If you've ever Googled "online marketing consultant," you already know the signal you're sending: you need strategic marketing help, and you're not sure whether to hire a person or a team. That's a meaningful distinction, and the answer depends entirely on where your business is and what you actually need right now.
This guide cuts through the noise. We'll explain what an online marketing consultant does, how their model differs from a full-service agency, what to look for, how pricing works, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
An online marketing consultant is a specialist who analyzes your current marketing performance, identifies gaps and opportunities, and builds a strategy to improve results across digital channels. Depending on their background and scope, they might focus on paid media, SEO, content, email, conversion rate optimization, or the full-funnel picture.
The key distinction from an agency: consultants operate at the strategic layer. They are typically brought in to diagnose, recommend, and advise — not to run campaigns day-to-day. Some consultants also provide execution, but their core value is expertise and objectivity. They are not tied to any particular platform or channel, which means their recommendations are driven by what's right for your business, not what they're set up to sell.
Common deliverables from an internet marketing consultant engagement include:
For growth-stage companies and DTC brands, the typical use case is someone who can function as a senior marketing voice without the cost of a full-time hire.
This is the question most brands skip past, and it leads to expensive mismatches.
A digital marketing consultant is the right fit when you need strategic clarity. If you're unsure which channels to prioritize, why your current campaigns aren't converting, or what your marketing org should look like in 12 months, a consultant brings the analytical depth to answer those questions. They are also the right choice when you have internal execution capacity but lack a senior strategist to direct it.
A full-service agency is the right fit when you need execution at scale. Agencies bring designers, copywriters, media buyers, analysts, and project managers under one roof. When you need daily creative output, multi-channel campaign management, or fast ramp-up across new channels, an agency has the bandwidth that a solo consultant does not.
The trap most growth-stage companies fall into: they hire a consultant, receive a strong strategy document, and then have no one to execute it. A plan that sits on a shelf produces zero results. Before hiring a marketing consultant, confirm that you have the internal team or an agency partner who can act on their recommendations.
The hybrid model — a consultant directing strategy while an agency handles execution — is increasingly common for companies that have outgrown founder-led marketing but are not ready for a full VP of Marketing. This approach gives you executive-level oversight without the overhead of a senior in-house hire. If you're evaluating whether that model fits your situation, it's worth reading our breakdown of what a fractional CMO does for B2B SaaS companies, since the two roles frequently overlap in scope.
Not all marketing consultants are equal, and the market is crowded with people who have run a few Facebook campaigns and rebranded themselves as strategists. These are the filters that matter.
Demonstrated results in your category matter most. Look for consultants who have worked with companies at your stage, in your revenue range, or in your vertical. DTC brands have different attribution problems than B2B SaaS. A consultant who specializes in one is not automatically equipped for the other.
Channel depth should match your actual needs. If your biggest gap is paid acquisition, you want someone who has managed significant ad budgets, not someone who dabbles in ads as part of a general practice. If SEO is the priority, verify they understand technical SEO, content strategy, and link acquisition — not just keyword research.
Look for a process, not just opinions. Good consultants follow a defined methodology: audit, prioritize, recommend, measure. If their pitch is entirely about their experience and contains no description of how they'll actually work with you, that is a red flag.
Ask for references you can actually call. Two or three client references in situations similar to yours is a reasonable ask. If they hesitate or provide names but no contact information, keep moving.
Pay attention to honest scope boundaries. A consultant who claims expertise in every channel is either a team or is overstating their abilities. The best ones know their lane.
Pricing varies significantly based on scope, seniority, and engagement model. Here is what the market looks like in 2026:
Hourly rates run from $75 to $300 per hour for most engagements. Execution-focused work sits at the lower end; senior strategic consulting commands $150 to $300 per hour or more. Specialists in high-demand areas like paid search or growth strategy often price above $250.
Monthly retainers are the most common structure for ongoing engagements. Expect $2,500 to $8,000 per month for a mid-market consultant providing regular advisory, reporting review, and strategic direction. Senior consultants working with larger organizations charge $10,000 to $20,000 per month.
Project-based fees are typical for defined deliverables like a full channel audit, a go-to-market strategy, or a channel launch plan. Project fees generally range from $3,000 for a focused audit to $25,000 or more for a comprehensive strategy engagement.
One thing to budget for that many brands overlook: a consultant's fee does not include ad spend, tools, or any execution costs. Their fee covers their time and expertise. Media budgets, creative production, and tooling are separate line items.
The intake conversation with a marketing consultant tells you everything you need to know, if you ask the right questions.
Ask how they measure success. A strong consultant will immediately discuss leading indicators tied to revenue — pipeline velocity, customer acquisition cost, return on ad spend — not vanity metrics like impressions or follower counts. If their answer centers on output metrics, probe further.
Ask what the engagement looks like week-to-week. How many hours are they committing? Who do they meet with, and how often? What decisions are in their scope versus yours? Vague answers here often indicate a lack of structure.
Ask what they won't do. Understanding the edges of their scope tells you whether you need additional resources. A consultant who is transparent about their limits is more trustworthy than one who claims to cover everything.
Ask for examples of strategies that did not work and what they learned from them. Marketing is inherently experimental. Consultants who can only talk about wins have either a selective memory or limited experience.
Ask what happens at the end of the engagement. A good consultant should be building toward a handoff — either to your internal team or to an agency — rather than creating dependency on themselves indefinitely.
EmberTribe operates as a growth marketing partner, not a traditional consulting firm. That means we bring the strategic rigor of a digital marketing consultant alongside the execution capability of a full agency team. For DTC brands and growth-stage companies, this eliminates the execution gap that makes standalone consulting so risky.
