Shopify is one of the most well known e-commerce platforms for its simplicity and scalability. There’s nearly two million merchants using shopify for their businesses, including big companies like FitBit and Red Bull.
But starting a small business can be difficult in an often competitive niche. Many people feel they are overshadowed by bigger brands and influencers. So good marketing is required to make people aware of your products and services.
However, there are steps you can take to make your product known by potential customers. Here are 7 techniques to help get your business off the ground.
Landing pages
You’ve probably seen landing pages before, where you click through to a page and it displays all the benefits of a product or service and encourages you to buy it.
These pages can be good for your business since they get rid of all the distractions and encourage the user to purchase the product that the page is focused on.
They also make good use of call to action prompts to encourage users to do something like give their email address or buy a product.
You can make landing pages in Shopify using plugins, which enables you to centralize all your landing and product pages in one Shopify store.
Landing pages also tend to be keyword optimized for your type of product.
For example, an online stopwatch product given a branded name like ‘Airbase Watch’ may be optimized for the keyword ‘online stopwatch’ since then people searching that team would see your product.
PPC – Pay Per Click
PPC stands for Pay Per Click, and it’s a way to buy adverts on social media platforms and search engine results.
Rather than paying for the time an advert is displayed or how many people will see it, you pay for how many people click through to your website.
The price of each click can range from pennies to over £40, but you won’t get much more than a few pounds per click in most cases.
You’ll have to decide what platform you want to advertise on, although you can use multiple platforms.
Consider which audience you will be advertising to. If you advertise to a more fashion focused audience, Pinterest advertising may be a good option. Or if you target audience is interested in tech, Reddit may be the way to go.
You can limit how much you spend daily through these services, so you won’t be charged too much.
The landing pages also tie into this, since these are the best pages to link through from PPC ads, since all distractions are removed and the page is focused purely on the one product.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
Like PPC, SEO is about appearing in search engine results like Google or Safari, when someone looks for a specific keyword.
However, SEO does not require you to pay for search rankings, but rather earn them. This can take more time than PPC, but is generally better as your search engine rankings won’t fall once you stop working on your SEO.
It’s also much better if you are are using this for a local shop, as google has features like Google My Business. Not to worry if you don’t have an in person store, this is just helpful for when people search for something similar to ‘restaurants in london’.
The difficulty of SEO is that some keywords will be easy to rank for, and some will be dominated by much larger businesses.
You’ll need to use a tool which will allow you to check how difficult a keyword will be to rank for.
Yoast SEO, a well known SEO app, recently released an app for Shopify to help people get their stores onto the google search results.
Like PPC, most people tend to focus SEO on landing pages for the same reason of less distractions on the page that could potentially stop people from buying. As mentioned before, landing pages should be optimized for non branded keywords that you want to rank for.
Blogging
If you choose to go down the SEO route as a small business, you will likely struggle as you’ll only have a few pages you can rank for.
A good method to overcome this is blogging and writing content for your shop.
This allows you to attract leads based on your blogging content.
For example, if you were selling patches, you might make an article on how to sew patches on safely. And in that article, you could link to products that are applicable.
You’ll have to do some research on what people are searching for, this will let you know what you can write an article to help get ranked on google.
You might not be able to rank for everything you can write about, but good content can result in your site being shared on social media and ranking better in search results.
Blogging ties into content marketing, which is another method you can use to promote your business. You can produce media like Tik Tok videos and Instagram photos to promote your business. There are many apps to help with content marketing in shopify and producing blogs.
Influencer marketing
Social media influencers have a big audience and can be helpful in building brand awareness for your shop.
Influencers can put out a positive word for your brand and encourage their followers to purchase your products. Since 82% of people trust purchasing decisions to be guided by what social media and influencers say.
There’s multiple ways to go about this, the most common one is a sponsorship where they are paid to promote your product in a social media post.
Sometimes it’s done through a referral link instead, where an influencer is given a link to refer people through, and for each person who purchases through that link, the influencer gets a commission from it.
You can also send them a free product to review on YouTube or a blog post, so they’ll link back to your site and provide lots of visibility.
Ask for reviews
Around 81% of people do research before buying a product. Asking people to review your site on services like Trustpilot let’s others know the service is genuine, as they might be unsure and hesitant to buy if they can’t find reviews.
You can usually ask for reviews via email once enough time has passed that the user will have had a good experience of your product and provide a link for them to rate your product. You can also incentivize them with discounts if they give a review.
Cart abandonment emails
Around 70% of shoppers abandon their carts, often people won’t remember that they’ve done this.
So often, shops will save these carts and send an email to these people to allow them to complete their purchase.
This is a good opportunity to get feedback from these customers, as well as offer a discount to encourage them to finish their purchase.
Marketing can be a difficult problem to tackle, but there are plenty of resources and technology available to help you overcome it.
Software like ActiveCampaign integrates well with shopify and many other platforms.
It can seem like a lot of work to get ActiveCampaign working for you, but it will seem invaluable in the long run.
If you need an ActiveCampaign expert to help you, let us know, we have years of experience to back us up.
Conclusion
Getting started with marketing can seem like a daunting task, but with the help of automation with things like cart abandonment, the load can be lightened.
It helps to become familiar with these tools to then learn what works best for your audience, and what will deliver the most ROI for you.
Would you like to know more? Download our 25 ways to get more sales with less work guide today, or see what services we offer.