Shopify is one of the most used eCommerce platforms in the world, in part because of how simple it is to launch a new store. Over one million merchants are using Shopify worldwide calculated in October 2019. 

However, opening a Shopify website is nothing if it has no visitors. Or, your website is getting visitors, but they’re not buying anything. Now, you start marketing your site, your products. 

So, here are seven proven marketing strategies that you can use for your Shopify sites. 

What is a marketing strategy?

You can’t succeed in your business if you have no strategies for what you’re going to do. 

Jim John once said:

“Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy. You might know how to succeed, but more importantly, what’s your plan to succeed?”

If you want to get more traffic and sales, you need to roll up your sleeves to do some effective marketing of your new products or services. More importantly, you need a strategy at first. 

So what’s a marketing strategy?

A marketing strategy refers to an overall business’s plan for reaching potential consumers and turning them into the final customers who purchase products or services from a company.

A marketing strategy includes the company’s value proposition, key brand messaging, data on target customers, and other high-level elements.

As marketing is a joint effort that collaborates with all aspects of a business from creative, sales, financial, and even technical departments, a marketing strategy helps everyone in a company work in harmony. It analyzes all aspects of your sales activities so that you will know the necessary details to achieve your bottom-line goals and increase sales. 

Marketing strategy is different from the marketing plan. The purpose of a marketing plan is to detail the specific marketing activities and marketing initiatives with particular timetables.

While a company conducts a marketing plan within a particular period of time, its marketing strategy should be a long-term and forward-looking approach to planning, which holds a consistent effort to achieve a competitive advantage. 

Why should you have a marketing strategy for your Shopify store?

Whether you’re a start-up retailer or an established brand in your field, developing a marketing strategy is vital to your business. The right marketing strategy can fuel your business growth. Otherwise, without one, your efforts to attract customers are likely to be haphazard and inefficient. 

In particular, a marketing strategy can benefit your business in various ways. 

More efficient distribution

Marketing is not standalone; it covers all aspects of your business. Hence, when your marketing in effect, you’ll acquire all the valuable information such as who your target audiences are, where they come from, and what price range you can offer. 

All these details help you determine the most effective distribution channels, costs, and other relevant elements. A sound marketing strategy lets you know your target customers, their shopping behaviors. You can rely on where customers usually spend their time online to expose your products. 

For example, you’re selling cosmetics that tailor to the young demographic; it’s wiser to make purchasing available for mobile and tablets with online payment via popular methods like credit cards or PayPal. 

Distributing products and services in a way catering to customers’ preferences is useful to boost sales and improve customer loyalty. 

Build brand image

Marketing strategy helps you establish a brand image, which is a powerful weapon of any company in today’s cutthroat business environment. Regardless of your industry, you need a rock-solid brand identity to stand out among competitors and capture customers’ attention. 

When you draw up a viable marketing strategy rooted in your business goals, market research, and other essential components and then employ it effectively, you’ll get to know how your brand image is built appropriately. 

The right marketing strategy ensures you’re not wasting your time and money on advertising on various platforms. 

Create the right products

Marketing is not only about promoting your existing products or services. First and foremost, it’s critical to understand your target customer's pain points and their needs, then develop the products that are useful for them. 

However, creating products that can survive in today’s highly competitive world markets is not a piece of cake. You should manage to capture customers’ demands and be sensitive to the changes in technology and the economy at the same time. A marketing strategy is essential here to make your life easier. 

A marketing strategy guides you to sell the right products to the right people at the right time with the proper promotion and distribution methods. 

7 excellent Shopify marketing strategies for your store

1. Engage store visitors with live chat

Many online businesses already adopt live chat app to engage with customers more effectively, have you? 

If you haven’t done it yet, it’s time to give it a try. 

Live chat app helps you respond to a lead or a customer faster instead of getting them waiting around. The faster you reply to customers, the quicker their problems are addressed. You’ll get to know more about what they’re looking for through your website and effectively lead them to the relevant solutions like a product or service. 

In direct conversations with customers via live chat, you can accelerate customers’ purchasing at the minute they’re going to hesitate to buy or not. 

