Blog Series Overview
Shopify is one of the largest, if not the largest, e-commerce platforms in the world. At the time of writing this article, there are more than 1.5 million Shopify merchants and 3.75 million Shopify websites. This number is growing exponentially every year. However, almost 50% of these stores are small in terms of size and revenue. While setting up a Shopify store is quite easy and takes just minutes, it is not quite as easy to grow & scale to a larger company. There are certain obstacles and non-technical hardships along the way that no one talks about. We aim to help these smaller-sized companies become more successful in Shopify. We are launching a new series of informative blogs. This is part 2 of the series, you can reach the other articles directly from below:
The 7 Golden Steps to Scale & Grow your Shopify Store:
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Part 1:
A Guide for New Shopify Store Owners - Part 2: How to Generate Traffic for your Shopify Store
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Part 3:
Quality Traffic vs More Traffic for your Shopify Store -
Part 4:
Remarketing 101 for your Shopify Store -
Part 5:
Remarketing Tips No One Talks About - Part 6: Getting Better Returns for Online Ads Spendings
- Part 7: How to Grow to a Large Shopify Store
The links will be updated once new blogs are published.
Qualification & Justification
Firstly, an introduction is in order. This blog is a collaborative work with Onur Tan, visit his profile for more amazing stories. Why would you take my points of view as a credible source of information? Well, I have been working as a data scientist in SaaS (Software as a Service) company, named Enhencer, for more than 4 years. Our goal as a company is to help e-commerce companies to dig out valuable visitors as their target audience from their website traffic and improve their returns on marketing campaigns. As an individual and as the company we have worked with many Shopify store owners ranging from small to large. We have encountered and solved many problems faced by these companies and helped many companies go from small-sized to larger sizes. As a result, we have seen a fair share of different scenarios that can emerge under different conditions.
Let's Get Started
To attract more traffic and new users to your Shopify Store, you have many different strategy options, but they need to be applied at the same time and according to your business. You should make sure that you can take full advantage of digital marketing’s ability to reach many people without borders, through many channels, and at a lower cost. In this article, we’ll take a broad look at some of these strategies and discuss which ones you can benefit from.
Paid Social Ads
Paid Ads can help e-commerce stores to generate traffic. There are many ways in which this traffic can be generated by using an advertising solution. Some of these are Facebook Ads and Google Ads that can help the store gain visibility.
This method is often used by e-commerce brands, agencies, and consultants to help clients generate traffic. Paid ads also offer another advantage — they’re cost-effective as they don’t require any upfront investments, unlike some other marketing methods like SEO or PPC, which can be expensive at the start. This makes it possible for small or startup companies to take advantage of this marketing strategy without worrying about breaking the bank.
While it is often possible to generate traffic through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there are many reasons why Paid Ads may be the better option for you:
- They can be more cost-effective for your business
- They provide more control over the targeting of your ads
- Paid ads can quickly get you in front of thousands of users, even if you don’t have visitors to your site.
Facebook Ads and Google Ads both allow you to create an ad campaign that will target people based on their interests, location, or demographics. Each platform has similarities but there are small differences that determine the differences.
Short Run Options: Online Ads
Facebook Ads
With the number of users (2.7 Billion) Facebook has, it gives a wide audience and a chance to add specific targeting according to their characteristics/interests. When attracting new users, you can easily reach your new target audiences with lookalike audiences. At the same time, it is one of the best channels to get your advertisement in front of thousands of people with its low costs and its ability to increase sales with traffic.
Google Ads
Although Google Ads bears similarities with Facebook, the fact that it has search ads and users of Google and YouTube, the two big platforms it holds, is an advantage compared to Facebook. Similar to Facebook, it is possible to reach users on YouTube and other Google service users by advertising on Google, the PPC program. Both channels are the most used advertising platform with very high ROI returns.
Instagram Ads
If your audience is also on Instagram and your brand is actively using it, try Instagram Ads too. It has over 1 billion users that
you do not want to miss, also it can be a new audience to use on remarketing campaigns like “Instagram Engagers”.
