It goes without saying that traffic is vital to your online business. Shopify is optimized to sell your products, but generating high-quality, reliable traffic takes more than an effective eCommerce platform. Without a comprehensive marketing strategy you will likely be wasting your time and money trying to figure out what is effective for your target audience. If you find yourself struggling to make sales, the following strategies can help drive more traffic to your Shopify store.
Everything Starts with a Thorough Market Analysis
New companies often fall into the mistake of identifying one or two competitors and imitating what they do. This is by far the most important strategy to avoid. Doing a thorough market analysis must be at the top of your list if you want to grow traffic to your store, because it’s vital for providing a comprehensive perspective on how customers react and are driven to buy from you instead of someone else. Furthermore, you can identify what differentiates you from competitors in both strengths and weaknesses.
Analyzing Your Audience
Before looking at your competitors and their products, it’s important to first take an in-depth look at your audience and their concerns and needs. After you complete your research, you may choose to go one step further and create personas or a customer journey map, though this is not absolutely necessary.
With audience research, you will find out who you should be targeting, and the easiest way to find them is look for their online communities. We suggest starting with Reddit. It’s a collection of thousands of niche forums where people freely discuss their interests and passions with like-minded members. By reading through their conversations, it’s possible to collect information that helps you formulate what your audience’s likes, dislikes, and thought processes are. If you can’t find a relevant audience on Reddit, you will need to search Google and Facebook for forums related to your industry or products.
Important: What you don’t want to do is to get caught up in actively promoting your products in the forums during your research or inadvertently making yourself known to the groups by asking questions. Forums are usually very protective of their space and don’t like businesses covertly coming in to extract audience data or sell products. If you’re caught doing this, you risk having your target audience foster negative feelings toward your brand. So, please be careful with how you interact and be respectful of their “sacred” space.
Approaching Current Customers
If you already have some traffic and sales, but are looking to grow your business even more, then you’re in an excellent position to learn about your audience through your existing customers.
The best way to carry this out is by collecting customer feedback with basic user experience surveys, product reviews, and asking frank questions to hear what their hesitations and complaints are concerning your brand, products, and customer service.
You can use pop-ups that ask multiple choice questions when someone exits your site before making a purchase, send email questionnaires that ask customers to rate different aspects of your store and shopping experience, or directly interact with high-converting customers by providing them with a free gift or large discount in return for helping you create a persona that matches the audience that they are a part of (through questionnaires, testimonials, or phone conversations).
Analyzing Your Competitors
The purpose of a competitor analysis is to collect and analyze information about rival businesses. By doing this you can learn what makes your products unique, as well as learn what your competitors are doing right and what opportunities you can take advantage of.
Unless you’re selling in a highly specialized industry, you should be able to find 5–10 well-established competitors to compare your business against. When doing your research, it’s also good to branch out beyond direct competitors and look at companies that serve the same audience but with different products. You may find insights with indirect competitors that your direct competitors aren’t able to provide.
If possible, you want to collect your competitors’ basic information, including traffic sources, average number of monthly visitors, and target countries. The easiest way to find this information is with a paid research tool like SimilarWeb. As you do your research, collect your information in a table that lets you easily compare:
- Products and services
- Pricing
- Perceived strengths
- Perceives weaknesses
- Uniqueness amongst competitors
We also suggest that you go even deeper to understand your competitors by comparing each potential element of their online business. Again, create a table for easy comparison and look for:
- Blogs
- Promotional videos (general and product specific)
- Visual content
- Product descriptions
- FAQs
- Buying guides
- Newsletters
- Pay-per-click ads (Google Ads and social media ads)
Now it’s time to go beyond your competitors’ sites and look at their social media. Find out which platforms they’re promoting their blog articles and products on and analyze how they connect with their audience.
- Voice
- Interactions with followers
- Frequency
- Types of content
- Influencer collaborations
Doing these three things will give you an idea of what your competitors are doing to bring in traffic. There is a good chance that you will find weaknesses that you can exploit to steal customers away or discover untapped audiences that have little or no competition.
