Category: Marketing

Posted on in Business, Marketing

Marketing Funnels Explained: Why It Matters and How To Build Yours

marketing funnel

Your customers discover your business in a variety of ways—through word of mouth, advertisements, and, increasingly, digital marketing efforts.

Creating effective strategies to turn these initial interactions into customers is complicated. How can you nurture and guide a prospect from initial awareness of your brand through to purchasing your product and becoming a loyal customer? You can start by mapping out the interactions a customer has with your business to create an effective marketing funnel strategy.

In this article, we’ll explain the different stages of the marketing funnel, how to create one, and dive into the tactics you can use at each stage.

Table of Contents

What is a marketing funnel? 

A marketing funnel is a model representing the customer journey from a prospect discovering your business, brand, product, or service to the moment they take a specific action or purchase from you.

You can divide a marketing funnel into as many stages as you’d like, but most marketers follow three distinct stages:

Top of the funnel (TOFU): Awareness 

In this stage of the funnel, you market to a wide audience to capture as many leads as possible. Typical TOFU activities include publishing blogs and how-to articles and posting on social media platforms.

Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Consideration

You market to an engaged audience who knows your brand. Typical MOFU activities include promoting and encouraging prospects to attend a webinar and to download case studies, ebooks, whitepapers, and research reports.

Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Conversion

At the bottom of the marketing funnel, your leads become fewer but more likely to convert. Treat these leads as though they are about to make a purchase decision. Typical BOFU activities include live demos, product trials, vendor comparison charts, and customer references. 

Marketing funnel where the customer journey passes through the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
The widest part of the funnel captures the biggest group of people who might be interested in what you sell, while the smallest part of the funnel includes the smaller group who are most likely to convert.

Benefits of a marketing funnel

📈 Encourage more meaningful growth. 

Funnels give you a clearer way to organize marketing tactics and make it easier to understand which tactics work for each stage of the funnel. For example, you might learn that TikTok videos work wonders to increase awareness about your business, but do little to drive actual conversions. This allows for more strategic growth: you’ll double down on what works and pull back what doesn’t. 

❤️ Get to know your customers.

Establishing a funnel helps you better understand your target audience and what they need to feel excited about making a purchase from you. Based on their behavior at this stage in the customer journey, you can learn which products they like and the most impactful types of marketing.

💵 Master your purchase cycle.

How long inventory takes to sell depends on your average order value (covered below). Typically, more expensive inventory takes longer to sell than less expensive products. But how many weeks does it actually take, on average, for the costly and affordable items to sell? Once you know how long it takes for the different priced goods to sell, the marketing funnel will provide insight into how to get those products to sell within the average timeline. 

How business stage impacts your marketing funnel

Your marketing funnel will grow and develop over time based on cultural trends, the products you sell, and your business’s stage. It’s an evolving model. A marketing funnel strategy requires maintenance, care, and attention to thrive. 

There are two main factors that differentiate the marketing funnel for an established business versus a new one:

Brand awareness

The level of brand awareness your business has determines how easy it is to attract new customers. If you have high brand awareness, you’ll spend less money on the awareness and acquisition leg of the funnel and more on consideration and conversion. Lower brand awareness means you’ll need to drive hype and spread the word earlier on, meaning that your time and resources will go toward getting new eyes on your products.

Revenue

The amount of money you bring in determines how much you can spend on marketing activities. The more revenue you bring in, the more you have to spend on paid acquisition and acquiring new inventory. If you’re starting out and have little to spend on marketing, your tactics will look different.

How to develop a marketing funnel 

Know your target audience 

Before you can deploy a marketing funnel strategy, you’ll need to first create buyer personas and then develop content specific to them at each stage of the funnel.

Marketing funnels outline a straightforward path to conversion. Most customer journeys aren’t as linear. Unsplash 

Buyer personas, also called customer personas, are fictional characters you develop to describe, in granular detail, your customers.

You can research and gather data on your customers using your website and social media data, as well as using third-party data platforms, including Google Analytics. You’ll want to look for data points like age, sex, occupation, and incometo better pinpoint your customers. 

Also, you may conduct short interviews or surveys with people who have already purchased your product to learn more about them and their experience.

What you learn will inform the channels and style of marketing you’ll use to reach your target audience. For example, if you find you sell primarily to teenage girls, chances are you’re not going to reach them with LinkedIn ads. 

Here are different ways you can uncover your target audience: 

  • Look at cumulative purchase history across all customers. 
  • Use digital analytics tools to gather quantitative information.
  • Run an online survey.
  • Conduct interviews.
  • Do industry research to explore consumer trends and behavior. 
  • Complete a competitive analysis by looking at competitors’ audiences.

From this information, create buyer personas that detail the common characteristics of the main types of customers in your funnel. 

Establish average order value and a consideration timeline

Your average order value (AOV) is the average value of your customers’ purchases. For example, if your shop’s revenue is $2,000 and you’ve had 100 orders, your AOV is $20. 

AOV determines how much focus you put on each part of your marketing funnel. If you sell fine jewelry and your AOV is $1,000, the consideration phase of your funnel will likely be much longer compared to a shop that has an AOV of $20. Customers tend to think longer about making large purchases than smaller ones.

This relates to the marketing funnel because:

High AOV = Long consideration timeline

You’ll want to spend more energy and money on developing content that nurtures people throughout the consideration phase. 

Low AOV = Short consideration timeline

You’ll focus more on acquiring new customers because they tend to move through the funnel faster.

This model helps differentiate where you place your budget and the emphasis you put on the different parts of your funnel. 

Stages of the marketing funnel

Stage 1: Top of funnel (TOFU)

The top and broadest part of the funnel represents anyone who hears about your product and business. This might be through your own marketing efforts, a recommendation from a friend, a roundup article on Google, or a social media post. These folks are aware that your business exists but may not have a need for one or more of your products. 

The strategy for each stage of your funnel depends on your target audience and AOV. But there are actions that generally make sense for awareness. Yes, you can run paid ads, but developing organic content and working with influencers for this stage in the funnel sets you up for longer-term success. 

For example, publishing a blog on your site not only helps you get traffic via search engine optimization (SEO), it further nurtures customers who want to learn more about your products, business, or industry in general. 

A presence on social media also helps. It allows prospects to learn more about your products, get a sense of your brand’s personality and voice, and engage with you by asking questions, posting comments, or sharing content with friends. Inviting someone to join your email list is another great way to engage with consumers and teach them more about your products. Many businesses offer a discount code to persuade people to join; others simply promise compelling content. Whatever you decide, providing the option to subscribe gives you a way to stay in touch with someone, even if they haven’t made a purchase yet. 

When you need to expand your reach further, try partnering with micro-influencers. 

“What I recommend to brands right now,” says Amanda Tallon, account strategist at growth marketing agency Shoelace, “is to work with micro-influencers or use the audience that they already have built out, because it’s getting very expensive to acquire new audiences through paid search and social platforms.” 

Micro-influencers have between 10,000 and 100,000 followers on social media. “If your brand is in line with that micro-influencer,” Amanda says, “chances are their followers are also going to be in line with your business.”

⚠️Choose your acquisition tactics carefully

Though we’re talking about TOFU right now, the methods you use to drive traffic to your site should target prospects that will eventually convert. For example, you might drive a lot of traffic to your website via a podcast. But the listeners aren’t in your target audience, and while they’re curious about your product, they never actually convert. 

Peepers, a brand that sells trendy eyeglasses, ran into a similar issue. The business, like many other ecommerce brands, is trying to diversify how it’s finding customers and driving traffic to its store. The team experimented with some nontraditional routes, and though they had ads and content that drove traffic, they didn’t drive conversions.

“Sometimes you fail to get traffic. Sometimes you succeed with traffic but fail to get conversions. You have to put both of them together in order to grow and grow profitably,” says John Hart, VP of operations and ecommerce of Peepers.

Peepers makes trendy eyeglasses. Peepers

Sometimes you fail to get traffic. Sometimes you succeed with traffic but fail to get conversions. You have to put both of them together in order to grow—and grow profitably.John Hart, VP of Operations & Ecommerce for Peepers<

Stage 2: Middle of the funnel (MOFU)

The middle of the funnel is all about developing and nurturing the relationships you have with the people you engaged with during the awareness phase. When a prospect reaches the consideration stage, they’ve identified a need for your product. They might need it to solve a problem, spark joy, or give as a gift. When someone reaches this stage, they’re aware of your business, what you do, and the types of products you sell. They might be on an email list or follow you on social media. 

Amanda cites email marketing as the best tactic for prospects in the consideration stage of the marketing funnel. If they are already on your email list, then they have already bought into your brand at some level. 

“You can develop a strong personal story with email marketing,” says Amanda. “You can do quite a bit of brand building in someone’s personal inbox.”

It’s easy to ignore consideration and focus on the bookends of the funnel—awareness and conversion. Amanda warns that though some customers will convert right after you acquire them, oftentimes they need more attention to make a purchase. 

Stage 3: Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)

This is the big moment—you’ve posted some great social media content, sent emails that were on point, maybe even worked with an influencer or two. Now, it’s time to drive home your product benefits, business ethos, and unique value propositions to get prospects to make purchases. 

Two tactics are particularly effective at this stage:

💬 Customer conversations

A customer will likely reach out to you only when they’re actively looking to make a purchase. They’ll look to you to remove any obstacles in their path. Speaking directly to a customer builds trust, gives them a sense of who you are and what you’re like to work with, and can remove any remaining concerns.

💸 Paid ads

“You can run paid ads at any stage of your marketing funnel,” says Amanda. “But if you don’t have a lot of money, run ads at the purchase stage to get the most revenue for your ad spend.” 

Paid ads can go farther at this stage in the funnel because prospects already know who you are, what you do, and the products you sell. Ads serve as reminders and should include copy that drives home your unique value proposition.

If you don’t have a lot of money, run ads at the purchase stage to get the most revenue for your ad spend.JAmanda Tallon, Account Strategist at Shoelace

Getting shoppers to move from the consideration to conversion stage of the marketing funnel is key for your business. Arturo Rey via Unsplash

The inverted funnel: inspire loyalty and get customers to return 

Enticing customers to return is one of, if not the most, cost-effective way to increase your average order value. “It can get really expensive for a business to acquire a new customer. The best-case scenario is for a customer to return and make a second, third, fourth, etc., purchase and increase their lifetime value,” says Amanda. 

The Peepers team thinks about driving repeat sales at every point in their business plan, starting with product development. The team creates products with designs that sets them apart from competitors, uses high-quality materials, and sells items at a very competitive price point.

“The next step, and something that we’ve tried to be even more focused on,” John says, “is delivering the best possible customer experience.” 

Along with delivering a top-notch customer experience, there are other effective marketing tactics that can help you with the loyalty section of the funnel. 

Try a direct-mail campaign

The Peepers team sends direct mail to drive more traffic to their website. There’s so much to experiment with here. You could send a postcard with a unique coupon code, a fun branded sticker set, or a handwritten note. 

Ask for user generated content

After a customer makes a purchase, Amanda recommends sending an email asking for a photo of their purchase and a review. After customers provide the content, you could send a discount code to use on their next purchase. This gives you new content for the awareness stage of the funnel, brings people back to the website, and increases loyalty by prompting them to use their discount code. 

Create a loyalty program

Another way to encourage repeat customers is through loyalty programs. Loyalty programs reward customers for making repeat purchases. Girlfriend Collective, a clothing brand, runs a loyalty program offering perks based on the lifetime value of a customer. As a customer spends over time, they unlock benefits like free shipping and returns and early access to sales.