Our model works best for brands that have proven product-market fit and need a systematic approach to scaling acquisition — across paid social, search, content, and retention channels. We operate as an extension of your team, which means our recommendations come with the team to execute them.
If you're evaluating agencies alongside consultants, our guide on how to choose the best ecommerce marketing agency covers the evaluation criteria in detail, including the questions that separate strong partners from expensive disappointments.
We're also transparent about fit. If a standalone consultant is a better match for your stage and budget, we'll tell you that rather than oversell the scope of an engagement that won't deliver.
If you're ready to talk through where you are and what would actually move the needle, reach out to EmberTribe. We'll start with a diagnostic, not a pitch.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced a new user interface that would overtake so-called “classic Facebook” in September. This means bye-bye 👋 to the old look and hello to a refreshed, updated interface. One of the main motivations for switching to a new Facebook interface (or FB5 as they call it) is a company-wide pivot toward privacy-focused communications.
Another big motivation is simply that Facebook’s desktop UI has remained essentially unchanged for years, and what worked in 2012 doesn’t really translate to a great 2020 user experience. Oh, how time passes...
What the new design addresses:
Among the changes in the new interface:
Unfortunately for Facebook, the UI change has been received with very mixed reviews, and despite the months-long lead time on changes, it seems likely that people will continue to have to grapple with getting used to “new Facebook” for a while.
The new Facebook design has triggered quite a few (negative) emotions from users. The change was made permanent on September 1, 2020, so users and Facebook engineers will have to adapt and make the best of a new situation.
A quick search for “Facebook interface” on Twitter shows that a lot of people aren’t loving the updates, and some are even reporting issues with the desktop interface loading. Well, anyone who has ever done anything knows that it’s impossible to please everyone, so these mixed reviews are far from shocking.
Some common criticisms (so far):
Well, truth be told, our team feels pretty lukewarm toward these changes. However, since we’re in the business of paid social, a big interface change like this could have unexpected influence over Facebook advertising strategies. To put it plainly: the success of Facebook ads is intrinsically tied to the functionality and popularity of Facebook itself.
With web browsing increasingly trending toward mobile usage, this change seems like a warranted update to accommodate evolving preferences.
It’s hard to say right now if these changes will turn out to be positive for the overall user experience or anger frequent Facebook users to the point of no return. But from a personal point of view, if users haven’t been deterred by previous Facebook updates, scandals, and complaints, this remodeled UI seems unlikely to push users away.
For now, Facebook advertising is safe (and we love to see it!). If you're ready to run Facebook ads that get results, let's talk.
Amazon has become the default launchpad for many small to medium-sized ecommerce brands looking to get products in front of buyers quickly. The marketplace's massive reach, built-in logistics infrastructure, and consumer trust make it an attractive starting point. But that convenience comes with trade-offs that many sellers do not fully appreciate until they are deep into the platform.
Selling directly to consumers (D2C or DTC) offers a fundamentally different model. One where you own the customer relationship, control the brand experience, and retain the data that drives long-term growth. Understanding the real differences between these two approaches is essential for building a sustainable ecommerce business.
Amazon offers two seller plans: Professional and Individual. Both carry subscription fees plus per-item selling fees on every transaction. Sellers can handle their own fulfillment or opt into Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which adds another layer of fees for picking, packing, shipping, and returns handling.
FBA does solve real operational headaches. Returns processing, customer service for shipping issues, and Prime badge eligibility are genuine advantages. For brands without established logistics capabilities, these services can be the difference between scaling and stalling.
But the costs extend far beyond fees. Here is what many Amazon sellers do not account for:
Most ecommerce brands frame this as an either-or decision, but the real question is about strategic emphasis and resource allocation. Understanding the strengths and limitations of each model helps you make informed decisions about where to invest.
Amazon's strengths are undeniable for certain use cases:
The limitations become more significant as your brand matures:
Direct-to-consumer selling provides advantages that compound over time:
The D2C model is not without its challenges:
The most sophisticated ecommerce brands do not choose one channel exclusively. They use Amazon strategically while building their D2C business as the primary growth engine.
Here is how a hybrid strategy works in practice:
Amazon can serve as a product discovery and validation channel. New products can be tested on the marketplace to gauge demand, collect reviews, and generate initial revenue while your D2C infrastructure scales.
Once a customer discovers your brand, the goal is to move that relationship to your owned channels. This is where packaging inserts, brand registry content, and post-purchase strategies become critical. Every Amazon sale should be viewed as an opportunity to earn a future D2C customer.
Early-stage brands might allocate 70% of resources to Amazon for immediate revenue and 30% to building D2C infrastructure. As the D2C channel matures, that ratio should shift. Mature brands often target an 80/20 split favoring D2C, using Amazon primarily for incremental reach.
Track profitability by channel, not just revenue. Many brands discover that their Amazon revenue looks impressive on the top line but delivers minimal profit after accounting for all fees, advertising costs, and operational overhead. That analysis often accelerates the shift toward D2C investment.
If you are ready to invest in direct-to-consumer growth, these are the foundational elements that drive results:
Your website is your most important asset. It needs to load fast, communicate your value proposition clearly, and guide visitors through a frictionless purchase experience. Platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce provide the infrastructure. Your job is to optimize the experience through testing and iteration.
Paid social advertising is the fastest way to drive qualified traffic to a D2C storefront. Start with the platforms where your target audience spends time, test creative aggressively, and scale what works. Build lookalike audiences from your best customers and use retargeting to capture visitors who did not convert on the first visit.