Analyzing Your Competitors’ Products
While it may be possible to get an idea of what your competitors offer by reviewing their websites and social media, the most effective way to understand how your competitors work is through first-hand knowledge. Once you have completed your competitor analysis, we suggest picking a few of the strongest and going through the complete buying process if you have the funds to do so.
You can gain a lot of insights if you record and compare each step of the process.
- Purchasing: What is the process like for adding products to the cart, checking out, email confirmations, and delivery confirmations?
- Shipping costs: What options and costs are available?
- Delivery: What does the package look like and what contents are included inside? Be sure to take pictures for your records.
- Product testing: Does the product live up to how the competitor promotes it? What are the product’s pros and cons?
Tip: If you document this process in detail, it’s possible to use the information to create effective comparison articles for your Shopify blog.
Search Engine Optimization
In today’s content-saturated world, product listing ads like Google Ads and Facebook Ads are generally looked down upon by consumers, made evident by the popularity of ad blocker apps. On top of that, pay-per-click advertising has become saturated with competitors, which is resulting in higher per-click costs.
Search engine optimization (SEO) on the other hand, is mostly within your control. The purpose of SEO is to understand the algorithms that search engines use to rank web pages and design everything in your site to align with what those algorithms are looking for. If done right, a one-time investment in optimizing your site can generate high-quality traffic for years to come compared with paid ads that require a consistent monthly budget.
While there are a lot of old-school SEO tactics floating around, it’s important to differentiate between what can help your site and what can harm it. White-hat SEO techniques are any optimization that is done to improve your site’s performance while following the search engine’s (e.g., Google’s) terms of service, including:
- Creating high-quality content
- Speeding up site loading times
- Incorporating mobile friendliness
- Making your site easy to navigate
On the other hand, black-hat SEO techniques that once were very effective in getting sites to rank now can potentially cause your business to be delisted from search engines. Tactics include:
- Paid link building
- Keyword stuffing
- Invisible text
- Dishonest redirects
As technology advances and search engine algorithms get “smarter,” there is a big shift toward focusing on site speed and site structure. While Shopify is effective at both, there are definitely ways to optimize your site further, such as making sure that all images are the right size.
Google offers an excellent tool for diagnosing potential site speed issues called PageSpeed Insights. You can use it as a starting point for making your site faster, but try not to get hung up on everything that the tool suggests. Some optimizations may be beyond your abilities while others may have a minimal effect.
Other ways to apply SEO best practices are to:
- Research and insert relevant keywords
- Write content that answer your customer’s needs
- Optimize product pages including meta titles and descriptions
- Minimize duplicate content
- Focus on the mobile experience
Learn More: SEO Actions You Can Take in Shopify to Make Your Site Rank
Content Marketing
Content marketing has long been a primary traffic source for online businesses. As they say, “content is king.” To achieve traffic through content marketing, you must be prepared to produce top-quality, valuable information that rouses your visitors’ interest in what you’re selling.
Content Marketing can be anything from well-crafted, SEO-optimized blog articles to social media campaigns, podcasts, videos, infographics, or whitepapers. It must be strictly relevant to your target demographic, showcasing how your products can benefit their needs and resolve any problems they are suffering from. With each piece of content, you can continue to develop the connection with your audience and provide new entry points to your business.
A good strategy isn’t simply about pushing the products you sell. Think creatively and show how you can offer value-added solutions that improve your audience’s experience at different stages in their online shopping journey.
Learn more: How to Grow Sales Through Organic Traffic on Your Shopify Blog
Social Media
The majority of your potential customers will be on social media in one form or another. While large eCommerce organizations may have the funding to develop multi-channel social media strategies, it’s better that small-to-medium startups focus on one social media platform in the beginning, either Facebook or Instagram.
Facebook boasts well over 2 billion active users, making it the most reachable platform on the planet for sharing blog posts and product promotions. Facebook alone contributes two-thirds of all social media visits and 85% of all orders from social media sites to Shopify stores.