Girlfriend Collective’s loyalty program offers benefits for spending with the store.
Girlfriend Collective’s loyalty program gives greater perks as customers spend more. Girlfriend Collective

Tracking attribution through data and surveys

Now you’ve completed your marketing funnel, the final step is to ensure you know exactly where your traffic comes from. This tells you where to invest your efforts.

Some Analytics tools don’t take into consideration content that’s nurtured customers to the point of purchase. Instead of relying on them solely for attribution, Amanda recommends setting up post-purchase surveys.

One client, she recalls, was ready to give up on TikTok as a marketing channel after both the platform and Google Analytics showed few conversions. But when they ran a post-purchase survey, TikTok was a leading platform for new purchasers. 

“We thought the average order value was significantly lower than other channels in the business in general, and it was the second highest,” Amanda says. “So, after that, we doubled down on our TikTok ad spend and realized that it was opening up an entirely new market for us.”

If you run a post-purchase survey, include the question about how the customer originally found out about your business. Be sure to leave a comment box alongside your answer options so respondents can provide an accurate response or provide more context. 

Unlock new opportunities with a marketing funnel

No two customer journeys are exactly the same. While the marketing funnel provides a clear framework for marketing tactics, it won’t always reflect each customers’ unique journey. That’s to be expected: some customers will flow through acquisition, consideration, and conversion. Others will bounce back and forth before committing. 

Ultimately, marketing funnels help you clearly map your marketing efforts for anyone, from raving fans to newcomers.

Wrapping Up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

This article originates from: https://www.shopify.com/blog/marketing-funnel

Posted on in Marketing

How To Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy: 10 Steps to Success

social media logos as chess pieces, indicating strategy: how to create a social media strategy that sells

If you’ve been struggling to meet your business goals on social media, you’re in the right place. 

Creating a social media marketing strategy will give purpose to your social media efforts. It will help you decide what content to develop and share, who you’re talking to, and what type of content performs best. Ultimately, it will help you harness social media to drive your business goals.

Here, we cover the essential steps to creating a successful social media marketing strategy, and include a useful template to get you started.

What is a social media marketing strategy?

A social media marketing strategy is a plan that outlines what content you’ll post and on which social media channels, your goals, and the tactics you’ll use to achieve them. 

Brands continue to ride the wave of social media marketing, with 33% of marketers saying they’re confident their efforts deliver a positive return on investment for their business.

Whether it’s TikTok ads or influencer marketing, social media lets brands access cost-effective marketing. Like a Swiss Army knife, a social media marketing plan can serve various marketing functions from:

  • Driving traffic and sales
  • Tapping into influencer networks
  • Building brand awareness
  • Amassing an engaged audience
  • Connecting with customers and prospects
  • Providing customer support

This is because you have a wide range of channels to incorporate, each with its own strengths and weaknesses to consider.

Having a well-defined social media strategy will help you build a community around your brand and, ultimately, make more sales. 

How to create a social media strategy 

1. Define your goals

Identify and clearly define what you want to achieve with your social media strategy plan. This will depend on your business, your audience, and your wider marketing strategy. Examples of social media marketing goals include:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Drive website traffic
  • Lead generation
  • Grow your audience
  • Increase engagement

Whatever you choose, this will be the guiding light for your strategy and will serve as the benchmark for tracking your performance. It’s important that your goals aren’t generic and instead focus on percentage increases or a revenue boost. For example, rather than having a goal of driving more website traffic, you should aim to increase website traffic by 5% every month, or reach 10,000 website visits a month by December. 

It helps to create goals that are SMART: 

  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound
A bullseye target with the acronym SMART written next to it.

Your social media goals should follow the SMART framework. 

This means you can easily track your goals, they aren’t wildly out of the realms of possibility, and they’re relevant to your overall business objectives. Most importantly, they have a time limit on them. This will increase the likelihood of you achieving your goals.

“I like to start by putting together a list of goals for each platform,” says Mac Steer, owner and director at Simify. “What do I want my audience to walk away from this post thinking? Do I need them to take action? How can I make that happen? Then, once I’ve got some ideas in mind and know what my goal is for each platform, I’ll figure out how best to execute those goals on each platform.”

2. Know your target audience

An effective social media strategy starts with understanding your ideal customer. Building rich context on your target audience takes time, but there are steps you can take immediately that will provide lasting value. 

“We identified our audience by researching demographic information, interests, and online behaviors, which resulted in the creation of our four customer avatars,” says Maria Mooney, brand director of Truly Free. “Knowing this information allows us to tailor content and messaging to the people most likely to engage with our brand.”

Start by researching your target audience or looking for demographic and psychographic data or observable patterns that help you form an image of who is likely to buy from you. This exercise won’t just inform your initial strategy but also help you develop a voice and tone for your brand that resonates with them.

Here are some activities you can do to get to know your target audience: 

  • Run a survey: Collect quantitative data about your audience, such as their age, location, job role, and core interests. 
  • Conduct interviews: Ask to speak to a handful of your best customers to get qualitative data, such as their values, challenges, goals, and pain points. 
  • Research the competition: See who’s following your biggest competitors. Identify what characteristics they share, what other content they follow and engage with, and any other information you can glean from their social media profiles. 
  • Check support tickets: Your customer service team has a wealth of information about your customers via support tickets. You can often find pain points and challenges here. 
  • Dig into your analytics: Most social media platforms have in-built insights that show you information like the age, location, and gender of your followers. 

Once you’ve carried out this research, you can create customer personas that match each audience segment. This should include demographic information, like age and location, as well as psychographic data, like interests, buying concerns, and motivation to buy. 

You can use this information to build up a picture of your audience and tailor your content so that it resonates with them.

Here’s an example of some of the demographic and psychographic information you can use to get to know your audience. 

  • Location: Where do your ideal customers typically live? Even knowing just the countries can help, but if you’re a local business or focus on one region, then it should be the cities you can realistically cater to.
  • Age: What is the age range of your customers?
  • Gender: What gender do they identify as? This might not be as important depending on your brand.
  • Interests: What are their interests/hobbies/passions? These make for effective targeting options (e.g., food, hip hop, bars, basketball).
  • Career/industry: What industry do they work in and what job titles have they held? This may not be relevant depending on your brand.
  • Income level: What is the income range of this buyer persona? Are they price-sensitive or are they willing to spend more money for premium products?
  • Relationship status: Are they single, actively dating, or married? This may be relevant if you’re in the wedding industry, for example.
  • Favorite websites: What type of websites do they keep bookmarked? Do they browse Instagram or TikTok daily?
  • Motivation to buy: What reasons would they have for buying your product? Do they want to sport a status symbol or make time to work out despite a busy schedule?
  • Buying concerns: Why might they choose not to buy your product? Are they worried about the quality?
  • Other info: Anything else that isn’t covered above but would be worth mentioning, such as education, stage in life (parents with newborn kids), events they attend, etc.

3. Conduct a social media audit

Running an audit on your existing social media content strategy will help you see what works and what doesn’t. It will give you a better understanding of what content formats and messaging styles your audience prefers, but it will also provide insight into when your audience is online and the best time to post. 

Instagram Insights showing the performance of a post.
Instagram Insights show this post had 25,000 impressions but only 10 comments. 

Here’s how to run a social media audit: 

  • Analyze engagement: Check your insights on each social media channel you use to identify your top-performing posts based on the number of likes, comments, and shares. 
  • Identify patterns: See if there are any patterns that show up in your insights. For example, you might find that people prefer to engage with videos on your Instagram account or that your followers are most active on the weekend. 
  • Run audits on each channel: Every social media platform is different—what works on Facebook might not work on Instagram and vice versa, so run an audit on each channel you use. 

When you’ve run your audit, assess the effectiveness of each top-performing piece of content in reaching your goals. For example, if followers are engaging wildly with meme-style videos that have nothing to do with your product, you might not hit the product sales targets you were hoping for.

4. Choose the right platforms

The social media content audit will shed some light on your best-performing platforms based on your goals, which will help you decide where to focus your efforts. It can be tempting to spread yourself thin across every new channel that pops up, but it’s better to excel on two or three than be inconsistent on six different channels. 

When choosing the best social media platforms for your brand, consider: 

  • Where your target audience is most active
  • Your business goals and objectives
  • Which platforms are easiest to promote your products on 
  • Where your content performs best 

Once you’ve selected the best platforms for your business, you can create a strategy for each of them that keeps your big-picture objectives in mind. Alex McIntosh, CEO and co-founder of Thrive Natural Care, finds choosing channels easy, as the company is focused on an omnichannel experience.

“This means we want to be present where our customers are, so we publish content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, and YouTube,” Alex says. “We know that our customers and audience are using different platforms at different times, so however they prefer to consume content, we want ours to add value to their day.”

Thrive Natural Care’s Instagram feed with lots of tropical and beach images
Thrive Natural Care posts on TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube to reach a wide audience. 

5. Develop a content strategy

Design a plan for the type of content you’ll create and share on each of your chosen social media channels. The content may vary depending on the platform and the audience you’re trying to reach, so it’s important to create a strategy that encompasses all of your customer personas and all of your social media channels. 

Defining your content mix—recurring formats and post types—makes it easier to produce social content while adding a rhythm to your posting schedule. This offers your audience both variety and consistency at the same time. Otherwise, you’ll wind up scrambling for something to publish every day.

Within your content mix, you want to have ideas you can plan for in advance, reproduce, and schedule to go out on a regular basis. For example, you might feature a customer testimonial every Tuesday and share a quote graphic every Wednesday and Friday.

Pieces that are relatively easy to create can keep your social media calendar full while you build out more elaborate assets, such as a promotional video or a blog post.

“For a content plan, we try to focus on both timeliness and value for our customers and followers,” says Alex. “One core value of our business is “leave it better,” and this is a guiding principle for our team. This means we want our social content to be something people feel good about. Whether it is a post about our regenerative farming efforts in Costa Rica or we are showcasing a new skin care product, we want our social media content to be valuable for anyone that sees it.”

The content mix you develop can incorporate:

  • News: Information about what’s happening in your industry or posts that are based on what’s trending at the moment.
  • Inspiration: Motivation to use your products or pursue a certain lifestyle, such as quote graphics or photos from around the world.
  • Education: Share fun stats and facts or how-to posts from your blog or YouTube channel.
  • Product/promotional posts: High-quality product shots of your products being used, demo videos, testimonials, or feature explanations can help you achieve your ultimate goal of getting sales. You can often run these as ads after you create them.
  • Contests and giveaways. A contest or free download in exchange for an email is a great way to promote something of value to both you and your audience other than your products.
  • Customer/influencer features: Shots or videos featuring your customers or the people they follow.
  • Community events: Share meetups, fundraisers, or learning opportunities, especially if you’re a local business.
  • Q&A: Ask your audience a question or make a request to elicit responses, such as: “Tag a friend who’s always late.” Answer a common question that you get from customers.
  • Tips and tricks: Share useful information and tutorials around your products.
  • Behind the scenes: Share how your product is made or what you’re doing to grow your business to offer some transparency that your audience can relate to. Giving your audience a look into the humans behind your business can go a long way in creating trust or building your personal brand as a founder.
  • Repurposed blog posts: Leverage your existing content on your Shopify blog and repurpose it into engaging social media content, such as snippets, images, or teasers. 

Aim for five to seven content archetypes to start.  Balance your content mix with post formats you can create quickly and those that are more labor intensive, as well as posts that aim for sales and posts that just seek to delight and grow your audience.

Snack brand Oh Snap! Pickling Co. finds the right mix of engaging content by publishing a mix of product shots, trending Reels, engagement posts, and even a tarot card series on its Instagram to keep customers entertained and engaged.