Every visitor who gives you their email address represents a relationship you own. Unlike Amazon customers, these contacts can be nurtured through email sequences, product launch announcements, and personalized offers that drive repeat purchases and increase lifetime value.
Organic traffic through content marketing and SEO is the long-term play that reduces your dependence on paid channels. Create content that addresses your audience's questions, showcases your products in context, and builds the topical authority that drives sustainable search traffic.
Subscription-based models and loyalty programs create predictable revenue and increase customer lifetime value. For consumable products, subscriptions are an obvious fit. For durable goods, loyalty programs with early access, exclusive products, or referral rewards can drive similar retention outcomes.
You should not abandon Amazon overnight. But you should start building your D2C channel with the same urgency you brought to your marketplace presence. The brands that thrive long-term are the ones that own their customer relationships, control their brand experience, and build the data assets that enable smarter marketing decisions over time.
The path from Amazon-dependent to D2C-primary is not instant, but every step in that direction builds equity in a business you fully control. Start with a solid storefront, invest in acquiring customers directly, and use the data you collect to continuously optimize your cash flow and growth runway.
The question is not whether you should sell on Amazon or go D2C. The question is how quickly you can build a direct channel strong enough that Amazon becomes optional rather than essential.
Facebook's Power 5 is a set of five automated advertising tactics that work together to improve campaign performance. Introduced by Meta as a best-practice framework, the Power 5 represents the platform's recommended approach to running ads that leverage machine learning effectively.
The five components are:
Each element works independently, but their real value emerges when used together. The Power 5 framework essentially asks advertisers to trust the algorithm with more decisions, in exchange for better performance at scale.
For Facebook advertisers who have been manually optimizing every aspect of their campaigns, this can feel counterintuitive. But the data consistently shows that advertisers who adopt these practices outperform those who insist on manual control across every variable.
Auto Advanced Matching (AAM) improves the connection between actions taken on your website and the Facebook users who took them. It works by automatically sending hashed customer information from your website, such as email addresses, phone numbers, names, and location data, to Facebook when a conversion event fires.
Without AAM enabled, Facebook relies solely on the pixel cookie to match website conversions to user profiles. As browser restrictions on third-party cookies tighten and users browse across multiple devices, cookie-based tracking misses a growing share of conversions.
AAM fills those gaps by sending additional identifiers that Facebook can use to match conversions to users. The result is more accurate attribution, larger retargeting audiences, and better optimization signals for the algorithm.
For ecommerce stores using Shopify or WooCommerce, AAM is typically enabled by default through their Facebook integrations. For custom-built sites, work with your development team to ensure the correct data layer variables are being captured.
The impact is significant. Enabling AAM typically increases custom audience match rates by 10-30% and improves attributed conversions by 5-15%.
Campaign Budget Optimization moves budget control from the ad set level to the campaign level. Instead of assigning a fixed daily budget to each ad set, you set one budget for the entire campaign and let Facebook's algorithm distribute spending across ad sets based on performance.
In a traditional setup, an advertiser might run five ad sets at $50/day each, spending $250/day total. If one ad set performs exceptionally well and another performs poorly, each still receives its fixed $50 allocation.
With CBO, the same $250/day budget is allocated dynamically. The high-performing ad set might receive $150 while the underperformer gets $20. The algorithm rebalances in real time based on which audiences are delivering the best results.
CBO is particularly powerful when combined with simplified account structure because fewer campaigns mean each campaign receives more budget, giving the algorithm more data to optimize with.
This is perhaps the most impactful and least intuitive element of the Power 5. Facebook's recommendation is to consolidate your account into fewer campaigns, fewer ad sets, and fewer ads rather than creating highly segmented structures.
Many advertisers instinctively create separate campaigns for every audience, every funnel stage, and every product line. A typical over-segmented account might have 20+ campaigns running simultaneously, each with 3-5 ad sets containing 2-3 ads.
This feels like control, but it actually works against you because:
A well-structured Facebook account for most advertisers needs only 3-5 campaigns:
Within each campaign, consolidate audiences rather than fragmenting them. Let the algorithm decide who within a broader audience set is most likely to convert.
This structure works especially well for ecommerce brands running catalog-based advertising, where dynamic ads can serve the right product to the right user without manual audience segmentation.
When you create an ad set, Facebook lets you choose where your ads appear: Feed, Stories, Reels, Marketplace, Audience Network, Messenger, and more. Automatic placements means letting Facebook decide where to show each ad based on where it is most likely to achieve your objective.
The hesitation is understandable. Advertisers worry about their carefully designed feed ads being stretched awkwardly into Stories format, or about budget being wasted on low-quality Audience Network placements.
These concerns were more valid in the early days. Facebook has significantly improved how creative adapts across placements, and the algorithm has gotten better at identifying which placements deliver actual results for each campaign.
Across our managed accounts, campaigns using automatic placements consistently achieved 10-25% lower cost per result compared to manual placement selection. The algorithm finds inventory pockets that manual selection misses, particularly in less competitive placements where CPMs are significantly lower.
Dynamic ads automatically show the right products to people who have expressed interest on your website, in your app, or elsewhere on the internet. Instead of manually creating individual ads for each product, you connect your product catalog and let Facebook generate ads dynamically.
The system connects three inputs:
When a user views a product on your site but does not purchase, Facebook can show them an ad featuring that exact product (and similar items) the next time they open the platform. This is dynamic retargeting at its most effective.
Dynamic ads are not limited to retargeting. Facebook's Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABA) uses machine learning to show products from your catalog to prospecting audiences who have never visited your site.
The algorithm analyzes user behavior patterns, product attributes, and conversion signals to predict which products each user is most likely to purchase. For catalogs with hundreds or thousands of products, this is far more efficient than manual ad creation.
