How to Promote Your Shopify Store: 5 Sure-Fire Strategies for Success

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With more than 1.7M merchants selling on the Shopify platform, it’s essential to understand how to promote your Shopify store successfully. (PUS)

If you’re a Shopify business owner struggling to gain extra revenue and traffic, we’re here to help you find the sunshine beyond the storm. As online shopping becomes more and more popular, it’s your time to thrive!

Here are 5 key strategies that will help customers find and visit your Shopify business.  

1. Social Media, Social Media, Social Media

Social media is an optimal vehicle for creating a robust online presence and growing your network of customers or partners. If used correctly, social media can become one of the greatest assets to your brand or business. With an abundance of information on every platform, it’s essential to understand how to make your content stand out and impact your desired audience. If you are looking for a way to drive traffic, increase sales, and grow your Shopify business, turn to social media. 

Develop a Social Media Strategy

According to Altimeter, approximately 70% of marketers lack a consistent social media strategy. The foundation of social media success is a clear, concise social media strategy that outlines what you want for yourself and your audience and how you’ll achieve those things. A social media strategy will be remarkably effective in helping your Shopify business navigate such a large audience to ensure that you’re reaching the right people and making your shop stand out. 

When you create your strategy, it’s essential to consider your social channels, create a content mix, and understand the process of creating your content. As a Shopify store owner, you are trying to drive traffic directly to your website, so try to think of ways to achieve this. One great strategy is to create special offers, promotions, or various discounts and information to make readers want more, ultimately leading them to your site. 

Here are three key concepts to consider when producing your social media strategy.

Content Mix

Establish plans for a diverse and engaging content mix that can be simultaneously flexible and consistent. Consistent content means that it can be planned for in advance, reproduced, and put out regularly to populate your social media calendar. 

Create a variety of social media content types, such as photos and videos and a range of post types (promotional, informational, inspirational, etc.) Aim for around 5-7 different content types to begin with and test out which ones succeed with your target audience. The age-old sentiment of “quality over quantity” still applies to social media, so ensure that your posts provide value to your customers. 

Consider Your Channels

Different platforms will offer various advantages based on your brand’s social media marketing goals. Platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and TikTok are optimal for short-form video content, whereas Facebook and LinkedIn are best for single images with longer descriptive text. 

Another way to find out what channels you should be using is to look at the demographics of each platform. For example, B2B audiences are most known for being active on LinkedIn, but if you cater to a younger audience, TikTok is a great place to start, as 27.5% of their audience is between 18-24 years old. With that being said, we continue to see TikTok’s demographics change rapidly as an older audience is catching on to the trend. 

Ensure you know what social platform works best for your social goals, and create content relevant to that.

Process

Create a social plan for your specific social content. This process may look like researching trends/relevant content types, developing content, publishing content, measuring performance, managing and learning from your social insights and repeat! This constant cycle will ensure that your social platforms are gaining valuable traffic for your business. 

Set Goals for Your Social Media Marketing Plan

Your brand or business will be the anchor of your social media strategy and its various goals. A great place to start your social media efforts is determining any desired outcomes you and your team want to achieve through social media.

Here are some of the goals that your business might aim to achieve on social media.

Drive Brand Awareness

A great way to boost consumer recognition of your business is to increase reach on social media . Increasing your reach may involve creating shareable content (infographics, videos etc.), developing a brand personality, creating social media ads and more. 

Increasing your brand awareness can encourage more customers to engage with your social media, which helps expand your reach. Brand awareness provides your business with a significant advantage over competitors. Consumers confronted with a variety of choices are more likely to interact with a brand they are familiar with rather than one unknown to them. 

Create Demand for Your Product

Social media provides many opportunities to attract people to your products or services—engaging consumers with relevant content like education, inspiration, and promotion. Leveraging educational content relevant to your product or service is an excellent way to tackle any possible information scarcity about your product or service market. When you reveal a problem, you can solidify your business or brand as the solution. Providing exciting and relevant information for your consumers can generate a hefty amount of buzz for your business through new visitors and existing customers. 

Generate Sales

With the advent of social commerce, consumers no longer have to leave an app to purchase a product. The online shopping experience has become streamlined and more efficient for consumers. Their shopping cart is now in the same place as their social media feed. Create shoppable posts on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to allow consumers to shop for products directly within the apps. Social commerce and a higher level of ease in the purchasing process can help to generate sales. 

Increase Web Traffic

Holding a solid social media presence allows for potential consumers to experience a concentrated version of your business or brand before visiting your website/online store or physical store. Your brand or business’ social media function is a great stepping stone to compel consumers to visit your Shopify website. 

Determine Your Target Audience

The Internet is your oyster! Social media success means social media research. Don’t be afraid to do some audience research on platforms where your audience may be. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter are bound to be home to your target customers with their billions of active monthly users. Search for a profile, page or group relevant to your product or service, analyze competitors’ pages, and gage a better sense of your niche target audience, what they value the most, and what they like. 

Collect psychographic and demographic data and begin to craft a “buyer persona”. This is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal buyer, created from accurate data such as:

• Location
• Country
• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Buying concerns

Demographic information is key to being able to develop targeted segments of buyers. 

