A great marketing strategy is critical to a successful Shopify store. Without it, your ecommerce business will not be able to reach its full potential. Read on if you need help developing a marketing plan that will work for your store.
In this article, I’ll cover the four essential elements of a great marketing strategy and some tips on executing them successfully for a Shopify ecommerce store.
Key insights
- A well-researched and comprehensive marketing strategy is essential for maximizing your Shopify store’s growth potential. Winging it is not an option in today’s competitive ecommerce landscape.
- Before diving into tactics, invest time upfront (4-6 weeks) in researching and building your strategy. Analyze your current performance, research competitors, gather customer insights, and identify the most impactful opportunities to shape your strategy.
- Effective Shopify store marketing strategies are rooted in SMART goals – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound objectives that provide a clear target to work towards.
- Your strategy document should define the high-level approach, the supporting tactics you’ll employ, and the specific actions required to implement those tactics. Assign clear owners and deadlines for each action.
- While your overarching strategy may be an annual plan, stay agile and regularly review and adjust your campaigns and tactics. Use analytics data to optimize based on actual performance feedback.
- SEO, PPC ads, email, content marketing, and social media are often the highest-impact marketing channels for Shopify stores. However, every store’s ideal marketing mix varies based on its niche, audience, and budget. Invest in the channels that best fit your specific situation.
Let’s take a look at the four key elements:
Investigation
A great marketing strategy will differ for each Shopify store because there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach. You’ll need to take a look at your strengths and weaknesses and the competition to find what works best for your business. To find out these strengths and weaknesses, you will need to do some investigating.
The investigation phase of an ecommerce marketing strategy is one of the most critical steps. This stage will define how well your online store performs against your competitors and what you can do to make it better.
Before planning out your store’s marketing strategy, research how you are currently doing in the ecommerce market; what are your strengths and weaknesses? Where does your Shopify store excel? Are there any areas that need improvement?
A vital part of the investigation phase is customer research. How is your customer feedback? Identify who your target audience is, where they spend their time online and what problems they are trying to solve. Spend time identifying your customers’ journey when they are looking to purchase products from online stores like yours.
When you have thoroughly completed your customer research, it’s time to look at what your competitors offer, their pricing, and their marketing approach. What gives your competitors their edge in your niche? Are they innovative? Do they provide excellent customer service? Is the quality of their products exceptional compared to the competition?
Take a look at the overall ecommerce market in which you will be competing. Are there any Shopify updates or changes that could impact your marketing campaigns? Perhaps there are economic issues that could provide an opportunity. The lockdowns due to COVID-19 are a prime example. Businesses poised to sell online profited greatly once everyone was in lockdown. This presented an excellent marketing opportunity for businesses able to sell and deliver their products through Shopify.
During this phase, you should benchmark your current performance. Identify your most important metrics, such as sales and revenue, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, traffic by source, conversion by source, social engagement metrics, and other metrics essential to your Shopify business.
There are several marketing tools that you may find helpful for this:
- SWOT analysis can help you plan out a high-level view of your Shopify business.
- The Business Model Canvas will give you an easy-to-reference overview of your Shopify store, which will help to ensure that you do not miss the critical parts of your organization while creating the marketing strategy.
- PESTLE analysis can provide a deeper insight into your industry and ecommerce market.
- The Value Proposition Canvas can help you to match up offerings to your customers’ needs.
- You can use the 7 Ps marketing mix to dig deeper into your business and offering.
The research phase of a marketing strategy for a Shopify store takes a lot of time and effort to complete. However, after the research has been done correctly, planning and implementing new strategies for your online store will be much easier.
Goals and objectives
After you have collected all relevant information about your store and the ecommerce market, it is time to define your goals and objectives. You should ensure that most of your objectives are SMART, which stands for:
- Specific – Your goals should be specific with regard to what is being improved and by how much.
- Measurable – Your store’s goals should be measurable. For example, do not set an objective such as “Our Shopify store will do better,” as that is a somewhat nebulous aim. Instead, identify criteria that you can measure that correlate with improving your business.
- Achievable – Is the goal achievable for your store? For example, expecting a 100% conversion rate is not feasible, nor is planning to gain 100% market penetration in your ecommerce niche.
- Realistic – Your goal should be realistic with your Shopify store’s resources. So, setting a goal of publishing three 1,500-word articles a day for your Shopify blog is unrealistic if you have a part-time copywriter and do not intend to hire more people to achieve your objective.