The real value of the Power 5 framework is not any single element. It is how they compound when used together.
Consider the combined effect:
Each element reduces manual control in favor of algorithmic optimization. And each element provides better data to the others, creating a virtuous cycle of improving performance.
Here is a practical sequence for implementing the Power 5 in your account:
The Power 5 framework represents Facebook's clearest articulation of how advertisers should work with, rather than against, the platform's machine learning capabilities. Advertisers who embrace algorithmic optimization and feed the system with clean data and strong creative consistently outperform those who cling to manual control.
The platform has changed. The strategies that worked when manual optimization was superior, including hyper-segmented audiences, manual placement selection, and ad-set-level budgets, now actively hinder performance. The Power 5 is not just a recommendation. For serious Facebook advertisers, it is the operating system for modern campaign management.
Are you currently maximizing Pinterest advertising for your eCommerce or online retail business? If not, you might be making a big mistake by snubbing this powerful social media marketing platform.
The user mindset on Pinterest is significantly different than it is on other social media platforms — users are often on Pinterest specifically to decide what to buy next, or plan a big future purchase. That high shopping intent is key for conversions!
This makes Pinterest a go-to eCommerce advertising platform full of marketing potential for your business. Imagine being able to present users who are actively searching for your products (or similar ones) with ads while also being able to promote to users who are passively browsing through their feed.
That's a clear win-win for catching ToFu and MoFu audiences.
Pinterest can also reveal your target audience's aesthetic preferences and preferred products and services, giving you an upper hand for your ad creative strategy.
What visuals appeal to your buyer persona? The answer in is the boards!
The best and most effective Pinterest ads:
Here’s some best practices and tips we've come across for how to make the most of your ads:
📌 Pinterest is growing fast and eCommerce advertisers are taking notice. →
This type of ad works well for health and wellness businesses because everyone loves a great success story. The image and the text overlay used for this ad are easily relatable. Your audience is invited to see themselves getting the same end result from your product.
Who says no to cute outfit ideas? There's a lot to gain from advertising clothing and accessories on Pinterest. Just make sure that your ads represent current stock!
Also, take note of the call to action in this ad. A good call to action will grab the attention of audiences. This one gives browsers an idea of cost without having to click first and entices them with a good deal.
Make sure that your pin is interesting enough to convince your audience to visit your website. This ad featuring Drummond House Plans shows a mock up design and floor plan of a modern house. It's not so vague that the viewer thinks it's just a regular house photo, but it also doesn't overstate the business.
On top of the sleek visual, Drummond House Plans takes into account user intent by including tags popular to Pinterest users planning to purchase or build a home.
We've seen clients get big returns on Pinterest ads. Are you ready to try out this visual social platform for your ad campaigns?
Have you scrolled through your Facebook feed and had a good product review catch your eye? Maybe you even ended up buying a product because you were swayed by a positive review from a friend, a relative, or even other online users you don’t really know.
That, my friend, is a result of social proof!
Social proof is social influence derived from the same principle as “word of mouth.” It generally inspires trust between your potential customer and users who leave testimonials about a certain product or service you offer.
Social proof doesn’t just rely on reviews or feedback — it’s also about what people see in your public social engagement such as the number of reactions, comments, and shares your ad receives.
If your ad gained around 1,000 likes whether organically or not, a customer’s natural reaction is to find out why. All thanks to a social phenomenon called FOMO or “fear of missing out,” people always want to know what the next big thing is.
Social proof is part of almost every successful social media marketing campaign and can negatively or positively impact customer’s purchase behavior.
When a customer is in a brick and mortar store, they have full capacity to weigh out options and directly see which product is the best for them. Things are a lot more complicated when shopping online.
Your potential customer needs an external factor to rely on to make a decision — and this is where social proof steps in.
The key to having effective social proof is using specific and authentic user-generated content (such as reviews) in your ads that are targeted to warm audiences. Your warm audiences are people who are already familiar with your products and just need a bit of a nudge to make that purchase.
Your Facebook campaigns can contain reviews that are not too in-your-face or too dry and unexciting. Although reviews are not exactly reactions or shares on your actual ad, they still showcase how other people love your brand and your products.
You can fit these testimonials into your ad copy or creative image into your actual ad depending on the length. Here are 4 stunning social proof examples used in Facebook ads.
Review in headline:
Review in ad:
Review in ad text:
Yup, you read that right — Facebook has ad text rules that you need to be wary of before running your campaign.
Facebook’s advertising guidelines include a 20 percent text rule. This specifically means that your image text cannot take up more than 20 percent of the photo. Facebook typically suggests no more than 500 characters and an image that is 400x400 pixels for News Feed ads, simply because they perform and drive results better.
Keep in mind that you can test your ad photos with Facebook’s Text Overlay Tool and see if they fit the standards before officially running your Facebook ads.
How will you use social proof to engage audiences?
How Your Digital Content Strategy Can Generate Inexpensive Growth Through Organic Traffic
"Content is king." We have all heard it before, and every marketer understands the gravitational pull that good content exerts on audiences and search engines alike.
If you think that sounds like a dramatic claim, you might be surprised by the data behind it. Brands that invest consistently in content marketing generate roughly three times as many leads per dollar spent compared to paid channels alone, and those leads compound over time instead of disappearing the moment a budget is paused.
An effective digital content strategy serves a dual purpose: it gives your website ranking authority in search results while also appealing to audiences by providing genuinely valuable information. In other words, investing in good content will help draw inexpensive organic traffic through meaningful engagement.
When done right, your content can generate organic traffic with long-term ROI at a fraction of paid traffic costs.