After browsing your website, products, and services, customers don’t place an order right away because they still have questions that are not answered anywhere. Their problems might be more specific than what a typical FAQ section can address. If you can reach them and directly answer their questions, they’ll be more likely to convert.  

Look at an example of a popular website that implements LiveChat. Live chat empowers the webchat on Wine.com. The chatbox pops up when you are browsing through the website and allows you to ask questions about the available selections of wine. 

2. Integrate Instagram to your Shopify store

With over 500 million daily users, Instagram can help you sell products on Shopify more effectively. 

You can find many ways to integrate Instagram and a Shopify storefront. Once the integration is complete, you can use Instagram to supplement your product images from your storefront. 

With the right strategy on Instagram with compelling images and strategically-used hashtags, you can capture the audience’s attention and build an Instagram community easily.  

The key to getting success on Instagram is consistent engagement with followers. Always keep followers updated on your business, and don’t forget to add your products to your post and stories. This method will increase sales dramatically. 

GoPro did a good job of integrating Instagram with its online store. 

3. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective marketing strategies for an eCommerce online businesses. 

When you’re trying to sell something online, you’ll have to solve a significant problem: “How do you get customers to find your store?” 

Once customers see your store on search engine results, they’re more likely to see your products and buy them. So your mission is to make your store and products appear on the search engine result to catch customers’ attention. Search engine optimization (SEO) will help you to do that. 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of enhancing your website so that it ranks highly in the search engine results for the keywords and phrases related to your business. The higher your site ranks in the search result page; the more people will see your website. Thus, it gives more chances for your website to get clicks and your products to be purchased.

4. Content Marketing

Content marketing is another powerful marketing strategy for your Shopify stores. Through content marketing, you can reach, engage, and connect with customers. 

The critical goal of content marketing is to provide valuable information via content to the target audience, increase traffic to websites, and generate fascinating conversions. 

There are various types of content, including blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and more. Regardless of which format you use for your content, it’s critical to create content that’s relevant and beneficial to your target audience. 

5. Influencer Marketing

Besides inbound marketing techniques, hiring influencers to promote business is more and more popular, and benefits businesses considerably. 

You may see many celebrities as influencers, but an influencer doesn’t always have to be celebrity. An influential person can be someone with many followers on social media and, most importantly, he or she must be good at promoting products.

6. Video Marketing 

These days, video is one of the most powerful marketing tools for any business. As you know the rapid development of Youtube, video marketing is gradually dominating the entire industry. 

Like content marketing, content in your video should be informational and valuable for your target audiences. 

A few types of video marketing:

• Product demonstration
• Launching
• Instructional
• Behind the scenes
• Announcement 
• Event
• Live videos
• And more

7. Referral Marketing

Referral or affiliate marketing is another effective strategy. It’s simply a marketing technique that you pay for third-party members to promote or sell your products. 

The goal of a referral marketing campaign can be getting more traffic to websites, increasing conversions, and generating sales. 

In an affiliate program, whenever someone performs specific actions through your ads such as clicking, navigating to landing pages, or placing an order, you have to pay for the affiliates the responding commissions. 

Typical well-known eCommerce retailers using referral marketing effectively include Amazon, eBay, and The Home Depot. 

Here are 50 easy and effective ways on how to promote your Shopify Store (insider tips).

Bonus strategy: abandoned cart recovery

Lastly, you should also consider an abandoned carts marketing strategy. Cart abandonment happens all the time in eCommerce; it's the nemesis of online stores. However, by setting up an effective omnichannel marketing strategy, you can recover a good proportion of otherwise lost sales.

For best results, use all the major marketing channels to remind shoppers about items they've left in their cart. Web push is the most cost-effective channel to use, so try that first, and back up your marketing efforts using other channels like SMS and email if you don’t get the desired results the first time around. Get your abandoned carts strategy right, and you could see phenomenal results, just like these five Shopify Plus stores. 

Final thoughts

There is no all-in-one marketing strategy for any business. To get the best result, it’s a good idea to employ multiple strategies, test the performance, and decide on which ones best fit your business. 

If you’re running out of marketing ideas for your Shopify store, these 7 effective marketing strategies may be helpful for you. Additionally, learn some of the great & unbiased Shopify store reviews by our friends from Litextension.