Oh Snap! Pickling Co.’s Instagram feed showing a variety of different content types.

Oh Snap! Pickling Co. publishes a mix of content on its Instagram.

Developing a mix of different content types will ensure you have a social media lead generation strategy that provides customers at every stage of the purchasing funnel with the information they need. 

6. Create a content calendar

Establish a schedule for when and how often you’ll post on each social media platform. This will help you maintain consistency and ensure a steady flow of content.

Start slow and then ramp up to a higher frequency as you develop your routine and figure out what works.

You don’t want to spread yourself too thin or spam your audience’s feeds. It’s fine if you only have time to post once every few days in the beginning. You can build up to one post a day and then test to see if a higher frequency actually nets you better results on specific platforms.

Ultimately, you want to focus your attention where it will have the most impact and when your audience is scrolling through their feeds. 

Each platform has a different ideal posting time depending on when their followers are most engaged. You’ll find that the best time to post on TikTok will be different than the best time to post on Instagram. If you aren’t sure where to start, think about when people check their feeds: in the morning, at lunch, during their commute, or before bed.

You’ll discover the best posting times for your particular audience through trial and error. Popular posting times will also vary depending on seasons and other variables.

What’s more important is that you schedule your posts in batches, at least a week in advance. Do it in one sitting, dedicating a few hours at a time so you can focus on other things while your social media publishing runs in the background. You can use an automated scheduling tool to load up your social media posts for the week. 

“First, we identify the themes and messages we want to communicate to our target audience,” says Maria of Truly Free. “These may include promotions, product launches, educational content, and a behind-the-scenes look into our company.

“Then, we establish a content calendar outlining the topics we’ll cover and when we plan to post them. This helps ensure we have a consistent and diverse range of content that aligns with our marketing objectives.

“Next, we brainstorm ideas for each piece of content, taking into account the specific platform and its best practices. For example, on Instagram, we may focus on visual content like images or videos that engagingly showcase our products. On Twitter, we may create short, snappy posts that are shareable and attention-grabbing.”

7. Engage with your audience 

Develop strategies to actively engage with your audience, respond to comments and messages, and foster a sense of community. No one wants to feel like they’re shouting into the void, so make an effort to start discussions and encourage interactions around your content. Alex McIntosh of Thrive Natural care says that the brand has put added importance on engaging with its audience.

“It is one thing to put out great content, but audiences want to feel like they are a part of something, and by engaging with our customers, we help them join us on our journey,” says Alex.

Here are some ways you can engage with your audience:

  • Reshare content: Post customer photos and reviews to your own feeds (remember to credit the original creator). 
  • Ask questions: Invite discussion by asking a question. 
  • Run a poll: Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook all have a poll feature you can use to encourage engagement and learn more about your customers at the same time. 
  • Jump on trends: Join in with the latest TikTok trends or trending hashtags on other channels—just make sure it’s relevant to your brand and audience. 
  • Respond to comments: Engage your audience by replying to the comments they leave on your content. 

Shopify merchant Bubble Skincare does an excellent job of engaging with its followers. It consistently replies to fans and shows its appreciation for purchases and comments.

A screenshot of a TikTok video by Bubble Skincare showing the brand replying to follower comments
Bubble Skincare responds to comments its audience leaves on its TikTok posts.

8. Leverage influencer marketing 

Consider collaborating with influencers relevant to your industry or niche. They can help amplify your reach, increase brand awareness, and drive engagement. 

Here’s how to get started with influencer marketing: 

  • Find relevant influencers: Use apps like Shopify Collabs to find influencers that have an audience in your niche. Consider the platform they’re popular on and how that’s likely to impact your brand. 
  • Brainstorm content: Work together to come up with content ideas that will resonate with their audience. Make sure it’s relevant to your brand and products, too. 
  • Track and tweak: Measure what works and what doesn’t to see what content you can collaborate on in the future.

You don’t need to hire influencers with millions of followers to expand your brand reach. Skin care brand Plenaire works with niche and micro-influencers to reach highly engaged audiences. Not only does this help you grow your audience, it builds trust in your brand and encourages sales, for a relatively low cost.

You can work with influencers on a short-term, one-off basis or as an ongoing ambassadorship. Both have their pros and cons, but it will ultimately depend on your goal and your budget. 

“We include influencers in our strategy as well, notifying them about monthly sales and products to advertise on their blogging channels,” says Nicky Miller, social media manager at Lion Brand Yarn. 

“An example of a successful campaign was our 145th anniversary. It was the perfect moment to create dialogue about our brand and invite others to talk about us. We encouraged influencers to share videos about our brand’s history and products. We updated our logo and utilized our social media platforms to share fun facts, reels, trivia, and giveaways. The results were a success, we saw nice growth on Instagram and were featured in several publications covering our brand.”

9. Monitor and analyze performance

Use social media analytics tools to track the performance of your content and campaigns and monitor their effectiveness.

Here are some metrics to monitor:

  • Reach: How many people see your social media posts in their feeds.
  • Engagement: How many people like, comment, and share your posts.
  • Click-through rates: How many people click through from your social content to your website or product pages.
  • Conversions: How many people buy something after seeing a social media post. 

The metrics you track will depend on your goals. For example, if your aim is to increase website traffic, you should closely track click-through rates, but if you want to boost sales, then conversions is your go-to metric. 

A screenshot of Twitter Analytics showing the engagement rate and link clicks.

Twitter analytics shows the engagement rate and link clicks on your most recent posts. 

Monitoring your metrics lets you make small changes to your strategy, rather than huge overhauls. You can be proactive in the short term and use those learnings to inform future campaigns.

10. Iterate and refine 

Continuously evaluate and refine your social media marketing plan based on the insights and data you gather. Adapt your approach based on what works best for your audience and aligns with your goals. 

Your aim now is to get a positive return on the time, money, and effort you spend marketing your business on social media. That requires deliberate action.

Your social media strategy is your plan of attack. But in a space like social media that changes by the day—with feed algorithm updates and audiences always ready for something new—you need to remain flexible and keep your finger on its pulse.

It’s important to have goals to track and check in regularly to see what’s working. Use those insights to develop content ideas, build out your calendar, and grow your audience. 

“We believe in putting our members first and providing them with the content they want and need,” says Maria. “To do this, we conducted a survey to gather feedback on the types of content our members were most interested in seeing from us. Based on the responses we received, we created a social media campaign focused on how to clean homes using Truly Free products. This campaign provided our members with valuable tips and insights, while showcasing the benefits of our products in an engaging and informative way.”

Get a better return on investment with social media

Developing a social media marketing strategy will give you purpose when connecting with your audience on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. It will help you determine the kind of content your audience likes to see and what they engage with the most. Ultimately, this will help you grow your audience, sell more products, and increase revenue. 

Wrapping Up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

The article originates from: https://www.shopify.com/blog/social-media-marketing-strategy

Posted on in Marketing

17 Creative Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Marketing your small business spreads the word about the incredible products you have to sell. No eyeballs equals slim chances of making your first $1,000 online. 

But your customer’s attention is being pulled from pillar to post. Big brands with thousand-dollar marketing budgets drive the cost of advertising sky-high. Let’s not even get started on social media channels changing their algorithms to make it even harder for small businesses to reach the audiences they built.

It’s not all doom and gloom. You can stand out in the busiest of spaces. It just takes a little more creativity. Click here to start selling online now with Shopify

To get you started, this guide shares 17 creative marketing ideas we’ve seen from independent brands that are totally free (or very low cost) to replicate.

Tweet from Jason Wong talking about saturation of marketing ideas

Free small business marketing ideas

A solid marketing plan isn’t off the table if your budget is zero. Here are 12 free marketing ideas that won’t break the bank.

  1. Host a social media competition
  2. Share user-generated content on social media
  3. Produce video tutorials
  4. Jump on trending topics
  5. Partner with other small businesses 
  6. Give quirky product recommendations
  7. Collect customer feedback
  8. Enter local awards
  9. Attend local events
  10. Sell mystery boxes
  11. Create content optimized for SEO
  12. Sell gift cards

1. Host a social media competition

To say social media platforms are oversaturated would be an understatement. Some 92% of companies will use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to reach their target audience by 2022. 

Couple that with the fact Facebook only shows posts to 5.2% of a page’s followers and you’ll see why social media is a pain-staking way to market a small business. 

Diversify your social media marketing strategy by hosting a competition. Science proves people love free stuff. So, give away something for free—such as a product bundle or trip to your HQ—in exchange for social media engagement. Have your followers like, comment, share, and tag a friend in the giveaway post to boost reach. 

Loca Foods, for example, hosted an Instagram contest that gave away dips and desserts. Participants had to like the post, follow its Instagram profile, and tag a friend. Bonus entries were up for grabs if followers shared the post to their own story:

Marketing idea used by Eat Local Food on Instagram to increase engagement with a giveaway

Granted, attractive social media competitions give away expensive products. But the marketing dollars you spend on hosting a giveaway don’t have to be extreme. You can make the prize as cheap or expensive as you want. 

2. Share user-generated content on social media

Another smart way to use social media to market your small business is to use user-generated content (UGC)—something 79% of shoppers say highly impacts their purchasing decisions, likely because it’s less biased than branded content. They get to see someone in their shoes loving the product.

Incentivize existing customers to share photos, videos, and testimonials of them using your products. Do regular scans of your brand name or hashtag to see social media posts people have shared without being prompted. 

The goal is to build a library of high-quality UGC that convinces on-the-fence social media followers to buy, like this example from Andie Swim. Its previous customer created a TikTok video, which Andie Swim reposted to Instagram.

(Just remember to ask permission from the original poster before sharing UGC to your own page.)

Marketing idea example of user generated content and how it can help you post to your social media channels

3. Produce video tutorials

Continuing with the social media theme, video marketing reigns supreme on many platforms. Take a look at TikTok’s success. Its minute-long videos became so popular that Instagram, traditionally a photo-sharing app, launched its own version—Reels—off the back of it.

Use Shopify’s free online video maker to produce content to market your own business on social media. That could be:

  • Reviews from happy customers 
  • Behind-the-scenes of running your business
  • Video tutorials that show how to use your product
  • Livestreams co-hosted with influencers in your space

Dope Dog is one small business using this free marketing idea. Its founder, Erin Mastopietro, says, “We held Instagram live sessions with experts in our niche, during which audience members could ask questions, and we also conducted a small interview.

“As a result, we gained exposure to the audience of the expert and provided value to our followers.” 

A marketing idea such as producing video tutorials to use your product is a great way to promote your business

4. Jump on trending topics

Social media is fueled by trends. Think about it: TikTok is credited for making songs go viral; artists see record-breaking streams when a dancing trend emerges. Everyone posts videos of themselves dancing to the same song.

How do you uncover trending topics before your small business’ social media content gets lumped in with the others jumping on trends? Spot them before the crowd does by:

  • Asking your customers
  • Reading discussions happening in forums
  • Running a competitive analysis
  • Celebrating annual events

Partake Foods, for example, posted this tweet that replicated Spotify Unwrapped—the music platform’s annual round-up of music a user listened to throughout the year. Only in this case, Partake Foods switched most-listened-to music out in favor of top products:

A marketing idea to use is jumping on trending topics like Partake Foods did with Spotify Wrapped

5. Partner with other small businesses

Here’s a great marketing idea if you’re working with zero budget: collaborate with other small businesses whose target market overlaps with yours (provided the products you sell don’t compete against theirs).