If you are still not sold on the reigning power of content, here is our proclamation to declare that content is, indeed, still king - and our manifesto for making it work.
Quality content and a healthy organic digital content strategy can increase web traffic at lower costs than running paid ads alone. You can grab the attention of visitors - future customers - through informative and engaging content that adds value to your brand.
Your organic content strategy will help inform a cohesive, multi-dimensional digital marketing strategy across all platforms and channels. If you are testing your content on organic first, you will know what performs well before investing more money into paid traffic.
One of the most compelling reasons to invest in content is the compounding nature of organic results. A single well-optimized blog post can generate traffic for months or even years after publication. Compare that to a paid ad, which stops delivering impressions the moment you turn off spending.
Over time, a library of strong content creates a moat around your brand. Each new piece adds to the site's domain authority, which lifts the performance of every other piece alongside it. This is why companies that commit to building brand trust through SEO see accelerating returns rather than diminishing ones.
Content does not exist in isolation. The insights you gain from organic performance - which headlines resonate, which topics attract engagement, which formats hold attention - become a playbook for your paid campaigns. Test messaging organically first, then pour budget behind what already works. This approach reduces wasted ad spend and shortens the feedback loop between creative ideation and data-driven optimization.
Who doesn't love a good story?
Content goes beyond selling your product or service to telling your story. What is your brand about? What passions, missions, and motivations drive your business? Your digital content should reflect your business's values and priorities.
Do not create content just to have content. It should have a purpose and a place within your digital content strategy. Overall, the content you produce should support direct response campaigns and build credibility among your audience.
Telling your story differentiates your business from the competition and helps solidify your brand in ways that product pages and transactional copy never will.
A strong brand story follows a pattern: identify the customer's problem, explain why that problem matters, and show how your brand delivers a solution others cannot. Every piece of content you produce should reinforce one of these three elements in some way. Blog posts might address the problem. Case studies prove the solution. Social content reminds audiences why the problem matters in the first place.
When executed well, brand storytelling creates emotional resonance that paid ads struggle to achieve. Customers who feel connected to a brand story are more likely to become repeat buyers and organic advocates.
Think about the content you have already produced. No doubt you have done significant work to create quality content for your audience. You do not have to throw away digital content you have invested in.
Content does not have to go to waste when it can be recycled and updated for more organic traffic. It is straightforward to keep good content evergreen by updating links, refreshing statistics, and repackaging information for multiple uses.
You can use past content to build better funnels, reinforce retargeting campaigns, and learn more about your own brand and audience.
Here is a repeatable framework for getting more mileage from every piece of content you create:
This approach ensures you are not starting from zero every time you sit down to create. Your search engine positioning will benefit as refreshed content signals relevance to Google's crawlers.
What if you were able to publish content that could predictably provide measurable business value? You can. This is what we call growth content.
Growth content drives measurable business value in the form of new users, leads, or sales.
A growth content framework consists of five key attributes that help you optimize content creation efforts with an eye toward growth:
By adopting a growth content framework, you can use content strategically and measurably to add value to your digital content strategy. The impact extends across every marketing channel you leverage, from organic search to email to paid social.
Despite all of this talk about creating content, you might still be tempted to ignore the long-term organic content strategy for the quick returns of paid ads.
We cannot deny that paid ads are an effective way to drive traffic to your website. However, if you are seeking a long-term digital marketing strategy to increase traffic at a lower cost, good content is going to drive your organic traffic in valuable ways.
Even better, your content can be used to inform paid traffic and organic traffic alike. Brands that build a balanced search marketing plan combining SEO and SEM consistently outperform those that rely on a single channel.
A long-term content strategy needs structure. Here is how to build one:
Most brands give up on content marketing too early. They publish for three months, see modest results, and redirect budget to paid channels. The brands that win are the ones that stay consistent through the inflection point - the moment when accumulated domain authority and content volume begin generating exponential returns.
The data supports patience. Companies that publish consistently for twelve or more months see organic traffic growth rates that outpace paid acquisition costs by a significant margin.
Content is not a marketing expense - it is a business asset. Every piece you publish adds to a growing library that works for you around the clock, attracting prospects, educating leads, and building the kind of trust that no ad placement can replicate.
The brands that treat content as a strategic priority rather than a checkbox will be the ones that dominate their categories. Build your content marketing strategy with intention, measure what matters, and commit to the long game.
Long live good content.
Deciding to launch an eCommerce business is a significant milestone. But before you make your first sale, one of the most consequential decisions you will face is selecting the platform that powers your online store. The platform you choose affects everything from site speed and checkout experience to long-term scalability and total cost of ownership.
Three platforms dominate the conversation for direct-to-consumer brands and growth-stage retailers: Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. Each takes a fundamentally different approach to eCommerce, and the right choice depends on your technical resources, growth trajectory, and operational priorities.
Below, we break down the features, limitations, and ideal use cases for each platform so you can make a data-informed decision.
Shopify has become the default recommendation for D2C brands and for good reason. The platform packages hosting, a drag-and-drop site builder, payment processing, and analytics into a single subscription. You do not need to source separate hosting, worry about SSL certificates, or patch security vulnerabilities yourself.
Shopify is the strongest choice for merchants who prioritize speed, simplicity, and a managed infrastructure. If you want to focus on product, marketing, and customer experience rather than server management, Shopify removes the technical overhead that slows teams down.
WooCommerce takes the opposite approach. Rather than a standalone platform, it is a free, open-source plugin that transforms any WordPress site into a fully functional online store. This architecture gives merchants complete control over every line of code, every design element, and every server configuration.
