Hey everyone, this is Patrick from code that converts and in today's post we're gonna be discussing one of the most commonly googled questions about Shopify which is does Shopify help you with marketing?
Normally I'd like to focus on topics related to improving the look and feel of your Shopify store, so you can:
- boost your engagement
- improve your customer's experience on your site
- increase your sales
But let's be real for a second.
If you don't have an effective plan on how you're gonna start to market your Shopify store, it really doesn't matter how good the store looks or how easy it is to use.
If you have no traffic, you get no sales, you have no data to go off of and it's just not the place where you want to be.
Now with all that being said, Shopify does come with a lot of tools to help you figure out what's best when it comes to marketing your Shopify store.
Now, every Shopify merchant is different, but you need to come up with an effective way for you to market your store so that you can keep making progress toward getting better engagement and getting more sales.
If you prefer to watch instead of read, you can check out the video below.
Basic Overview of The Different Kinds of Marketing
I'm sure you know already, but Shopify is a full-service platform that allows you to easily set up an online store and manage an e-commerce business. Naturally, this means that it does give you access to tools as well as educational content that you can use to figure out how to start marketing your Shopify store.
But before we can start looking at some of the marketing tools you can use, I think it's important for me to discuss the different categories of online marketing so you can start to think about what will work best for your business.
Online marketing generally falls into five categories:
- content marketing
- social media marketing
- paid advertising
- email marketing
- search engine optimization
I'm going to briefly describe each of these categories as I currently understand them so you can get a sense of what they are.
Content Marketing
A great example of content marketing is this blog post you're reading right now. Shopify merchants, like you, are my target audience and my goal with this post was to create content that can help you solve a problem.
So for you and your Shopify store, when you're thinking about doing content marketing, you're gonna want to think to yourself, what's the problem that my audience has and how can I create some content to help them solve it?
So just to give you a different example, let's say you run an online clothing store on Shopify and you want to make some content for your audience to try to build brand awareness.
One thing you can do is create content about the newest and hottest fashion trends of 2023. There are probably people in your audience that would like to update their wardrobe, so they will probably find your content useful.
They may consume the content and then recognize your brand the next time they see you post something, which can eventually lead them to buy something from your Shopify store.
Content can generally 3 different forms:
- Video Content
- Written Content
- Audio Content
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing is all about creating content to reach potential buyers on different social media platforms. Just to illustrate an example, let's use the clothing store example again.
Let's say you launched a new line of products for your clothing store and you want to do a photo shoot and post the photos on Instagram to try to get some engagement from your audience.
You can take the photos used for the shoot to create a bunch of organic Instagram posts and Instagram reels that can make your audience excited to visit your site and get familiar with the new products you just added.
Some popular social media marketing platforms are:
- Tiktok
- YouTube
Now keep in mind that each of these platforms does well with different types of content but anyone that regularly makes online purchases uses one of these platforms.
So incorporating even just one of these platforms will help you boost traffic to your Shopify store.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is what happens whenever you send marketing messages to people on your email list. Let's go with the clothing store example again.
Imagine your clothing store has an email opt-in form on its home page that offers potential customers 25% off their first order in exchange for their email.
Once people start signing up for that list, you now have access to their email addresses and you will want to send them specific marketing messages straight to their email.
The great part about having an email list is that you own it!
Whenever you post content to platforms outside of your site, you no longer have complete control over your content. You now have to think about following specific rules and guidelines to ensure that your content is ok to post on these platforms.
But when you have an email list, you can send your audience whatever you want.
Your content may eventually be taken off of external platforms, but an email list can never be taken from you. So when thinking about your marketing strategy, you should consider building an email list as you build your brand.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a way for businesses to get their products or services in front of more people. It's like paying for a little extra boost to get your stuff seen by the right people.
Imagine you're a Shopify merchant, you can use paid advertising to drive more traffic to your store, increase sales, and grow your business.
For example, you can use paid advertising to target specific audiences, like people who live in certain areas or are in specific age groups. This way you're reaching people who are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Plus, paid advertising can help you increase brand awareness, which can lead to more organic traffic and sales.
Another great thing about paid advertising is that it allows you to test different products and marketing strategies. You can see what works and what doesn't, and use that information to make smart business decisions, like which products to stock and how to market them. All this leads to increased profits and growth.
In short, paid advertising is a powerful tool for Shopify merchants. It can help you reach more customers, increase sales, and grow your business, all while having fun testing different strategies.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization or SEO for short is very closely linked to content marketing because it involves you optimizing whatever content you create or optimizing different parts of your website for search engines.
So again with the clothing store example, imagine you have been running ads to present your brand to potential customers and get sales. That has been working very well for your business but you're tired of just relying on ads to get traffic to your store.
SEO can help you a lot in this case because if you do it properly, your Shopify store will start to show up whenever people type in specific search terms in search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
If you decide to focus on some sort o SEO strategy, your store has a higher chance of popping up whenever a potential customer is actively searching for something related to your niche.
SEO can be used to optimize specific pages on your site as well as to optimize the content you create which will lead to increased traffic, which means you can get free organic traffic without having to pay for it or do a lot of additional work.
There's a lot of work upfront to make sure everything is search engine optimized. But once it is you'll definitely reap the rewards of having gone through that process.
There's no best way to do marketing for your Shopify store, it just has to do with what works best for your store and specific niche.
How can Shopify Help You With Marketing
As a platform, all Shopify was made to do is help you quickly set up and manage an e-commerce business. It wasn't made to handle all of your marketing needs out of the box.
So instead Shopify decided to create a third-party app marketplace that allows independent developers and outside companies to create apps to add a bunch of new features and functionalities to Shopify stores.
Naturally, there are a lot of apps specifically built to help you with different kinds of marketing. These apps help your Shopify store integrate with different social media platforms and e-commerce software tools that will allow you to quickly implement and scale whatever marketing strategy you would like to try for your store.
Shopify was even kind enough to write an extensive blog post about the different marketing tools that it recommends for different strategies and created an entire platform called Shopify Learn to help Shopify merchants learn about how they can get better at marketing their Shopify store.
Don't worry, I'll provide links to all these resources at the end of this article.
But before I do, I wanted to talk about a couple of things:
- What marketing problems Shopify can't help you with
- What can you do if you realize you need more help with your marketing
What Shopify Can't Help You With
If you ever need to reach out to Shopify support, they have a bunch of helpful support agents that will be more than happy to help you out with whatever issue you have on your store.
But it's important to understand that they can't help you figure out how different marketing tools work or what marketing strategy will work best for your store.
They understand how Shopify works as a platform but they are not marketing experts!
They can send you links to Shopify documentation or Shopify content about marketing, but they cannot go in and help you learn how to market your store.
What If You Need More Help With Marketing
Let's say you don't wanna have to deal with marketing right now and you just want someone else to do it. If you can afford to get help with marketing your Shopify store, that's probably a good idea for you.
You might want to consider hiring someone to help you run part or all of your marketing efforts for you.
If sounds interesting to you, there are two places that I recommend you go to look for some help.
On both of these platforms you can look for Shopify experts to help you with any part of your Shopify business. So if you need some help with marketing or anything else, I recommend that you check out one of these platforms.
Just make sure that before you hire anyone off of this platform, you make sure the person or company has good reviews from other people that have worked with them and a portfolio of work they have done in the past.
That way you can ensure you are working with an expert instead of someone who is new to the platform.
Additional Resource
As promised I will put a few more resources below that you can use to help you figure out which marketing strategy is best for you.