Paid ads are the quickest way to get more customers, but because you have to pay for every click, it can be expensive. On the other
hand, it’s probably the most effective way to get traffic. The thing is that paid ads can be very cost-effective and efficient.
Long Run Options
SEO Optimization
SEO optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engine result pages.
It's the process of fine-tuning your website to increase its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.
This is because it can help you get more traffic and sales, which in turn can generate higher revenues for your business in the
long run. The most important thing to note about SEO optimization is that it is not a one-time task. It needs to be done
continuously as there are always new opportunities for improvement. Optimize your e-commerce store for SEO by using the right
keywords, optimizing product pages, and generating content that will rank well on search engine results pages.
Running this process with content marketing actively using keywords in blogs, articles, and video content on your site- will improve SEO optimization and will put your site higher in the rankings. You can think of the two strategies as constructs that feed off each other, meaning you’ll have ever-improving traffic and visitors.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a method where you inform users, not only about your product or your brand, but also about the industry and
the market, where your users can find answers to their questions, and it will increase your brand’s awareness and preference by
users.
It is possible to diversify this in the form of an informative article, video, podcast format, or interactive games. There is no
limit and it is a highly preferred strategy to attract users to visit your site and increase traffic.
Making users stop by your site regardless of the product or brand, providing useful content, and solving their problems are very
effective in terms of gaining brand reliability and a loyal user base.
Connecting very specific and small audiences to your brand is necessary to continuously increase customer diversity.
Suggesting where the product you offer can be best experienced with a video, exemplifying how it can be used best, and offering
solutions to common problems independent of the product are all useful methods to retain the mentioned audience.
Influencer Marketing
In this era of social media where a photo or video can reach millions of people around the world, it is not surprising that
influencer marketing has grown to be an effective strategy for generating traffic to e-commerce shops. Influencer marketing can
help you get the word out about your products and increase brand awareness, but you’ll need to pay influencers for their time and
expertise. This means that it’s often not an option for small businesses on a budget.
If you want to hire an influencer, there are ways they can help:
They can create content for your site. Influencers with large followings often have large teams who help them create content on top
of what they post themselves. The same goes for people who make videos or podcasts — these people usually work with editors,
writers, videographers, and other support staff to make sure their content is high quality enough that it catches the attention of
people surfing the internet looking for something entertaining/interesting/relatable enough that they’ll watch it all the way
through (or at least binge some episodes).
They can promote your products or services in posts made by themselves or others under their name; this includes sharing links
in social media posts as well as featuring images from your store directly into theirs (for example: “Check out these awesome
shoes from Shopify!”).
Special Discounts
Many store owners have a problem with generating traffic to their stores. This is why you will hear people talking about special
discounts and promotions to attract new users.
Special discounts and promotions are also effective ways to get new users to your Shopify store. It will increase your visibility,
which in turn will generate more traffic for your store. Make sure that you offer various discounts at different times of the year,
not only around Christmas time or the Black Friday season.
The perfect time for these discounts is at the start of a business launch or during a sale. It’s best not to offer them too often
because this may upset loyal customers who are just waiting for that perfect deal.
Conclusion
We hope this article gave you some great tips on where you can start when it comes to generating traffic for your Shopify store. To
increase your traffic, it will be more useful to execute more than one strategy at the same time among the items and alternatives
here. Just as it will not be effective enough to attract traffic with paid ads, supporting it with SEO optimization and content
marketing will help you to keep a much more permanent audience.
You can get traffic fast with paid ads, but if you want and have time, money, and energy for a sustainable flow of traffic besides
paid ads, focus on SEO and content marketing too. Follow your competitors well and try to understand where they get new users other
than these methods. Know your product and your audience well, and choose the advertising channel according to them. If influencer
marketing is not going to make a huge contribution to your brand, instead of spending time and money on it, turn to alternatives.
If your brand has an older audience, you don’t have to focus on Tiktok Ads.