Let’s say you had an online store selling handmade crockery. Partner with another small business owner that sold handmade vases and lean on each other’s audience and run a co-marketing campaign, such as:

  • Co-hosting a webinar
  • Giving discounts to each other’s email list
  • Shouting each other out on social media 
  • Becoming a guest on each other’s podcasts
  • Going halves on fees to host a pop-up shop 

The beauty of co-marketing is not only that you support fellow small business owners, but you get to tap into an existing audience for free, unlike the influencer marketing route—many of whom charge to publish sponsored posts. 

6. Give quirky product recommendations

Shoppers have various things running through their mind when they’re visiting a new ecommerce store. At the forefront are questions like: How do I know this is the right product for me?

Take the pain out of comparing new products with quirky recommendations. These don’t require hours of time to go into product development. Just go beyond “you viewed this, so you might be interested in this” categories that grab people’s attention. 

Digital consultant Kayleigh Töyrä recommends product recommendation lists for:

  • People who already have everything
  • Gifts you may keep for yourself instead
  • Things you don’t need, but may want

Kayleigh adds that with clever copy to increase sales, new businesses can “up- and cross-sell in a more fun way.”

7. Collect customer feedback

Existing customers are your best friends. They’re the people who have seen your existing digital marketing strategy and purchased off the back of it. Use them as your starting point when developing new marketing ideas.

Use Shopify Apps like Post Purchase NPS Survey to send a customer feedback survey to anyone who purchases through your online store. Ask what they liked about your product, how they discovered you, and the trigger that caused them to buy. 

Use those insights to fill your social media profiles, landing pages, and product descriptions with customer testimonials.

Package Free, for example, has a highlight reel of customer reviews on its product pages. Anyone debating whether to trust the retailer is instantly reassured, undoubtedly improving the ecommerce site’s conversion rate: 

A marketing idea such as reusing customer feedback across other pages and social media is a great way to share positive reviews about your business or products

8. Enter to win awards

Being voted the “best” product in your industry is a surefire way to build credibility and attract attention. Stephen Light, CMO and co-owner of Nolah Mattress, explains that “awards offer businesses a solid shot of authority, which is one of the keys to successful marketing; you want your audience to know that you offer the best of the best.

“Regardless of your niche, there are countless awards and accolades offered that you can find with just a little digging.”

Here’s a starting point for your award submission research:

  • The Best of Small Business Awards
  • Best in Biz Awards
  • Dream Big Awards, run by the US Chamber of Commerce 
  • National Small Business Week Award, hosted by the US Small Business Association

Whichever awards you enter to win, Stephen says, “It’s a cost-effective boost of credibility and publicity that can make a big difference with very little investment. Displaying them proudly on your website can encourage conversions.”

Enter industry product competition and use any awards won as ways to win trust and sales

9. Attend local events

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking all of your marketing tactics need to be online. Granted, building an online presence is crucial. But get away from the computer and meet potential customers in the flesh by attending local offline events, such as: 

  • Craft fairs
  • Sunday markets 
  • Networking events

Check with your local council, many of which have a list of events to support small businesses in the area. Sites like Meetup and Eventbrite also round up business events in your local city. 

Can’t find any? Host your own. Find a free space to host an event (like the public library), bring your inventory along, and hand out flyers to build brand awareness. Just remember to take your business card. Anyone interested in your products but not ready to buy can have information to visit your website later.

10. Sell mystery boxes

Got a bunch of slow-moving products? Sell them as part of a mystery box—something Kaleigh Moore did for her jewelry business: “Fill it with slow-moving products and promote them as a surprise, offering at an affordable price point.”

Mystery boxes work for several reasons:

  1. The human brain loves surprises. 
  2. Mystery boxes induce the fear of missing out, a phenomenon that causes 60% of people to make reactive purchases. 
  3. You shift slow-moving inventory and create space for more popular (and profitable) inventory.

Zac’s Sweet Shop is another ecommerce retailer that offers mystery boxes. Shoppers not only get the chance to try a variety of products at a low price, but the brand has a way to shift slow-moving or soon-to-expire food products inside each mystery box.

A marketing idea to sell slow moving products is by creating mystery boxes

11. Create content optimized for SEO

Sometimes, the most effective online marketing ideas are the simplest. They just take a longer time to come to fruition. But lay the groundwork early and you’ll set yourself up for success later down the line.

That’s especially true with search engine optimization (SEO), the process of optimizing your online store. You’ll appear in search results when people are actively searching for information or entertainment, or to solve a pain point.

Tie SEO in with a content marketing strategy to get your small business off the ground. Write a blog post that targets low-volume keywords with a direct tie-in with your products. Go after those with minimal competition to set yourself up for success.

Here are some simple content marketing ideas to get you started:

  • Solve a pain point your audience is experiencing
  • Write a guest post for a popular publication in your niche
  • Tell the story of your existing customers to help new shoppers themselves in their shoes

“The secret is really putting out great content. And putting out great content means a lot of different things, but to me, what I think it means is putting out content that’s relevant to your audience that people really want to read, and understanding how to monetize that content.”Trevor Crotts, founder of BuddyRest

12. Sell themed gift cards

Gift cards improve cash flow. You get the money upfront without immediately needing to fork out fees to produce or ship the product to a customer. 

Offer them through your online store and prioritize marketing them in peak gift-giving seasons, such as:

  • Mother’s or Father’s Day
  • Black Friday and Cyber Monday 
  • Christmas

Starbucks, for example, sells gift cards year-round. But the retailer keeps an ear to the ground and creates customized gift card designs based on trending topics. Lyrics from Taylor Swift’s new song appeared on a Starbucks gift card just four days after it was released. 

Marketing idea to use is being on top of gift card design like this example from Starbucks using Taylor Swift lyrics

Whichever season you’re offering gift cards in, post about them on social media, send email marketing campaigns to subscribers, and add a pop-up on your website to direct first-time visitors toward your gift card options. You could even offer $10 gift cards to thank existing customers for shopping with you—and encourage them to do so again. 

Low-cost marketing ideas

Exhausted free marketing ideas and looking for tactics that move the needle? Put these low-cost marketing ideas on your to-do list.

  1. Offer free samples
  2. Gift free products to influencers
  3. Create a referral program
  4. Incentivize email sign-ups with discount codes
  5. Make an incredible unboxing experience

13. Offer free samples

We briefly touched on the idea that people love free things. 

If you can absorb the cost of giving away inventory for free (with the goal of turning those people into paying customers later down the line), offer free product samples to people who visit your pop-up store or market stall. You can even give samples to customers who’ve purchased a product from you as an incentive to buy again.

“People love getting a free gift, and then if they share that kind of thing, it usually leads to good sales on our end.” —David Gaylord, founder of Bushbalm

Made with Local is one brand using this low-cost marketing idea. Sheena Russell, its founder and CEO, says, “Because we are a product/food brand, we’ve had fun using Instacart to ship gifts—samples of our product—to people that we’ve recently chatted with about Made with Local. This could be business contacts, potential buyers, etc.

“You can get samples delivered to their door in less than two hours in most big cities, and folks love it.”

14. Gift free products to influencers

Influencer marketing is big business. Some 87% of consumers trust advice from social media influencers when making purchasing decisions. No wonder brands will spend $4.62 billion on influencer marketing by 2023.

But instead of paying for influencers to talk about your product, a low-cost marketing idea is to give free products to them. Many bloggers have a PO box specifically for press packages. 

While it’s not guaranteed that the items you send will be shared, the only thing you’ll pay for is product manufacturing costs and shipping fees—a small price to pay if an influencer shouts your small business out to their loyal audience. (Though you can boost the chances of having them open your gifts if the unboxing experience is enjoyable. More on that later.)

The Tur-Shirt Company tried this marketing idea. Its founder Terri-Anne Turton sent the brand’s clothing products to Instagram influencers in the parenting space. Many of them shared photos of their own children wearing the clothes, tagging The Tur-Shirt Company and directing followers toward its website.

“I gifted her two Tur-Shirts and her kids loved them—they were amazed when they worked out how they work. It was heartwarming and the orders started to flood in,” Terri-Anne says. “I had an influx of orders over the weekend totalling £1,300 of sales.”

Gifting influencers your product for free is a good marketing idea to create awareness of your brand and product

15. Create a referral program

Granted, the goal of marketing is to drive more revenue. But that revenue doesn’t always come from new customers. Many ecommerce business owners forget about one marketing strategy with a low barrier to entry and high success rate: word-of-mouth marketing.

  • “Getting customers to refer other customers is a great way to get more out of your marketing dollars. You can make this easier by using an app like Smile to incentivize customers to refer their friends to buy from you.” —Jason Wong, founder of Doe Lashes

A customer loyalty program encourages your existing customer base to recommend your products to their family and friends. Incentives can be:

  • Discount codes 
  • Priority access to new products
  • Points to redeem on future orders 

Use Shopify Apps like Referral Candy or LoyaltyLion to power the program for you. From there, the only investment you’ll make is a small incentive for people to join through your referral program. Choose rewards like priority access to make it even cheaper. 

Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, did this for an online business. It added a small section beneath the customer’s email order receipt that said: “Share your unique referral code and for every customer you refer you will get a surprise gift in your next shipment and they will get a surprise gift in their first shipment.”

Derric reports this referral marketing program drove more than 15,000 referrals per month. 

16. Incentivize email sign-ups with discount codes

There’s no beating around the bush: every small business needs to build an email list.

Building a brand on social media alone is risky. You’re at the mercy of ever-changing algorithms—many of which are pushing brands into paying to reach the audiences they’ve already built. 

A DTC VC, Dennis Hegstad, tweets about the importance of building your own email or SMS list for sales and discounts

Both SMS and email marketing are direct lines of communication for building relationships with your customers. Get their email address or phone number (and consent to reach them in those inboxes) by making the sign-up process irresistible. For many customers, that means offering discount codes.

Research shows that 81% of shoppers enjoy receiving emails that contain special offers, making it the preferred channel to discover coupons. Those who use a discount code spend 24% more than shoppers who don’t. 

Again, this marketing idea doesn’t have to be ground-breaking. Simply create an email pop-up that offers a discount code in exchange for their subscription. Follow that up with an automated email campaign with the coupon and a list of bestsellers.

A marketing idea any ecommerce business can use is creating a pop up and offering a discount on a shoppers first purchase

Pattern Beauty uses a discount code as the incentive for website visitors to join its email list.

17. Make an incredible unboxing experience

Earlier, we touched on the fact that UGC is a superb way to fill your social media calendars with content that turns followers into paying customers. 

The unboxing experience is a simple way to do that. More than 165,000 people search for “unboxing” on YouTube every month, with channels dedicated to unboxing experiences like Unbox Therapy amassing more than 18 million subscribers. 

These videos are clearly in demand. So, if you have the flexibility to subtract a few dollars from your profit margin, go above and beyond to make your unboxing experience share-worthy. 

Take it from Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box. The retailer experimented with unboxing videos on various social media platforms, as its founder, Danny Taing, explains: “We experimented with Facebook. We experimented with Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, like a whole bunch of the social media platforms Influencers there.

“What we found has been most effective has been YouTube, and specifically has to be YouTube influencers that have really engaged audiences, and that the influencers themselves really love eating.

“Our product is so hands-on and sensual in a lot of ways,” Danny says. “You have to unbox it and show the snacks, and eat it and talk about it, like a good five- to 10-minute YouTube video gets the job done a lot better than an Instagram post.”

Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive 

These free and low-cost marketing ideas prove there’s more to promoting a small business than investing in Facebook ads. The trick is to test different ideas and get creative. Attend local events. Start a podcast. Partner with other businesses in your area. Run video marketing campaigns on social media. 

Just don’t forget about the easiest source of creative marketing ideas: the customers already buying from you. 