Develop Strong Social Media Content

Establishing a variety of thoughtful and exciting social media content will help maintain audience interest in your business and everything you have to offer and craft an authentic brand voice. Social media posts should adhere to an identifiable, genuine brand voice. 

Here are 4 examples of social media content that may help your business grow. 

News

Relay relevant and exciting information relating to your industry or business that is up to date or trendy. By discussing news stories, you have the opportunity to promote the story and promote your brand at the same time. This type of content is shareable and can help you reach a wider audience. 

Education/q&as

Share fun or exciting statistics, facts, trivia, etc., about your product or service. Provide consumers and potential buyers with an opportunity for open-ended dialogue to voice any questions or concerns that they may have about your business. Q&A sessions give leads and consumers a chance to have a more interactive online experience with your brand. 

Utilizing Instagram’s question sticker is a super accessible way to allow audiences and visitors to ask questions through Instagram stories. 

User-generated Content

Your happy customers offer a lot of potential for boosting your brand’s credibility and building audience trust. User-generated content (UGC) leverages crowdsourcing as a form of marketing with earned content. No one knows your audience better than they know themselves, and their collective knowledge is critical to the success of your brand on social media. 

Product/promotional Post

Product posts are an easy and effective way to entice customers to make purchases, while high-quality demo videos and testimonials help customers better understand your products or services. 

Advertising any exclusive promos (ex: free shipping for a limited time, 10% for new customers, etc.) can also create a sense of urgency amongst your audience and generate increased sales. 

2. Be an Email Marketing Marvel

Perhaps even more important than a strong social media presence is a solid email marketing strategy. With social media, you never know when a platform might cease to exist, causing you to lose access to the audience you’ve built. With email marketing, you can always reach your audience, as long as you’ve built up a strong subscriber base!

Email campaigns allow you to stay engaged and connected with your audience and they are a low-cost way to reach new, past and current consumers. 

Grow Your Email List 

As time goes on, you may have some email contacts that unsubscribe, change their emails or are no longer active on their email. That’s why it’s essential to create email campaigns that keep readers wanting more.

If you notice that you are losing subscribers, there are multiple ways to grow your email list:

1. Encourage your subscribers to share/forward your emails
2. Promote your “exclusive email content” on social media
3. Add a CTA button on your website or linked it to your social bios
4. Collect emails at your checkout
5. Offer discounts or coupons in exchange for an email address  

Send Regular Newsletters

Achieving consistent customer engagement can be done through newsletters or various email series. When you consistently send out this type of email marketing, it will keep customers actively engaged in your Shopify site. One way to better engage with potential customers is to create exclusive email campaigns that include sales, discounts and other promotions. 

Start a Loyalty Program

Loyalty program members, on average, buy 5-20% more than non-members. Exclusive email list campaigns can help your business retain existing customers and stay connected with your loyal customers in a personal way.

These programs can develop brand loyalists that will end up helping you market your company in the long run. Not only will they be buying from your company, they typically engage with social content, leave reviews and tell their peers about how great your business is. 

Focus on the Customer, Not the Competitor

Be unique in your loyalty program, and try to offer a system that other competitors aren’t without creating irrelevant competition. It’s important to remember that your loyal customers are more likely to remain true to your store regardless of what the competition offers. If you spend too much time worrying or creating programs similar to your competitors, customers can draw away from your brand for its lack of authenticity. 

Create a Points System

Loyalty programs are simple ways of asking your existing customers to purchase from your store. If you ask them to give you money through a purchase, create a rewards points system to give back to them. Point systems are great ways to not only gain loyal customers but to gain new customers as well. 

When creating your point systems, think of what your brand can give back to your customers. When customers hear “save money”, they are automatically drawn in. 

Point systems are an effective way to step above your competition while offering exclusive discounts for your customers.

Benefits of a Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs have many benefits: customer retention, higher purchase value, reduced unprofitable customers, and more.

Keeping existing customers is one of the main reasons why loyalty programs exist today. It can be challenging for companies to obtain and retain loyal customers, especially in a world where competition is at an all-time high. These devoted customers are more likely to spend more money at your company, especially if you have point systems, exclusive discounts or sale coupons. 

Build a Subscription Model

Did you know acquiring a new customer can cost 5 times more than retaining a current one? That’s why another great option to build brand loyalty is creating a subscription model. Like point systems, subscription models can keep those long-lasting customer relationships while creating a profitable environment for your business. 

3. Blog Your Heart Out

Blogging can increase your sales as consumers are 60% more likely to purchase a product from your shop after reading a blog about it. If you’re looking for a way to improve your store’s SEO and increase customer engagement, blogging may be the way to go. 

Develop a Content Strategy

Before you begin to write a blog, you must develop a content strategy that sets marketing goals and objectives. If you blindly write a blog with no strategy or advanced planning, you may not reach the correct audience, and your message may not attract your target audience. 