WooCommerce is the right fit for brands with in-house development resources or an agency partner who can manage the technical stack. If your business model demands deep customization, complex integrations, or a content-driven growth strategy, WooCommerce offers a flexibility ceiling that hosted platforms cannot match.
BigCommerce occupies a middle ground between Shopify's simplicity and WooCommerce's flexibility. It is a hosted, SaaS platform like Shopify, but it ships with more built-in features out of the box, reducing the need for paid add-ons.
BigCommerce works well for mid-market and B2B-adjacent brands that need advanced features without the overhead of managing their own infrastructure. If you are scaling past $1 million in annual revenue and want built-in functionality that would require multiple paid apps on Shopify, BigCommerce deserves serious consideration.
FactorShopifyWooCommerceBigCommerceHostingIncludedSelf-managedIncludedTransaction Fees0.5-2% on third-party gatewaysNoneNoneCustomizationModerate (Liquid templates)Unlimited (open source)Moderate (Stencil framework)Time to LaunchFastSlow to moderateFastBest ForD2C brands wanting speedDevelopers wanting full controlMid-market brands wanting built-in features
Selecting a platform is not purely a feature comparison. Consider these practical factors before committing:
1. Your team's technical capacity. If you have no developers on staff and no agency partner, a hosted solution like Shopify or BigCommerce will save you from the operational burden of managing servers, security patches, and plugin conflicts.
2. Your growth trajectory. Model your costs at current revenue and at two times and five times your current volume. Shopify's transaction fees and app costs scale linearly. BigCommerce's tier-based pricing can jump at revenue thresholds. WooCommerce's costs are more variable but can be optimized with the right hosting setup.
3. Your marketing and advertising stack. Consider how each platform integrates with your paid media, email, and analytics tools. Shopify's native ad integrations and WooCommerce's WordPress-based SEO advantages each serve different acquisition strategies.
4. Your need for customization. If your business model requires a unique checkout flow, complex product configurations, or custom integrations with ERP and inventory systems, the flexibility ceiling of your platform matters.
Shopify gets the EmberTribe seal of approval. Our team of growth experts swear by Shopify's functionality and ease of use. For the majority of D2C brands and growth-stage eCommerce companies, Shopify delivers the best balance of speed, reliability, and ecosystem support.
BigCommerce is a strong alternative for mid-market brands that need built-in B2B features and want to avoid transaction fees. WooCommerce remains the go-to for technically capable teams that require full customization and a content-driven approach to growth.
If you are looking for the simplest path to launching and scaling your eCommerce business, Shopify is the best place to start. But whichever platform you choose, the real differentiator is not the technology itself. It is how effectively you leverage it to acquire customers, optimize conversions, and build a brand that lasts.
Some of our best-performing ads aren't visually impressive, so don't get too hung up on animation or polish, trust the data.
Running "ugly" ads (aka real, lo-fi, less polished) could seem counterintuitive, but if done right, it can help to bring in new customers at a low cost, help convert retargeting audiences, and bring in more traffic to your site.
Consumers trust brands that feel attainable, authentic or aren't big $$$ brands. Ads that are too polished blend in with large companies and often don't attract consumers. Think about the sort of images that you see naturally occurring from other users on your Facebook and Instagram feeds - that is what we’re going for.
If your brand is new, cottage/boutique size, organic, all-natural, "made by moms", etc. then running less-polished" ads could be for you!
Using assets like UGC won't be pixel-perfect but do prove to be very popular and ads consumers trust.
Here are some examples of ads that are producing our best results right now:
Ideas to test "ugly" ads:
Less production time helps you be faster to respond to trends, news, events, new stock, inventory issues, sales etc.
Flashy, polished ads don’t always mean great performance. So test out an “ugly” ad and see if it outperforms. You just might surprise yourself!
In this post, you'll learn:
Whether it’s a cart recovery system, upsells, a messenger bot, or a review platform, the right Shopify App can drive the conversation, streamline your workload, and boost revenue for your store in little more than a few clicks a week.
From improving conversion rates to bolstering consumer trust, you’d be hard-pressed not to find something a simple app can improve in your store.
But all that convenience comes at a cost. With over 1200 apps to choose from – many of which you’d need to pay for, right out of the gate – and no reliable way to test them, enterprising Shopify store owners can quickly find themselves overwhelmed and underwater
👋 This is exactly what we’re here for!
With decades of combined experience across hundreds of Shopify stores of every possible size and type, we’ve narrowed down the list of must-have apps to 26.
We’ve divvied these apps up into the must-have categories your store should cover, and further broken them down by cost and sophistication – so feel free to choose your own adventure with them at that point.
With this list in hand, you can’t go wrong wading into the Shopify App waters.
If you’re a digital seller, these are non-negotiable.
(Not to be confused with the Facebook Sales Channel)
If you want to advertise your products on Facebook (and you do), your best option is hands-down going to be Flexify.
1. Flexify (Free plan available. Additional charges may apply):
Sure, Shopify has the ability to add Facebook as a sales channel, which allows you to connect your product catalog to an ad account. But that will limit you (and any agency you might want to employ hint hint) in your product set creation and image-cropping options. Flexify’s free plan simplifies this whole process and does it very, very well. Flexify recently introduced its new superfeed which removes the need for pagination and can be used for Google, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Facebook.
(Not to be confused with the Google Sales Channel)
Same deal – if you’re into advertising on Google Shopping (and… you probably are), the Google Shopping Feed is your buddy.
2. Google Shopping Feed ($4.99/month. 21-day free trial.) Additional charges may apply):
Shopify has made an app to try to hook stores’ feeds into Google … but by all accounts (um, including ours), it’s awful. Do yourself a favor, skip the Shopify version and head straight to Google’s purpose-built feed app.