Wrapping Up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

The article originates from: https://www.shopify.com/sg/blog/marketing-ideas

Posted on in Marketing, Online-store

How Google Trends Can Help You Make Business Decisions

a bar graph against a green background: trends google

As the world’s most popular search engine, Google has access to decades of information on what users are looking for online—and that information is accessible via the Google Trends tool. Researchers have used Google Trends search data for everything from predicting the stock market to monitoring the spread of disease. Read on to learn how you can put this powerful free tool to work for your business.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a website that shares anonymous, aggregated data about what people search for on the web. Using a random sample of billions of daily searches, Google Trends measures the relative volume of search queries over time, stretching back to 2004. Click here to start selling online now with Shopify

Take note: Google Trends only provides relative search volume, not absolute search volume—or the total number of Google searches a term received. Google Trends data is indexed to 100, meaning that the maximum search volume for a particular query over a set timeframe is 100. If you look at trends over time, 100 is the day with the highest search traffic for your keyword. If you explore Google Trends by region, the location with the most search interest within a set timeframe has a value of 100.

How to use Google Trends for your business

  1. Plan ahead for seasonal marketing
  2. Find the best day of the week to run ads and publish content
  3. Use regional insights to create valuable content
  4. Identify additional keywords
  5. Discover breakout queries
  6. Find the right phrasing
  7. Optimize marketing by channel
  8. Understand your competitors

As a business owner, you can use Google Trends for more than just staying on top of the zeitgeist. Here’s how it can help you with keyword research, competitive analysis, and more. 

1. Plan ahead for seasonal marketing

If you use Google Ads, you know that Google provides you with the monthly average search volume for search terms on the platform. The difference between Google Ads and Google Trends is that Trends provides real-time data rather than a monthly average, so you can use it to pinpoint searches around particular events or to see how searches change over time. These insights allow you to plan ahead for seasonal marketing campaigns that promote products during the time when searches for related keywords spike. 

“Hiking sandals” is an example of a seasonal keyword. Every year from 2004 to 2022, search interest for the term “hiking sandals” in the US peaked in June and dipped in November. To capitalize on this pattern, you can increase your ad spend in late spring and early summer, when most people search for hiking sandals.

2. Find the best day of the week to run ads and publish content

You can use Google Trends to see if your search term performs better on certain days of the week. For example, both “hiking sandals” and “walking sandals” receive the most traffic on the weekend, so consider running more ads and leaning into content marketing campaigns that land on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

3. Use regional insights to create valuable content 

You can get more specific with search volume data by selecting a location and narrowing your parameters from, for example, worldwide to the US—or even further to just California. If you select California, you’ll see search volume sorted by metro area. For example, in 2022 the term “hiking sandals” had the highest concentration of searches in the San Diego metro region. You can use this information to localize advertising and to improve the targeting of your content marketing efforts. For instance, you might consider publishing a blog post on the top hiking trails near San Diego to promote your walking sandals.

4. Identify additional keywords

Use Google Trends to conduct keyword research for SEO by viewing related search topics. When you use Google Trends to explore a term, you can scroll down past the “interest over time” and “interest by region” data to a section of related search topics. Toggle between “rising” (highest increase in search frequency over a given period of time) and “top” (highest overall search frequency) for a clearer picture of each term’s performance. 

In 2022, rising related topics for “hiking sandals” in California included “ankle” and “backpack,” while some of the top related topics were “sandal” and “hiking boot.” If you sell hiking sandals, looking at topics can help you brainstorm what other products your customer may be looking for—such as hiking boots and backpacks. You can click on those topics to assess if they are worth pursuing. Exploring trends by topic can give you additional information about search interest that you may not have discovered otherwise.

5. Discover breakout queries 

Rising related queries usually have a percentage next to them, indicating how Google search volume has grown. However, some queries and topics won’t show a percentage increase in search volume. Instead, you’ll see the word “breakout,” which is Google’s way of indicating that search volume for this term grew by over 5,000%. For a search term to experience that much short-term growth, it likely initially had very low search volume. These newly popular keywords can be an important part of your SEO strategy. 

6. Find the right phrasing

Google Trends’ “compare” feature can help you choose the perfect phrasing for your search term. For example, in the US in 2022, “walking sandals” got slightly more interest than “hiking sandals”—except in Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, where “hiking sandals” was the preferred term. This feature can help you decide which keywords to prioritize in your marketing efforts. A brand selling sandals might use the term “hiking sandals” in the Southwest and “walking sandals” elsewhere.

7. Optimize marketing by channel 

Google Trends gives ecommerce store owners the option to refine search volume data by type of search. Web search is the default, but you can also see trends in image search, news search, shopping search, and YouTube search. Benefits include seeing how the trends for shopping search and image search differ from web search. For example, popular web searches for “walking sandals” include the word “best,” while image and shopping searches are more likely to contain the words “for women.” If you want to rank for web search, consider compiling a list of the best walking shoes. If you want to make sure your product page ends up on image and shopping pages, know that searchers are looking for products that work for their body and gender identity.

8. Understand your competitors 

One handy feature of Google Trends is the ability to compare up to four different search terms at once. Once you’ve decided on a region and time period for your first search query, click “+ compare” in the light blue box to the right of your original search term to see how these two terms compare. You can add up to two more terms, which can be helpful when conducting competitor analysis. Compare your brand name to your three biggest competitors to better understand your niche and improve your marketing efforts. 

Google Trends FAQ

Is Google Trends a free tool?

Yes, Google launched Trends in 2006 as a free tool for the general public.

How accurate is the data on Google Trends?

Google trends data is accurate, but it doesn’t provide absolute search volume. Since Google performs billions of searches daily, including every single search in its data set would take a long time. So, Google Trends uses a sample of searches. Google notes that its Trends data “is not scientific and might not be a perfect mirror of search activity.” Some searches will report with a search volume of zero, but that may mean that the search volume was too low for Google to consider it significant; the actual volume may be higher than zero—but still low.

Can I use Google Trends for international data?

Google Trends data shows global search queries, so it’s a solid option for international data. Depending on the region, you can search for data by country, state, or metro area.

How does Google Trends determine search popularity?

Google Trends determines search popularity by taking a random sample of daily searches for a particular query and then translating that sample into a number out of 100. The term with the highest search volume at a particular moment in time is the benchmark for 100, and every other query’s popularity is shown relative to the most popular search.

What is 100 in Google Trends?

If you see the number “100” next to a search term, that doesn’t mean it has an absolute Google search volume of 100. Since Google uses normalized values, a score of 100 means the term in question has the highest relative search volume.

Wrapping Up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

The article reference: https://www.shopify.com/blog/trends-google

Posted on in Marketing, SA

How To Design A Fantacy Unboxing Experience For Your Customers

If you’re running an online business, one of the important touchpoints you have with your customer is when the items they ordered and purchased from you get delivered.

For one, this allows you to leave a positive impression on them and create a pleasant online shopping experience. A well-designed unboxing experience can create a ‘wow’ factor that can make your customers fall in love with your brand all over again and order more. 

In general, most customers are already excited about receiving their items. But you can take it up a notch and make it even more exciting by providing a carefully curated unboxing experience. 

What Benefits?

1.It Has The Potential For Free Marketing

While some customer prefers to enjoy the unboxing experience on their own, others love to record the moment and share the experience on social media. As such, it becomes a significant marketing opportunity to help your brand reach more clients and stand out. 

2. It Improves Customer Loyalty

One of the most important goals of any company is to make customers repeatedly purchase their products. That said, customer experience across the buying journey impact customer loyalty.  

A big part of the buyer’s journey that you can easily improve and control is creating a positive unboxing experience. This strategy relies on emotion, allowing consumers to feel pampered and valued. Such consumer empowerment can encourage people to come back again and again.

How to?

1.Packaging Materials——Choose The Right Packaging Materials

To create a unique unboxing experience for your customers, focus on the material. Ideally, it shouldn’t be just any ordinary box that you bulk buy from a supplier. Your box should feature your brand colors, logo, or name.  

Once your products arrive on a customer’s doorstep, you want to let them know they came from you. While plain boxes may be cheaper, if your brand isn’t clear, you could miss out on the valuable opportunity to establish consistent brand recognition. Note that consistent branding–from product browsing and selection to purchasing to receiving and unboxing the product, can help build and strengthen your brand story. That said, don’t skimp on your product boxes.  

Alternatively, the term ‘unboxing’ doesn’t necessarily mean boxes. As such, you can choose whether you’ll use boxes to pack your items. However, it’s important to choose the right type of packaging suitable for your specific products. 

For instance, a custom box may not be necessary if you have smaller, flexible products such as shirts. You can opt for branded mailers or plastic pouches. Regardless of what type of packaging material you choose, you want to make sure that it reflects your brand and agreeably matches your product.

2.Think About The Layout

No one likes to receive a highly anticipated item that seems carelessly thrown into the package, nor do they want to see lots of return labels or receipts when they open their package. Instead, customers want to see a well-packaged and nicely presented product with each item positioned properly. This can provide a nice impression and make them want to order again.

That said, be intentional not just to throw return labels, packing slips, or packaging foam and material anywhere on the box. After all, you want to provide a nice impression and make them want to order again.

As a good start, pack and present the items in an appealing and organized manner. Ensure they first see what they ordered and arrange the extra papers and miscellaneous things. This approach can help prevent the less important things from taking away the customer’s focus and reaction from the main focal point, which is your product.

3.Add Personalized Extras They’ll Love

One of the best ways to create a memorable unboxing experience is to add extras that customers will love. Aside from the product they’ve bought, you can include small, personalized items, such as a simple thank you note for their purchase.  

You can also leverage engagement by sending postcards that ask them to share the experience on social media with a specific hashtag. Moreover, you can also give them a discount coupon they can use for their next purchase, encouraging an additional sale. You can also send bonus gifts or product testers, especially during holidays or the sale season, to show appreciation and increase customer loyalty.

There’s no denying the increasing impact of unboxing. What was once a seasonal pleasure, unboxing, has become a powerful online fad and online marketing tool. So, if you wish to convert one-time customers into loyal buyers, designing a memorable unboxing experience can help you stay on their minds and keep coming back. If you don’t know where to start, take inspiration from the above tips to create a unique unboxing experience for your customers.

Wrapping up:

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements.

Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses! If you would like to know more details about us, please contact us:  blog.shopshipshake.com. If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

This article partly refers to: https://www.expert-market.com/how-to-design-a-great-unboxing-experience-for-your-customers/

Posted on in Business, Marketing

16 Real Ways To Increase Website(Online Store) Traffic in 2023

“How do I drive more traffic to my online store?” 

At some point, that thought crosses the mind of every entrepreneur selling online.

Maybe you’ve invested time and effort in setting up your store and tweaked everything for launch, only to open up shop and wonder where all the traffic is. Maybe you’ve seen steady growth over the past six months, but hit a plateau on traffic and sales. Or maybe you’ve been successful with one traffic-driving tactic and you’re curious about what tactics you can try next.

Whether you’re trying to attract your first customer or your 1,000th customer, generating more traffic to your online store is a crucial part of growing your business. If your site is properly optimized for conversions, getting an increase in web traffic could mean more customers and more sales.

How to increase website traffic

  • Run paid ad campaigns
  • Engage on social media
  • Hire influencers
  • Use content marketing
  • Apply SEO strategies
  • Explore traditional marketing like tv, radio or mail

We’ve gathered a list of 16 proven, high-impact tactics for driving more traffic to your online store.

Which tactic is best for your business?

Some of these sources will generate higher quality traffic for your specific business and some will generate lower quality traffic.