One great way to develop an effective and influential blog is to pre-plan the topics for your blogs in a monthly or yearly batch. Here is a quick step by step on how to create these ideas: 

1. Do some research – Research relevant content that you think needs to be discussed, expanded on, or content that you know is relevant to your audience. 
2. Complete keyword research – Find keywords that are relevant to the topics that you want to discuss. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, UberSuggest, SEMrush and more are excellent references.
3. Google your keywords – Find out what pages Google is currently ranking for the keywords you want to target. This step will help you understand what types of content Google prefers for certain queries. 
4. Create a plan – Decide what type of article you should create based on the articles currently ranking for your keywords. If Google is only ranking listicles for a given keyword, you should most likely write your own listicle as well. Once you choose your blog type, make a brief description of what your competitors are discussing and what you want to discuss (you want a mix of relevant and unique content). While creating and compiling your research, it’s important to elaborate on the goals you are trying to achieve with these blogs. 
5. Execute your plan – Once you have your keywords, content types and descriptions, you’re all set with a blog strategy that can help you stay relevant and reach the top of your desired SERPs.

Start a Shopify Blog 

Shopify highly supports businesses’ blogging pages. Companies can create custom blog templates and publish them in time for new products or promotions with the built-in blogging engine. Shopify has many helpful features that show you how to create blogs, include images, add tags and more. Adding a blog to your Shopify account can boost sales and drive more traffic to your business. 

Reach Out to Others

Guest blogging, otherwise known as a guest post, is a great SEO practice. Guest blogging can be a successful way to promote your company through another company’s website. Google highly ranks sites with backlinks, which can motivate you to reach out to other businesses and gain those free backlinks from your blog. This method can not only help you gain links but can create a new crowd of potential buyers that have the chance to bring more revenue to your business. 

To find relevant sites looking for guest bloggers, you can search blogs that accept guest posts. When you research these blogs, you can also include your keywords or relevant topics to ensure you are interacting with relevant people or websites. 

Overall, blogging can help you grow your Shopify store tremendously. Take a look at your competitors and see what they are doing and discover how you can use this research to your advantage.

4. Get Pay Off with Paid Marketing 

Paid marketing is a way to generate sales and bring new customers to your shop. This strategy can be used with pay-per-click (PPC), meaning you aren’t breaking the bank on advertising; you only pay when your link gets clicked. This method is often used on search engine result pages or social media platforms. Paid marketing will increase traffic to your Shopify site and help you gain more sales. With a multitude of paid marketing tactics, find the one that works best for you and your store. 

Run Google Ads

Creating Google ads can help you make more sales and can help further promote your Shopify account. One of Google’s Economic Impact reports suggested that businesses who use Google ads see an average of $2 revenue for every $1 that they spend. With extreme flexibility, Google won’t trap you, so you can start, pause or stop your ads at any point in time. 

Run Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads allow businesses to pay to promote your products and link directly to your site. With a similar PPC strategy, you can define and find your target audience based on location, demographics, similar interests, and more relevant terms. This is a common paid marketing strategy, as it is a cost-effective way for businesses to reach their direct target audience.

Run Tiktok Ads

TikTok has created a new channel app that Shopify merchants can access in their Business Ads Manager. This new partnership will help store owners create in-feed video ads that will help promote their products and business. By allowing you to target your ads based on interests and demographics, this collaboration is a match made in heaven! 

Run Instagram Ads

Instagram ads allow you to promote your product to a wide range of Instagram users. These ads are beneficial for your Shopify store as you can sync all of your available products while managing it all in one place–Shopify. If you’re looking to gain more customers and expand your marketing strategy, Instagram ads may be for you! 

5. Be an SEO Superstar

Building your Shopify SEO strategy can be a long-term process, but we promise you it’s worth it! When you invest in optimizing your content and website, you can gain much more organic traffic to your online store. SEO will allow you to target relevant traffic for people looking for a product or service similar to yours. 

Check out our complete Shopify SEO Guide to learn everything you need to know about optimizing your Shopify store. Discover how you can: 

• Optimize your Shopify store architecture
• Complete keyword research
• Complete on-page optimization
• Find link building opportunities
• Take advantage of technical SEO and more! 

Sure-Fire Strategies for Success

Now that you know good business-consumer relationships can translate into significant sales for your Shopify store, it’s time for you to take these strategies and apply them to your Shopify site. Put your new knowledge to the test and use these tactics to increase search visibility, build brand awareness, boost sales and overall, promote your Shopify store better.  

Developing a successful Shopify shop and brand can seem daunting, but remembering why you created your shop in the first place is what should drive you to succeed. By focusing on social media, email marketing, blogging, paid advertising, and SEO you can promote your shop and see the light at the end of your tunnel. 

Thank you for reading up to this point! If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all of this information, then reach out to the digital marketing pros at Konstruct Digital! 

Our Social Media and Content team can help provide you with optimized blogs, social posts and email copy while helping you stay up-to-date on all of the latest social trends. While our content team is hard at work, our SEO team will develop strategic plans to help you rank on the top of Google Search while completing constant research to ensure your brand remains relevant. If you choose Konstruct, you will also work with our PPC team to develop advertising strategies and plans based on your content and the current trends and updates. 
Are you ready to promote your Shopify store? Contact us to grow your Shopify store today!