Shopify and Facebook have a partnership that lets you integrate your store into your Facebook shop page. Additionally, you can create location or niche-targeted ad campaigns along with tailored ads and call-to-action buttons that link directly to your Shopify store. You can even retarget Facebook users who have previously visited your store with auto-generated relevant ads featuring products that they looked at during their previous visit.
Another social media phenomenon is Instagram. It has become a goldmine for eCommerce businesses with close to a billion active users. Shopify offers seamless integration with Instagram for a greater reach, higher visibility, and enhanced sales.
Contests and Giveaways
After reading everything above, you may be thinking to yourself “Hmm… all of these strategies have potential but how long will it take to see results?” If you need an immediate boost in sales, contests and giveaways are effective strategies. They can increase traffic to your store exponentially because of how powerful of an emotional incentive that “getting something for nothing” creates within your customers.
The Shopify App Store offers a variety of apps designed specifically for creating and running a successful promotion, although we recommend using Gleam Competitions.
Gleam Competitions
Price: Free, $49–399 / month to gain access to participant data and unlock more app features
Gleam Competitions lets you build shareable competitions within minutes using its drag-and-drop promotion builder. Then choose from hundreds of options and actions you want customers to take before embedding the competition on your site, in pop-ups, or across your social media platforms. It’s free to use, but by paying a monthly fee, you can collect valuable data about everyone who participated.
Influencer Marketing
Influencers are a marketing trend used to generate instant bursts of traffic and trigger sales. All it takes is reaching out and collaborating with credible influencers within your particular market. If you’re interested in trying this method of promotion, we suggest simplifying your research by using a tool like Socialbakers to identify influencers within your area of interest.
With that being said, it’s vital to do your research before collaboration. Influencers are easy to find but to achieve real outcomes, you need to inquire about their fan-following, other brands they’ve collaborated with in the past, and the quantifiable results of those campaigns.
Influencer marketing can provide quick and easy sales, and even be very cost-effective when using micro influencers — simply send some free samples of your product in return for a shout out to your Shopify store.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing can also be an effective strategy for stimulating sales numbers. It has already been adopted by major players in the online sales industry. Affiliate marketing basically utilizes the reach of built-in audiences of brands, product reviewers, bloggers, and influencers. Those partners promote your products to their audiences with the help of referral links to your store, and in return, you compensate them with a cut of each sale — either a percentage or a fixed dollar amount.
There are many Shopify affiliate marketing apps to brokerage such partnerships. You can choose from a wide variety, with most notable apps being Refersion, Enlistly, and Affiliatly. These apps offer a platform to track the orders made from referral links with dashboards that enable you to manage and analyze your promotions.
Discovering the right people for your affiliate program is as crucial as creating the promotion campaign and choosing the target audience. You have to be prepared to do your research before jumping into action. Never automatically accept an affiliate marketer’s request to join your program until you have vetted their websites and confirmed that they are in line with your target audience.
With the Right Strategy, Traffic Will Come to Your Shopify Store
Shopify can help you build a powerful eCommerce site, but it’s up to you to create an effective strategy to properly engage your audience and drive traffic to your store.
It’s important to design your marketing strategy so that it’s a balance of short-term gains and long-term goals. We suggest starting with a small monthly budget for Facebook Ads, which allows you to quickly target niche demographics and interests. As you do this, begin to implement as many SEO techniques as possible, which can take months to begin seeing results.
Every method requires a steep learning curve, and there may come a time when you feel like you have wasted time or money, but that is all part of the learning process. By setting time aside to regularly educate yourself on eCommerce marketing strategies, you will be better prepared to face any obstacles that come your way. With unprecedented market competition and ever-evolving user preferences, it becomes indispensable to implementing the best possible sales and marketing strategies to operate a flourishing business. For more tips on increasing traffic, be sure to read our guide to Promoting Your Shopify Store.
