem certain to see endless fee increases and diminished value, just like with QuickBooks.

Any better tips or suggestions?