Repeat after us: Abandoned cart recovery = Revenue recovery
All stores need some sort of email marketing solution, which is how you’re going to at least start recovering these carts. Here are some of our favorite, low-risk options:
3. Recart ($29/month. 28-day free trial. Additional charges may apply.)
Also includes Facebook Messenger Recovery, where we’ve seen messages getting upwards of 70% open rates.
4. ShopSync (Free.)
If you’ve already got MailChimp as your email provider, nab this app for recovery. Mailchimp removed its partnership with Shopify and the only way to sync the platforms is with this app.
5. Klaviyo (Free to install. Additional charges may apply.)
Robust email platform, works beautifully with equally sophisticated stores, tons of automation options.
Got another email provider in place? See if they have a Shopify app and give it a go. The above are our favorites, but that doesn’t mean an email platform you love won’t perform adequately in its Shopify implementation. We’re just a little more skeptical (and how much do you really love that email provider anyway? 😉).
6. OneClickUpsell ($24.99/month. 30-day free trial.)
Although this app can be quite expensive, we’ve seen the OneClickUpsell app pay for itself many times over if set up properly.
7. Product Upsell by Bold Apps (From $9.99/month. 14-day free trial.)
This app is an awesome way to increase your average order value.
8. Persistent Cart (Free.)
With this app, you can keep your users logged into their cart across devices.
Capturing customers intent on leaving with some sort of promotion or discount can bump up store conversion rates, with less than 10 minutes of work.
9. Exit Offers ($9.99/month. 14-day free trial.)
10. Wheelio (From $14.92/month. 7-day free trial.)
11. Privy ( $10/month. 15-day free trial.)
When you’re good, you’re good. And you want everyone to know it.
We recommend most eCommerce stores have some sort of reviewing mechanism. They help build trust, build social reactions, and build your bottom line.
12. Product Reviews (Free):
Great for a simple review mechanism where you can manually upload reviews from other platforms, like Amazon.
13. Yotpo Reviews (Free to install. External Charges may apply.):
Perfect for a more complex reviewing mechanism – it verifies reviews to give customers a sense of trust, outputs them to your marketing on a kind of modified Facebook Dynamic Product Ad system, and more.
14. Growave (Free plan available. 14-day free trial.)
This all-in-one platform helps small- and medium-sized Shopify stores gather reviews, wishlists, loyalty programs, referrals, social login, and UGC to improve sales.
Live Chat/Messenger Shopify Apps
There are a ton of live chat apps out there and many of them work just fine. Below, however, are a few that we particularly like. Use them to answer questions, bot together some FAQ responses, direct consumers to the appropriate sections of your site or (😱) chat directly to your customers … live.
15. Chatra Live Chat + Facebook (Free plan available)
16. Tidio Live Chat (Free plan available. Additional charges may apply.)
17. Zendesk Support (Free to install. Additional charges may apply.)
18. Shogun (From $39/month. 10-day free trial.)
Custom landing page builder. Easy as pie, can fit your store theme almost out of the box.
19.Zipify (From $67/month. 14-day free trial.)
Smarter sales funnels & landing pages for your Shopify store.
20.PageFly Advanced Page Builder (Free plan available.)
Build landing pages, product pages, FAQ, home pages & funnels.
Every store is unique, with unique challenges. If your special set of circumstances seems to warrant a little something extra, one of these just may hit the spot.
More apps does not equal better store. In fact, more apps can slow your site down, confuse the systems in place, mess with your site formatting and even drive away confused customers (especially on mobile …yikes!). Consider your needs before implementing and monitor your results after 👍
21. SyncTap (Free plan available. 14-day free trial.)
Target highly profitable audiences with your Facebook ads in seconds!
22. Free Shipping Bar by Hextom (Free plan available.)
Top-of-site announcement bar for free shipping or some other sort of promotion (many themes have this as a built-in feature, just by the way. Check yours for it, first!).
23. Back in Stock (From $19/month. 30-day free trial.)
Run out of inventory quickly and often? Capture that audience before they leave the site. A pre-order app can also work well here, but this one is simpler than most.
24. Product Discount by Bold Apps ($19.99/month. 14-day free trial.)
Storewide sales, flash-sales, & scheduled sales with a click. Boom.
25. Recurring Orders & Subscriptions by Bold Apps ($19.99/month. 90-day free trial.)
For shops with a recurring business model.
26. ShipperHQ (from $50/month. 30-day free trial.):
Create an Amazon-like checkout experience with shipping rates and options that make sense, and convenient delivery options your customers will love. Instantly pull delivery dates from carriers, calculate the most accurate rates possible, set up unique shipping rules and restrictions for any checkout scenario, apply dynamic shipping discounts and promotions, automate LTL freight quoting and box selection for orders, and much more.
👉 Pssst: If you choose to upgrade to the paid version of any of these apps, you’ll need to be logged into your Shopify store as an owner to do so.
If you're ready to level up your Shopify store with less hassle and more help, book a call with us.
Check out this TribeTalk from our Marketing Specialist, Kathryn Betancourt chatting with one of our Growth Specialists, Courtney Corner and one of our Project Managers, Deanna Spallone.
Instead of discussing paid traffic, today's TribeTalk focuses on another element we talk about often here at EmberTribe, EMAIL.
We answer questions such as: "Where to start with email?", "What should you test?", and "How can you easily create consistency?".
Where do I start?
Choose a platform for your email marketing. A few suggestions if you haven’t chosen one already are HubSpot, Klaviyo, or Mailchimp. FYI, you will have to pay for a tool to integrate your Shopify.