For example, let’s say you’re targeting young professionals interested in buying wacky office supplies. LinkedIn might be a better option over, say, Pinterest. If your target audience young 20 year olds, TikTok might be the best best option.

Website traffic acquisition success is found by doubling down on the most relevant traffic you can find. Of course, “the most relevant traffic you can find” is incredibly subjective and different for everyone, so let’s break down each tactic you can use to increase web traffic:

  • Tactic type: Whether the idea is a short-term or long-term traffic generator. Short-term tactics usually see results quicker but require more maintenance or reinvestment. Long-term tactics take longer to see results but are more evergreen and require little to no maintenance.
  • Effort: How much time, skill, or experience you’ll need to put into the tactic. 
  • Time to return on investment (ROI): Whether you invest time, effort, or money into a traffic-driving tactic, it will take days, weeks, or months to see that investment increase traffic and sales. 
  • Cost: The upfront budget you’ll need to launch the tactic.
  • Traffic potential: The total amount of traffic that could be sent to your store.

💡 TIP: You should aim to choose one tactic you can do consistently. If you spread yourself thin with trying too many tactics at once, you’re not going to see results—and that’s when you get frustrated, and feel like you should give up.

To increase website traffic you need to be able to get your business in front of your ideal customers. With paid social media ads, you can create highly targeted campaigns that serve tailor-made ads to the customers who are most likely to click through and purchase your products.

If you’re thinking about running paid social media ads, here are some platforms you should consider:

1. Facebook ads

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: Low

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤

With 2.6 billion monthly active users as of the first quarter of 2020, Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world. Facebook is filled with opportunities for you to reach new customers and drive them to your online store. Its robust advertising platform lets you target users based on their interests, behavior, location, and more. Facebook also can be a tool that saves you time and money by optimizing your ad delivery and getting your message in front of those most likely to convert.

Example of a facebook ad that's used to drive traffic to websites

Using Facebook Dynamic Ads you can even serve customers who have previously visited your website automatically generated ads featuring the products they’ve already looked at or added to their carts. These powerful ads can help you bring users back to your website, so you can make the most of the traffic you’re already getting.

2. Instagram ads

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: Low

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤

Instagram is an incredibly popular platform, with more than one-billion active users worldwide, with 90% of accounts following a business according to Instagram.

Finding hashtags on Instagram or creating videos or images for marketing are just a few of the Instagram tools to grow your following. Creating Instagram ads is most likely to result in growing website traffic and sales, so, if you’ve already built an army of followers on Instagram, you aren’t really using it to its full potential until you’ve tried its advertising platform.

Make sure you’re signed up for an Instagram Business account or convert a personal account to a business one. This will give you even more ways to connect with your audience through Instagram ads. The platform offers the ability to create ads as photos, videos, carousels, collections, and stories, so you can begin creating ads in the content format you find easiest.

Example of an Instagram ad that's used to drive traffic to websites

3. Pinterest ads

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: Low

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤

Pinterest is the ideal place to reach your potential customers as they visit the platform to consider future activities and purchases. According to Pinterest, 72% of active users say they use it to find new brands and services, and, in another study, 90% of respondents said Pinterest gives them ideas about which products to purchase.

Example of a Pinterest ad that's used to drive traffic to websites

Pinterest is extremely popular among niche groups like home decorating, renovating, landscaping, and DIY crafts and is ideal for businesses hoping to make inroads with these markets.

Pinterest is home to Promoted Pins, a form of paid advertising that pushes your Pins to the top of your customers’ search results, helping you stand out from the crowd. Promoted Pins blend in with the rest of Pinterest’s content, making it a great tool for capturing your customers’ attention and pulling them to your online store.

4. Google Ads

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: High

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

Unlike social media advertising platforms, Google Ads offer a unique opportunity to advertise your products and services directly to people actively searching for them. Emarketer reports that 35% of users purchase a product within five days of searching for it.

Google gives you the option to put your ad in front of users on the world’s two largest search engines: Google and YouTube. Although the platform gives you the ability to increase web traffic and sales, on the downside, it’s a complex platform to navigate for beginners, and you can risk spending a lot of money advertising to the wrong audience.

Google offers three ways to put your ad in front of web browsers; search ads (SERPS), Google Display Network (PPC), and YouTube ads. Google ads operate on an auction basis: the amount you bid on your chosen keywords will determine your placement in relation to other bidders, as well as relevancy to the search term. And if you’ve ever used Google Analytics, you know how powerful some of the insights Google can provide.

5. TikTok Ads

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: Medium

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰

Effort: Medium

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

robyn konchova TikTok ad.

Contrary to popular belief, TikTok isn’t just a platform of silly videos and memes. It continues to be an incredibly powerful platform for advertisers across virtually every demographic. According to Data.Ai, “TikTok ranked #1 among all apps and games by consumer spend in both Q1 2022 and the previous quarter – becoming the first app to ever beat a game in consumer spend in a given quarter — first in Q4 2021, and again in Q1 2022.

Furthermore, global spend in TikTok in Q1 2022 marked the biggest quarter for any app or game ever. The app surpassed $840 million in consumer spend worldwide, a 40% jump from Q4 2021.”

While creating quality content on the platform does require a fair amount of investment, it can be a great platform to add to your marketing arsenal. At Shopify, we see the value in TikTok so much so that we launched TikTok Shopping in partnership with TikTok. With TikTok Shopping, Shopify is the first commerce platform to bring organic product discovery and shopping tabs to TikTok, helping creators and merchants deepen their relationships with consumers

Be sure to check out our complete guide to advertising on TikTok to learn more about how you can get a higher ROI on your advertising efforts.

Engage in conversation on social media

Social media engagement is more than simply sharing a link across Facebook, Twitter, etc., to your online store in the hope it increases website traffic. Social engagement is about encouraging conversations with the right people, responding thoughtfully, and driving excitement and enthusiasm.

6. Get friends and family to share

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: Medium

Time to ROI: Weeks 

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤

When you launch your business, turning to friends and family to get support is a great tactic to generate initial awareness, traffic, or even your first sale (thanks, Mom!). People don’t launch businesses too frequently, so it’ll probably be quite novel within your circle of friends and family to see you start your own online store. Hopefully they’ll be willing to share news about your brand new business endeavor.

Do you know the site Upworthy? Did you know that its initial momentum was generated by friends and family. It set a goal of getting 1,000 Facebook fans by the end of the day it launched. It worked, and that’s part of what gave it the initial traction to take off.

Reach out in a targeted way to your friends and family. You’ll get away with it without risking irritation. On Facebook, talk about your store in an update.

Are there channels for talking to your extended family? Do they plan reunions on an email list? Send a note and tell them about your new store.

Don’t focus your ask on getting them to buy your products. While you could offer them your products for free or at a big discount—they are your friends and family, after all—instead, ask them to share your store with their networks. These are people with whom you have social equity, and you won’t ask for these kinds of favors very often. You’ll have a higher rate of success than reaching out to strangers, and if enough of them share, that may give you sufficient momentum to keep a regular stream of customers.

7. Drive excitement with contests and giveaways

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: High

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

Contests and giveaways are a great way to get more followers on Instagram, increase social media engagement, and drive traffic to your website. When you run a contest or giveaway, 94% of the time users share the promotion immediately after they register. And of the total participants, 62% share the promotion with a friend and suggest they take part too. 

With viral contests, giveaways, and sweepstakes you can quickly drive more traffic to your store by offering exciting prizes in exchange for your customers’ participation. Prizes and rewards are powerful incentives for getting both current and new customers to actually visit your store.

Using tools like Gleam, Woobox, or contest and giveaway apps on the Shopify App Store you can embed giveaways into landing pages or blog posts on your store. These contests can even use social sharing as a method of entry, giving your sweepstakes a higher chance of going viral and spreading around social platforms. Once participants are on your store, you can use different techniques to guide them to your products, like offering discounts or coupons on first purchases.

8. Offer time-sensitive discounts

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: High

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

Offering time-sensitive discounts can be an extremely effective way to get people to take action, generating traffic and increasing sales. Putting an expiration on your discount leverages scarcity, which is a powerful psychological sales trigger.

In the example below, bags and accessories brand Rareform offers a discount that expires after one day. Rareform is a larger brand and can afford a 50% discount and flash sales on its products. If you’ve launched your store recently, consider adding a minimum purchase limit. This can be a smart way to still offer your fans a nice incentive but also make sure you don’t give away the farm.

Example of the brand Rareform's Facebook post to drive traffic to their products during a Father's day promotion

Product discounts aren’t the only offer you can provide customers. If you don’t normally offer free shipping, then occasionally doing so can be a compelling incentive to drive traffic from social media or email marketing campaigns onto your store.

Reach new audiences with influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the process of building relationships with influencers to get your online store in front of new audiences. According to BrightLocal, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.

With influencer marketing, you can harness the creativity and reach of relevant influencers in your industry while leveraging the trust they’ve already formed with their audiences, generating referral traffic to your store.

9. Send free samples to Instagram influencers

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: High

Time to ROI: Weeks

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

Instagram is one of the most effective marketing channels for ecommerce businesses. According to Yotpo, at least 30% of Instagram users have purchased products they discovered on the platform. It’s also a great way to increase awareness of your brand and potentially drive traffic to your store—especially if you know how to target influencers.

Bloggers and social media celebrities like Estee Lalonde are highly trusted by their followers, so getting them to feature your products is an effective, organic tactic for increasing your traffic.

Instagram influencer, Estee Lalonde, sharing a video update on Instagram about the makeup she uses in her routine
Estee Lalonde applying makeup and promoting products she uses, with links to each to drive traffic to websites of her brand partners. Estee Lalonde on Instagram.

There are more reasons to work with an Instagram influencer other than accessing their audience. You can tap into their knowledge of the platform, see what works, and learn to create the best content for that platform. Also, you can work with them as consumers of your brand and get their feedback and perspective, which can help improve your products.

💡 TIP: If you’re yet to find an influencer to work with, find one through an influencer marketing platform.

Here are some questions to ask yourself when looking for an Instagram influencer to work with:

  1. Are they a good brand fit? Ask yourself: “Does the influencer we’re going to work with seem like someone we would want to be a customer, and would they actually use or wear our stuff?”
  2. Do they have good engagement rates? It’s not always about the number of followers—engagement rate is more important. Ideally, an influencer’s engagement rate is anywhere from 2–3%, with multiple comments on each of their posts.

10. Reach out to bloggers and press

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: High

Time to ROI: Weeks

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

It’s hard to grow a business and market it alone. When it comes to selling online, the more connections you have the better—especially if they’re connections with an engaged audience of their own. Having connections who will talk up your product is essential to driving traffic to your site and increasing sales. This is where blogger outreach comes in. 

Blogger outreach is about more than making friends online. It’s a process to help you achieve measurable success in your business. Even if you don’t have a lot of contacts online you can still reach out to people. The key to successful blogger outreach is to offer value and tell bloggers exactly what’s in it for them. Even if they are a good natured individual, asking for help rarely will work, as people are busy and have a million things of their own to do.