- Time-bound – Make sure your goals have a deadline by which they need to be achieved.
These criteria help you know what you must achieve with your ecommerce marketing strategy.
Not all of your objectives need to be SMART, but this approach does help to stop you from setting poor goals. For example, this isn’t a useful objective for a Shopify store: “We will increase online sales.” How much would you increase online sales? By when? Is it online sales of any of your Shopify products, or should it be specific ones? With your current resources, is it even achievable to increase your sales?
Strategy, Tactics and Actions
Once you have defined your store’s objectives, you need to move on to the strategy, tactics, and actions phase.
Strategy is the high-level direction your business needs to take to achieve its objectives. For example, if you aim to increase sales by 40% over the next 12 months, your strategy might be to increase your organic search traffic and traffic from social media. The ‘why’ might be that you already have a lot of content on your Shopify site, but the potential of that content has not yet been maximized for search and social.
The tactics are the next level down from the strategy. Continuing the above ecommerce example, your tactics may be:
- Optimize existing Shopify product pages and blog posts to ensure they are targeting relevant keywords
- Create social media content based on existing product pages and blog posts
- Create new content based on keyword research
- Build a presence/profile on social media sites that your target customers use
The actions are yet another level down from tactics. Here, you will define specific steps that are needed to execute the tactics as part of the strategy. For example:
- Update title tags of Shopify product pages and blog posts
- Write meta descriptions for content
- Add internal links to content on important landing pages
- Fix broken links within your Shopify store
- Register profiles on relevant social media platforms for your brand
- Design cover images for the social profiles that align with your Shopify store’s branding
- Build a calendar of content to go out on social media promoting your products
You need to make sure that a specific person or team is named as responsible for completing each action and that there is a deadline.
Setting actions is vital so everybody knows what they must achieve for your store and who has to do it. Ecommerce marketing strategies can fail without an action plan because key objectives are not met, and there is no clear road map for achieving these goals.
Results and analysis
The final phase is analyzing the results of your marketing campaign. Did you achieve the objectives you set for your Shopify store? If not, why not? What worked well for your Shopify SEO and why?
This stage is crucial as it helps you identify what to change so that your future ecommerce marketing campaigns perform better.
For this step, use all relevant data sources, such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, brand monitoring tools, and sales data from your Shopify dashboard. Use whichever metrics help you determine whether your campaign was successful.
Note that you do not have to wait until the deadlines you set for your store’s SMART objectives. You can monitor your campaigns as they are running, and if something appears to be underperforming, feel free to make adjustments to improve it. You shouldn’t be wasting any of your Shopify marketing budget unnecessarily.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to develop a marketing strategy for my Shopify store?
Developing a thorough marketing strategy takes time. Expect to spend at least 2-4 weeks on the investigation phase to gather data, analyze your store’s current performance, research competitors, and identify opportunities. Setting goals, defining your strategy and tactics, and planning actions can take another 1-2 weeks. So in total, budget 4-6 weeks to build a comprehensive strategy.
How often should I review and update my Shopify store’s marketing strategy?
Your marketing strategy should be a living document that evolves as your store grows and the ecommerce landscape changes. Plan to do a full strategy review at least once per year. However, you should monitor results monthly and make tactical adjustments to your campaigns as needed based on performance. Being agile and adapting to what’s working is key.
What are the most important marketing channels for Shopify stores?
The most impactful channels vary by niche and target customer, but in general, the top channels for Shopify marketing tend to be:
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) ads like Google Shopping
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing (blogs, videos, etc)
- Influencer marketing
The right mix for your store depends on your products, audience, and budget. Your initial investigation phase will help identify the highest-opportunity channels.
Do I need to hire an agency or consultant to help with my Shopify store marketing strategy?
Many store owners develop and execute their marketing in-house, especially in the beginning. However, working with an experienced ecommerce marketing consultant or agency can save you time and help drive better results faster. If you have the budget, consider bringing in an expert to guide your strategy and execution.
Conclusion
The key elements of a great ecommerce marketing campaign are the investigation, objectives, strategy, tactics and actions, and results phases. I know that marketing for a Shopify store can be a challenge. If you need help getting started on your Shopify strategy or implementing one already in place, I can help you. I know what it takes to develop an effective Shopify SEO or content marketing plan for any size ecommerce business, so don’t hesitate to reach out if this article has inspired you to change your approach to your Shopify store!
Contact me at hello@emiquent.com to learn more about my Shopify SEO and content marketing services.
