What are the most important focus-points for succeeding when marketing a shopify store?
Online marketing for Shopify stores is vital if you plan on competing in eCommerce. So many different factors come into play like SEO optimisation, email marketing, social media marketing, paid advertising campaigns on platforms like Google Ads, influencer marketing, content creation, it just becomes a huge undertaking. Not to mention the countless apps utilising Shopify’s built-in marketing tools to reach potential customers, drive traffic to your store, and convert visitors into buyers. So how do we actually go about optimising product pages, running targeted ads, building email lists, and engaging with customers on social media platforms and most importantly – how do we know if it’s working or not?
Secret #1 Feed based Search Engine Optimisation
Imagine you tell Tshirts and your brand is called “Awesome T-shirts”. You’re store might be ‘awesome t-shirts’ but you could have product names like ‘red t-shirt’ and ‘yellow t-shirt’. If someone is googling for your brand, the product names ‘red t-shirt’ might bring up a host of search results that do not pertain to the brand ‘Awesome T-shirts’.
So how do we help SEO for our products? Do we put the brand name in the title of every single product? i.e. ‘Awesome T-shirt’s – Red T-shirt’?
Well, that could work, but it would make the store titles look messy. What you can do is augment your product feed (for example in Google Merchant Center) to put an appendage to product titles featuring your store name. This means that the products in your shopify store don’t change, but the output feed will be read with the brand name as an appendage. A perfect way to improve your product SEO drastically, without effecting how your store presents product titles!
Optimising website content, product descriptions, and meta tags to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) and attract organic traffic. A great secret to success here, is looking at your product feed. In many cases your shopify product descriptions won’t have your brand name in the title.
Secret #2 CRM & Email Marketing
Building an email list and sending targeted email campaigns with promotions, new product announcements, and personalised offers to nurture leads and drive sales is fairly standard practice, but don’t forget to get clinical on your basket recovery and view-product recovery emails. Open rates and click rates will change based on your improvements of subject line or CTA buttons. This golden audience is up to 80%+ more likely to convert, so do not sleep on your recovery flows!
Paid Advertising
Utilising platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads to run targeted online marketing for shopify in order to reach specific demographics and interests with paid ads is great, but nothing beats building conversion-based ads around ‘purchase’ events. Don’t spend a penny running ads unless you have a compliant 1st party data infrastructure in place, but the main secret here, is that you have to be careful that your shopify store is sending the correct (and accurate) events when a purchase really happens. Be sure that the purchase event also arrives at Meta or TikTok (and other platforms!) with the correct event parameters so the platform can tie the correct user to the attribution.
We find that it can be common that multiple shopify apps and analytics apps can sometimes muddy the waters, or double & triple-fire events to make things inaccurate in your reporting. Clearing up apps, and auditing the data that arrives in your ad accounts it an important secret to optimising paid campaigns.
Remember – paid social media campaigns are only as effective as the data the platform receives, it’s how they learn algorithmically and can make the difference between success and failure in eCommerce!
Content Marketing
We say at TDS, that if online marketing is the spear, the content is the blade
Creating valuable blog posts, product guides, and videos to educate potential customers, establish brand authority, and attract organic traffic are among the standard practices for online marketing for shopify. The secret to really pushing the effectiveness on this comes down to getting very granular and high-resolution on your split testing. What content works, and WHY? Is the captions? The pace of edit? Is it the first milliseconds of the video (MUCH more important than most realise). Does the hook need work? Is the lighting good enough, is it too dark and swipable in-feed?
We say at TDS, that if online marketing is the spear, the content is the blade. Spend time focusing on sharpening the blade of your content, and you’ll likely improve your ROAS dramatically!
Other important aspects:
- Product Page Optimisation: Ensuring product descriptions are detailed, including high-quality images, clear pricing, and relevant keywords to enhance conversion rates. Be sure to split-test different product pages and CTA’s to make small but significant improvements.
- Customer Loyalty Programs: Implementing loyalty programs to encourage repeat purchases and customer retention.
- Retargeting: Using retargeting ads to reach users who have previously interacted with your store but didn’t complete a purchase. This is an even bigger reason to make sure your event data is in place.
- Analytics Tracking: Monitoring key metrics like website traffic, conversion rates, and customer behavior to evaluate marketing campaign effectiveness and make adjustments.
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