Here are some blogger outreach ideas to help you generate traffic:

  • Guest post on other blogs. While growing your own audience, guest posting gives you a way to get in front of someone else’s. Link back to your site where relevant, even if it’s only in the author bio. Guest blogging maybe time consuming, but it is one of the most powerful ways to get your brand on the map and generate backlins, especially when starting out.
  • Do an expert roundup. Seek out experts on a topic and ask them to contribute an idea, such as a tip, recipe, or story, to your blog post. Then, publish a list of all the responses you get back. Let them know when you publish your insight and they’re likely to share it with their audience.
  • Solicit product reviews. Contact bloggers with relevant, engaged audiences and offer to send them your product for free in exchange for an honest review. If you have a great product, they’ll love it and tell everyone.
  • Find affiliates to promote your business. Incentivize other people to drive traffic to your business by using an affiliate program and offering a commission on every sale .
  • Get included in gift guides. The right gift guides can increase sales and traffic to your website. However, inclusion in these guides does not happen randomly and requires some effort, as there is strong competition to get your product listed.
  • Ask Instagram influencers to promote your product. The same techniques for reaching out to bloggers still apply when contacting instagram influencers. Getting the right mention or stylish photo can drive traffic or sales to your store.
  • Get press coverage. If you have a great story or an interesting product that people will want to write about, put it out there! Get in touch with bloggers and journalists who cover businesses like yours and tell them what you’re up to.

You don’t have to target the biggest and most successful people. You have a better chance of getting featured by influencers with a smaller audience because they’re not constantly swarmed with requests. Keep in mind that the loyalty of the audience matters almost as much as its size.

11. Write a blog post featuring influencers and their advice

Tactic type: Short-term

Effort: Medium

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤

This tactic is an expansion of blogger outreach that deserves its own section, as it has worked well for a long time and continues to do so.

The core of the tactic is: write a blog post featuring an influencer and/or their advice, and send it to them in an email or via Twitter in the hope they share it with their audience.

For example, here are two ideas to get started:

  1. Ask influencers their advice on a product. Imagine you’re a cosmetics brand and you’re writing a blog post on what to look for in buying your next foundation. You might want to reach out to influencers that write or record videos of their reviews and ask them what they think is the most important thing to look for when buying a new foundation. You could do this with only one influencer or as many as you see fit.
  2. Create a master list of trustworthy voices in your niche. Potential buyers are always looking for authorities in the space they can trust to get consumer reviews. If your industry has influencers, try writing a blog post that lists the top five, 10, or 20 trustworthy influencers in your niche. By doing this you’ll help potential buyers and start building a good relationship with influencers.

After you’ve produced your blog post, reach back out to the influencer with a link and ask them if they can share it with their audience.

Instead of waiting for an influencer to feature you, you can feature them first. If you’re looking for influencers to connect and build a relationship in your industry with, this might jump-start the process. 

Attract customers with content marketing

Content marketing is about creating interesting, informative, and engaging content to organically attract customers to your online store. From videos and podcasts to guides and ebooks, there are endless opportunities for your business to branch out into the world of content and generate traffic.

Original content helps position your business as an industry thought leader and build your brand. Your business’ content strategy can include anything your customers might find relevant or interesting—don’t limit yourself to content that includes or focuses on your products. Instead, consider any and all topics and resources related to your business that your customers would find useful.

Content marketing also gives your store the chance to conquer search results beyond product and brand keywords. Using free tools like Google Keyword Planner and Keyword.io, you can identify new opportunities for your business to rank in search results and get in front of larger audiences, as well as generate new content ideas.

12. Write blogs to provide information or solve problems

Tactic type: Long-term

Effort: Medium

Time to ROI: Months

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤👤

According to WordPress, the world’s largest blogging platform, each month 409 million people view more than 20 billion blog pages. In the same period of time, WordPress users produce about 70 million new posts, and 77 million new comments.

While there is ample opportunity to reach an audience, if you want to attract relevant buyers and generate traffic back to your store through blogging, you’ll need to be purposeful about your targeting. Solving problems through content while also producing “search engine findable” is the best method for a blog, but it isn’t easy. It’s literally the job description of a good content marketer. Content marketing on a blog involves some customer journey mapping, persona building, keyword research, and content gap analysis.

Successful content marketing on a blog starts with two things:

  1. Figuring out who your ideal audience is. Put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes: what problems do they have that they turn to your store to solve? What interests them outside of your products? What do they do for fun with friends? What are they passionate about? Craft blog content based on the answers to these questions.
  2. Creating content where your ideal audience would want to hangout. Sites that win big have pages with information that people are looking for. To get in front of the right audience, make a list of topics and phrases to target. Ask yourself: If I were looking for this product/service/article, how would I search? What words would I use? What phrases? Getting in the mind of your visitor-to-be is the key to generating quality traffic.

You can also turn your long form content into a webinar to generate additional site traffic. Infographics are also a great way to communicate the message of your content as well.

Don’t go into blogging unprepared. Know your ideal audience, have a strategic plan for gaining mindshare with that audience, and eventually create a new place for them to hang out online.

13. Produce podcasts to reach new audiences

Tactic type: Long-term

Effort: Medium

Time to ROI: Months

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤👤

According to Edison Research, the number of Americans listening to podcasts every week increased 175% over the last five years, with roughly 90 million listening to a podcast each month.

Much like blogging, podcasting gives you the potential to excel in a specific niche, targeting a specific audience.

The problem is that podcasting isn’t necessarily optimized for traffic acquisition. Podcasts are enjoyed at the gym, on the bus, or during a lunchtime walk. Unlike a blog post or social media post, there’s no call to action to click while you’re listening. There is a heavier lift on the listener to remember key points and take additional steps after listening to a prompt or suggestion. 

You have to find other ways to drive traffic and make it as easy as possible for listeners to find information mentioned in the episode, says Shuang Esther Shan. “We stick to three core principles. First, for in app podcast descriptions we provide a concise and accurate summary of the episode with a link to our blog post that accompanies the episode. Second, on our blog, we’ll publish a key summary for easy access and reading as well as the transcripts for our hearing-impaired audience. Finally, if an episode covers a lot of apps, tools, or any other useful resources, we’ll provide a list of relevant resources with each item linked accordingly.”

14. Use video to educate or entertain

Tactic type: Long-term

Effort: High

Time to ROI: Months

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤): 👤👤👤👤👤

While there are various options for hosting videos, YouTube is the most popular and the best channel for generating traffic. It’s also the second-largest search engine in the world. 

The potential audience and numbers you can reach are impressive. According to YouTube’s stats, it has over two billion users (almost one-third of all people on the internet), and on mobile alone reaches more 18–34 year olds than any TV network in the US, with more than 70% of YouTube views. The demographic on the average viewer is wide open. The average YouTube user is not a young, single male.

So, how do you narrow down that massive audience and get the right eyes on your YouTube channel and then back to your store? Here are some of the different types of content your business could be using:

  • Educational content. Teach new skills to build trust with your audience, and if possible, use your product as the centerpiece for solving their problem. Educational webinars are an especially great way to highlight your products features and the pain points it solves. 
  • Storytelling. Inspiring videos that fit into your business’ identity are perfect for communicating your brand’s image and ideals to a wider audience.
  • Entertainment. Fun videos that cater to your audience’s interests is one of the best ways to capture viewers’ attention and focus it onto your products.

Use SEO to increase your store’s discoverability

Can your customers actually find your store online?

When customers search for your products, you want your store to be one of the top results that appears for their search, especially considering a study by marketer Brian Dean that reports 75% of clicks go to the top three results on a search engine results page. That prized position is a key ingredient for generating sustained, qualified website traffic for your online store.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of fine-tuning your website to increase its chances of ranking highly in search results for relevant keywords.

SEO is a fine science and only works when you put time and effort into learning the rules that govern search engines like Google and Bing and apply those rules to the structure and content of your site. You can use popular SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SemRush to help you further understand where you can improve.

15. Write titles that match search intent

Tactic type: Long-term

Effort: Low

Time to ROI: Days

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤):👤👤👤

The meta title is the line search engines show on their results page for search queries.

Image of the search engine results page in Google highlighting what a meta title is

Both meta titles and meta descriptions are attributes that determine how your page appears on a search engine results page. They’re immensely important to getting clicks to pages. Click throughs from search traffic are the lifeblood of organic traffic. They’re one of the essential metrics Google uses to prioritize the order of results.

Google explains, “Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It’s often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.”

Ultimately, it’s the meta title that’s going to help you stand out. This what we recommend you aim for when writing meta titles:

  • Create unique titles for each page.
  • Keep page titles to less than 55 characters.
  • Keep consistent with use of title or sentence case across all your pages.
  • Include your target keyword.
  • Ensure you match the search intent of the query.

16. Add long-tail keyword variations to your pages

Tactic type: Long-term

Effort: Medium

Time to ROI: Weeks

Cost (out of 5 💰): 💰

Traffic potential (out of 5 👤):👤👤👤👤👤

Building a keyword strategy for your ecommerce website is essential for consistently generating organic traffic from search engines. It’s easy to focus on short, high-volume terms, because they’re easier to identify and research, but you might be missing out on page views if you’re not looking at long-tail keywords.

Ahrefs performed a study across 1.9 billion keywords and found that 92% of them get 10 searches per month or fewer. On analysis of their data, while 60% of searches go to keywords with 1,001 or more search volume, these are short-tail keywords that make up only 0.16% of total keywords. This means the remaining 40% of keywords are long-tail keywords that own 99.84% of queries with 1,000 or fewer searches per month.

This is great news because long-tail keywords are easier to rank for and usually get clicks from search engines at a much higher rate than shorter, more generic terms. 

As an example of how you can maximize your exposure to long-tail variations and increase your traffic, let’s pretend we sell the Logitech C310 webcam and want to optimize our page to rank for as many searches as possible. We could use a tool like Google Keyword Tool and make note of all the long-tail variations or, if we really wanted to go in depth, a free tool like keyword.io could unearth many long-tail queries. We’d also want to look at the bottom of the search results where Google lists related searches. The related searches for “Logitech C310” look like this:

Example of using Google suggest searches to input long tail keywords on product pages to drive traffic

Because our Logitech C310 page is optimized for the term “Logitech C310,” we don’t need to insert each long-tail search phrase into the page verbatim. Instead, we want to work the unique variations at the end of “Logitech C310” into our copy to allow the possibility of ranking for it.

Revisiting the related searches from above, we’d want to pick and choose relevant words and add them to our page. For instance, we might include the words “review” and “windows 10.” We can also compare the differences between the C270 and C615 models by using the phrases “vs C270” and “C615.” With all of these newly included modifiers incorporated into the copy, our page has the potential to rank for a wider range of queries.

Not all of the modifiers we uncovered will be applicable. Branded keywords such as “amazon” won’t be useful, and we would likely have a number of modifiers already incorporated. However, more often than not, by looking for long-tail variations we’ll uncover a handful of gems to help increase potential ranking opportunities and ultimately boost our traffic.

Wrapping up

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, over 1,000,000 SKU and more. With a successful track record of over 100,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements. Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses.

If you would like to know more details about us, please contact with us:  www.shopshipshake.co.za

If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://shop.shopshipshake.com/shop/register/business

Article reference: https://www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-increase-website-traffic

Posted on in Build your business, Business, Marketing

Apply These 10 Secret Techniques To Improve Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Retail Store

There are more than half a million new small businesses every year. For a brand-new retailer without an existing customer base, spreading the word and generating sales poses a challenge.

Social media is one way to build buzz and attract customers to your new store. Almost all (91%) retailers use at least two social media channels, so that means there’s a lot of noise—and clutter—users have to cut through.

With a few creative content ideas, strategic paid targeting, and tools to help you track your efforts, social media can be a huge asset to building buzz for your brick-and-mortar store. 

Keep reading to learn:

  • Social media marketing challenges for retailers
  • Retail social media content ideas
  • Buzz-building social media tactics
  • Measuring your social media marketing

Common social media challenges for retailers

Tracking real-life actions taken because of digital initiatives isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Here are five common challenges that retailers face when it comes to social media. If you can relate, you’re not alone.