Next, you’ll want to build your list by capturing emails. Where should you start capturing emails? You can build your list with a subscribe option on your website, information from purchases, and run a campaign to opt-in for a chance to win a gift/shopping spree.
For your Initial email campaigns, start with a welcome series for services/Cart abandonment. For eComm businesses, these are people with high intent so use email here to push them over the line to purchase with a time-sensitive discount, creating urgency. You want people to make a decision to purchase so they don’t miss out on such a sweet offer.
Now that you got that setup, what’s next?
Build out more campaigns and test everything! Send yourself a test of each email and make sure to click photos, CTAs, links, check different devices, etc. before launching. The last thing you want is a mass email with your CTA button going to your “Summer Sale” page when you are trying to push your new “Fall Catalog”.
Pro-tip, a few tools for testing your emails that we like to use are EmailOnAcid and Litmus PutsMail.
Keep in mind mobile-friendly content! 60% of people open their emails on their phones. Something to consider is the subject line has to be shorter for it to fully appear on a mobile device. They usually show about 70 characters depending on the device.
Increase ROI by using customer-centric strategies such as personalization, segmentation, and responsive design (vs. hard sales and email blasts). We recommend using personalization across all automations, transactions, promotional streams. For context, emails with first names in the subject line often have up to 2x higher open rates.
Use automation to be the trigger for campaigns to send an upsell, cross-sell, delight, or to request a review. Triggered emails result in higher CTR.
Win-backs such as a birthday or annual gift just for being a loyal customer go a long way. Who doesn’t appreciate a good birthday gift from your favorite brand?!
Make sure to include reviews and user-generated photos. These will build your brand's credibility and authenticity as current and potential customers view what others are saying about your business.
For ongoing emails that are not automated focus on creating consistency. Make a calendar plan. Have template(s) pre-built to save time. Stick with themes so that you aren’t having to recreate the wheel every day i.e. Friday promos, Monday tips, etc.
Have specific promos just for email subscribers that you don’t run on social. Give them first access to upcoming promos (save the date/or early access) and then use this exclusivity as a hook to get more subs for your email list.
Don’t Stop Experimenting...
Try testing things like timing, segments, offers, and triggers unique to your industry/client (each with unique benchmarks).
If you want to go further, run A/B tests on subjects or design. Then compare the results of campaigns by the open rate for subject lines or CTR/conversion rate for design.
Check Google Analytics to leverage which day/time is best for sales, average repeat purchase information, and potential segments to test.
What are you testing with your marketing emails? Leave us a comment below.
In this post:
Check out this TribeTalk from our Marketing Specialist, Kathryn Betancourt chatting with our Director of Operations, J.P. VanderLinden, and one of our Growth Specialist, Melanie D'Angelo.
This helps pull data into Amazon but there are still issues for how to pull data OUT to other systems. It's not perfect, but it's more than we've had before, and it might be enough for folks to start exploring.
We've also discovered thatSellerly, a collection of Amazon business tools by Semrush, offers excellent marketing tools for Amazon listings designed to make selling on the marketplace easier and more effective. If Amazon's data insights are still not sufficient for you, give Sellerly a try!
Marketers understand that different ad types work better at different parts of the funnel. For example, Search is great at BOFu, Display at TOFu, etc. But what about how they work together?
Google released a report that marketers advertising on YouTube saw better conversion volume and rates from their Search campaigns. Specifically, Search conversions were 8% higher, conversion rates were 3% higher, and Search CPAs dropped 4%.
We all know that advertising on YouTube increases brand awareness and ad recall. The big questions are: Is this something driven by traditionally understood marketing practice? Or is Google itself actually influencing the algorithm to favor buyers who spend across multiple components of it's ad platform?
Regardless of what’s going on Google’s side, we recommend testing YouTube. Don’t just measure the direct performance, also measure the "halo effect" on other channels like Search & Social.
Yabba DABA Do!! Let’s discuss Facebook DABA campaigns. We think these campaigns have a lot of value for our clients.
Most folks think of Dynamic Ads as only supporting retargeting your website visitors and app users, limiting your audience size to the number of people who’ve interacted with you in the past. That’s why, despite the great performance, the possible investments advertisers have been able to make have been fairly restricted — typically, the biggest share of their budgets goes to acquiring new customers.
To help advertisers reach these audiences with top-performing ads, Facebook now offers the possibility to expand the reach of Dynamic Ads campaigns outside retargeting audiences.
Facebook’s Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABA) expands your dynamic ads to reach beyond your website or app visitors to generate demand. DABA campaigns serve personalized recommendations based on browsing activity and showcase the relevant inventory from your catalog to people likely to purchase.
Unlike lookalike audiences and retargeting site visitors, broad audience targeting captures intent in other places like:
DABA campaigns will have your potential customers saying….
What questions do you have for us? Have you tried DABA campaigns? Are you running YouTube ads? Comment below.
Today, my guest is Beau Lebens.
You guys are in for a real treat.
Beau is the Head of Product Engineering for Jetpack at Automattic. Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com, which currently powers 1/3 of the web.
Beau was employee #35 at a company that is now a staggering 855 team members and counting. Automattic is valued north of $1B and operates as a 100% distributed team.
Beau started coding back as a teenager while growing up in a small town in Western Australia. But as his skills & experience continued to grow, his travels brought him to Hawaii, San Francisco, Brooklyn and now Denver, Colorado.
He oversees what I believe to be one the most dynamic product teams in the world. And in this episode there’s a ton of takeaways, from understanding the seemingly “unscalable” hiring process all the way to what is arguably the most robust tech stack I’ve ever seen for a distributed team.Listen On Apple Podcasts
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