In the vast landscape of entrepreneurship, it is extremely difficult to find success and create longevity in this field. Ludovico Apollonio tackled this challenge head on within the e-commerce space. Born in 1992, 28-year old entrepreneur Ludovico Apollonio is the owner and founder of different ecommerce brands.
What do you do now?
I currently run different ecommerce brands with my company. We sell gadget products all over the world from our warehouses in China and LatinAmerica. I have grown this brands to over 7-figures in revenue in just under 3 years since official launch. I also have a teaching program called Ecom Academy designed to help other entrepreneurs start, and more importantly, scale their businesses efficiently.
What marketing techniques did you leverage to scale your brand?
The main marketing strategies I used were Facebook & Instagram paid advertising. I believe paid and organic social media marketing is the most effective way to start and scale any new e-commerce brand from scratch. This consists of the different sponsored posts you see throughout your Facebook and Instagram feed. The amount of reach and exposure you can get from these platforms at their general cost per impression mark is very effective at a low barrier of entry compared to other aged methods. Addition to these platforms is also Google, Snapchat & Tiktok which are also effective marketing platforms if you have the right systems in place.
What main factors within your business helped you grow the most?
The main thing was to improve and optimize the different systems within my business. Constantly improving and streamlining the systems within your business not only improves your businesses productivity, but also directly improves the overall customer experience; which is vital for growing any direct to consumer business. In my opinion, improving the customer experience should always be the short and long term focus of a brand. Right now I have a lean team; I have hired two VA’s to handle all our customer service emails, an inhouse graphic designer and one other virtual assistant to run our email marketing campaigns. Other than those areas that I have outsourced, I handle all the other front end, social and marketing. As for shipping and fulfillment, this is also an important system that needs to be streamlined enough to progress the customer experience. These systems are important because it helps automate my business. Like any successful business owner this frees up my time and allows me to focus more on scaling the business when I don’t have to manage customer service, fulfillment or any other exterior tasks. In my opinion, I think it is good to “wear all the hats” in the business at first, but as your business grows it is important to create systems that are cost efficient and positively improve your business and productivity.