No existing audience

If you’re new to the scene, you don’t have the luxury of an already-existing audience—you’re starting from scratch.

Britni Johnson faced the challenge firsthand, when she worked with The Summit at Fritz Farm, an open-air retail mecca in Lexington, Kentucky, to promote its grand opening. Most of the brands were making their debut in the area, so local consumers didn’t recognize or know the retailers.

“Most of the community had no idea who [our] brands were,” she says.

We had a large task on our hands with generating excitement and really educating the city of Lexington on why they should be excited.

No ideas for content

A lack of social media content ideas poses yet another challenge, especially if you don’t have an established customer base to inspire new options.

Anna Sullivan, co-founder and strategist of The Creative Exchange, worked with a client, Two Roosters Ice Cream, to promote their grand opening. One of their biggest challenges was a lack of content.

“We didn’t have any pictures of the store,” Sullivan says. They got creative and took pictures of the space, the product, ice cream out in the wild, and Implemented other creative ideas (like using staged shots to gain attention on social channels).

Before you blindly jump into your social media marketing efforts, start with a blueprint. “Plan first with a social media strategy,” Sullivan recommends.

Your strategy should include the following:

  • Goals
  • Audience definition
  • Which social channels you’ll use
  • Brand voice
  • Content suggestions

Your strategy should also touch on how you plan to spread the word. 

Sullivan recommends tagging local publications and newspapers. “A new business opening is easy to get journalists to tweet about, since it represents economic growth,” she says.

No time to dedicate to social media

Opening and managing a new store is busy for even the most seasoned retailer. Social media can easily fall to the bottom of your priority list. After all, what’s more important: sending out a tweet about the products you’re excited to reveal, or making sure said products are artfully merchandised when you open?

Additionally, social media may not be every retailer’s area of expertise. Therefore, it could take you longer to conquer the learning curve and to execute social media promotion.

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Not offering incentives for people to come shop

One mistake retailers often make is not offering an incentive for customers to physically visit their stores, especially if they’re promoting a grand opening or an event. “Why would I go [to a grand opening] if there’s going to be a crowd, and I can come back in two days?” Sullivan says. “I’d rather just wait for there to be no line and no people to shop.”

Matt Hamm, president and owner of Computer Repair Doctor, made sure he didn’t make this mistake when promoting the grand opening of one of his retail locations. He offered people discounts on computer-repair services—plus free pizza and beverages.

Give people a reason to stop by. Make the event significant for the local resident,” he says.

Hamm’s suggestions for other retailers? “If you’re opening a bar/restaurant, give away free drinks or appetizers. Clothing store? Opening weekend discounts on your clothes.”-

Although there’s never a single go-to answer for when to start promoting an opening or event, Sullivan has found in her experience the four to six weeks prior is a good time to start rolling on social media. This gives you enough time to build buzz, create relationships, and generate a following.

For Johnson, the scenario was a bit different, given the phased grand opening of several retail businesses in a single location.

“We did a huge social media campaign in anticipation of the entire center opening this year, starting the social channels from scratch a little over a year ago,” she says. Today, they have nearly 9,000 followers on Instagram and more than 16,000 on Facebook.

If your event is extra buzz-worthy, a prolonged launch strategy could be your best bet.

Small budget

Many retailers don’t have large budgets to invest in social media marketing. But, Sullivan advises that if you’re going to invest, do it at the start. “You want to invest upfront and then DIY it later, instead of the other way around.”

“If you don’t, you run the risk of damaging your brand,” Sullivan says.

It’s generally better to enlist the help of an expert at the forefront. They can lay the blueprint for your social media marketing efforts moving forward, so all you have to do is execute. Starting a social media business account from scratch is extremely challenging, and you could waste a lot of fruitless hours trying to build it up yourself.

Additionally, if you don’t have a budget to promote your social media channels, your initial reach is going to suffer. Hamm learned this through his own experiences.

“Things we’ve tried that didn’t work were posting without a paid boost. Unless you’re paying to promote the post, it won’t have a high enough reach,” he says.

Retail social media marketing content ideas

Capture behind-the-scenes visuals

Behind-the-scenes posts are a common go-to for social media content as they’re easy and authentic to capture—and shoppers love them. “Sneak peeks make [consumers] feel a part of something,” says Sullivan.

Talk about what you’re working on,” she says. “Post about your Home Depot run to get more paint, your first shipment, assembling displays, and setting up inventory.

Basically, Sullivan explains that if you display your emotional involvement behind the launch, consumers are more likely to invest emotionally, too.

Johnson is familiar with this tactic, too. “We mixed in photos from the actual construction of each of the stores, as well as photos from live interviews on-site,” Johnson says.

Anytime you can include a visual, do it. People share video content with friends twice as much as other types of social media posts.

Show your excitement

Whether you’re promoting a grand opening, special event, or normal weekday at your retail store, share that excitement with your audience.

Write heartfelt posts about the history of your store, meaningful moments with customers, vendors, or employees, and land interviews through which you can share your excitement with new audiences on other social channels.

Because of the phased grand opening for The Summit at Fritz Farm, Johnson says, “we created a 30-day countdown campaign that highlighted a different tenant that would be opening on day one.”

Johnson and team also secured interview spots for the founders that were featured on other social media accounts with established audiences.

The more people you can get excited with you, the more likely they’ll spread the word and come shop.

Post community-driven content

Being active in your local community is a great way to connect with customers in your area. Even if it’s not philanthropic community involvement, your passion for the thriving economic growth in the local community is contagious.

Johnson talks about how The Summit at Fritz Farm was a major symbol for economic development in Lexington. “[We shared] photos from retailers with a short story about their brand and why Lex,” she says.

Engage local influencers

Influencer marketing is another great tactic to get your brand in front of new audiences. “[We] worked with bloggers to promote various brands throughout the campaign,” Johnson says of her experience. “We also invited those bloggers to a VIP brunch on the opening day and had them post live stories while exploring.”

Engaging local influencers—much like getting publicity from local publications—gets the word out on social media to new audiences. Those audiences are more likely to trust the influencers they already follow and engage with than a brand-new store that hasn’t yet opened.

Create fun, engaging posts

Not everything has to be promotional. Social media posts that are just for fun can inspire engagement, relationships, and positive sentiment towards your brand.

Sullivan recommends posts with fun facts or games like fill-in-the-blank activities. Other creative social post ideas could include challenges to your audience to caption a photo, trivia, or games where followers have to guess what’s in the picture.

Buzz-building social media tactics

Create a Facebook event

One mistake Sullivan says she sees is retailers who neglect to use Facebook events for special openings or events.

“People get notifications and reminders,” she says. But it’s not just for increasing attendance; it’s also helpful for you. “Facebook events give you more direct numbers and insights, and you can calculate an attendance rate.”

Denver-based Trill Evolutions had a grand opening event, and they used Facebook events to spread the word.

They took it up a notch, though, and asked for customer information in exchange for additional discounts. Now they have information to send retargeted social ads, text messages, and emails to their audience in the future.

Giveaways and contests

Giveaways and contests provide another way to link the digital engagement of social media and the physical engagement of your brick-and-mortar store.

Sullivan and Two Roosters hosted a sidewalk chalk art contest for free ice cream. This not only created some fun engagement on their social channels and provided plenty of eye-catching content to post; it also enticed their followers to visit their storefront.

Giveaways and contests are always great ideas to generate excitement and make people want to follow you.

Use hashtags

Why use hashtags? “A hashtag immediately expands the reach of your tweet beyond just those who follow you, to reach anyone interested in that hashtag phrase or keyword,” according to Buffer.

Create a branded hashtag to promote your store or event, and tap into local, trending hashtags to spread the word. Using a branded hashtag can help you build buzz and recognition around your brand and help you track your efforts (more on that later). 

Using existing hashtags can help you jump in on conversations that are already happening. Don’t use too many, though. More than two, and engagement could significantly drop.

Paid social advertising

After you’ve created and populated your social media pages with organic content, run paid ads. “This helps you get in front of the right audience,” Sullivan says. With social ads, you can choose who you want to serve the ad to, and this includes geographic parameters (especially helpful for grand opening events).

Hamm has firsthand experience with how much paid social advertising can amplify your efforts. He was able to reach nearly 7,500 people with a single paid boosted post—for just $34.02.

Other paid social ideas include Snapchat filters. “This is especially good for customers who need something to do in line,” Sullivan says.

Interested in launching ads for your retail store?

In addition to paid social ads, you could set up Shopping Ads on Google to boost your store’s sales.

Engage with your followers

A major part of social media marketing involves community management. Remember, social media isn’t a one-way conversation. Brands need to interact with their followers, hear their feedback, and answer their questions.

Measuring your social media marketing

Every once in a while—monthly or quarterly, per se—it’s important to analyze the impact of your social media marketing efforts. This will help you adjust strategies moving forward and learn insights about your customer base and business.

As we said before, tracking real-life actions taken because of digital initiatives isn’t always the easiest thing to do. But there are some helpful tools that can give you some insight.

Of course, you can calculate the attendance rate from your Facebook event and look at your branded hashtags.

“One reason the branded hashtags are a good idea,” Sullivan points out, “is because you can track the use of those hashtags later.” This provides direct engagement and reach numbers.

Look at qualitative data as well, such as individual interactions on social media, or customers who have come into your store and referenced the Facebook event or Instagram post about the event.

There are many paid and free social media analytics tools you can use, too:

  • Brand24: This paid tool is great for social listening. You can use it to find out what people are saying in your area, about your industry, about your store and products, and about your event.
  • Awario: This is a more affordable social listening tool that does much the same as Brand24 but with fewer features.
  • Canva: This is a free tool that’s helpful for content creation. Create graphics and collages, add text to images, and make other creative visuals to accompany your posts. Pay for the full version to access additional features.
  • Hootsuite: This tool is a social media post scheduling tool. You can also use it to engage with your audience. It will save you time to schedule social media posts in advance, rather than signing in every time you want to post something. There is both a free and a paid version.
  • Buffer: Much the same as Hootsuite, Buffer is a social media post scheduling tool that’s also available in a free and a paid version.
  • Facebook Pages Manager app: Especially handy for the entrepreneur on-the-go, this app will enable you to manage your Facebook business page from your phone.

Grand opening FAQ

What is a grand opening?

A grand opening is a celebration marketing the opening of a brand new store, whether a completely new store or a brand’s new location.

How do you promote the opening of a store?

There are several ways to promote the opening of a new store. Put out ads and billboards. Host an event. Share event information on social media. Hold contests and giveaways. Work on building up as much foot traffic as you can for your very first day open.

How do you introduce your business to social media?

Start by choosing and branding your social media platforms. Put together enticing content that grabs attention and draws potential customers in. Then announce your launch or grand opening in order to increase the number of people that show up.

What type of social media posts get the most engagement?

Some of the most engaging social media post types include short-form videos, behind-the-scenes content, and Instagram stories using interactive stickers. While you’ll want to sprinkle in other types of content in your grand opening social media strategy, be sure to focus around these three types.

Wrapping up

We at ShopShipShake have been working with businesses like yours with fulfilling experiences. We offer one-stop services, including an efficient supply chain, over 10 thousand of China’s suppliers, and more. With a successful track record of over 20,000 clients, we are sure to deliver your orders requirements. Let’s get in touch to build, sustain, and grow your businesses.

If you would like to know more details about us, please contact with us:  www.shopshipshake.co.za

If you are interested in cooperating with us. Please register on: https://bit.ly/3ks0m1M

Article source: https://www.shopify.com/za/retail/social-media-marketing-how-to-build-buzz-for-your-retail-store-grand-opening