You don’t need rocket science to understand how beneficial is traffic (more importantly targeted traffic) is for your Shopify store. The more eyeballs you get rolling, the more checkouts you get.
Since you’re on this blog post. There can be two scenarios :
(a) You are a Shopify store owner who has some traffic/sales and is looking for ways to invest in getting more traffic
(b) Your Shopify dashboard is empty and you need to drive traffic to make some money.
In either scenario, you’ll learn practical ways to drive traffic to your Shopify store.
I’ve made it easy for you to absorb this guide by breaking down the information in multiple parts.
- Source/Method to Drive Traffic
- How it Works ( a small overview for you to understand )
- How can you start using on your brand
- Best Practices (tips/comments from experts that are driving traffic via that method ).
5 Bullet Proof Methods to Drive Traffic to Your Shopify Store in 2019
#1. Paid Advertising : Search Based
How this Works :
As a business, you need to put yourself in places where your potential customers are hanging out. For example, if you own a hair strengthening shampoo, you need yourself to be in front of people dealing with hair loss. Paid advertising bridges this gap.
You can use Google Ads, Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads ( Instagram ads are now part of the Facebook ad platform, so they are kind of the same thing ).
Both of these giants, Google and Facebook has database of users.
They trap their data to understand about the users. Facebook knows where you hang out, what is your political opinion, what topics do you like and so on based on your interaction with their platform.
So for example, If anyone wants to reach out to people staying a particular district to promote their food restaurant, facebook/google will charge them and put their ad in front of people who are in that location ( since they already have the data ).
Location is mere tip of iceberg.
You can pinpoint and laser target whom do you want your ads to be visible to. You can select from a whole lot. Pet owners, income group and so on.Google and Facebook are always trapping data to understand their user better ( so they can sell that data to advertisers ).
More or less both advertising platforms work in the same manner. You create ads : text, video or image, you choose what people do you want to show these ads to, facebook looks up in their database and check which users are under your selection, and put your ads in front of them.
How to Get Started :
If you haven’t yet tried your hands on google ads, you’re missing out.
1. You can get started with Google Ads by Simply Signing in. If you have a Gmail account, this should not take more than a minute or two.
Once you’re in your google ad dashboard, you can start creating campaigns.
2. Go to Tools > Keyword Planner to first learn about your niche and what audience is searching.
3. Type a broad query related to your product/service. If you sell dog food, you can try finding the volume for “best dog food” etc.
3. Google will tell you how much you’d spend for one click on that keyword, how many visits you’d get and more.
4. You should try to spice things up by targeting low volume long tail keywords like “best dog food for pitbull” etc. This will bring down your budget and drive traffic/sales at the same time.
You’ll know what keywords to target and how much you’d spend. Once you have an idea, you can create your first campaign. From there, things unfold on their own.
Best Practices :
Say No to Broad Matching
According to Google, Broad Match “lets a keyword trigger your ad to show whenever someone searches for that phrase, similar phrases, singular or plural forms, misspellings, synonyms, stemmings (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations.” While using broad match may enable your ad campaign to show up for more keywords, they may not be the keywords that really convert for your business.
Jane recommends only using Broad Match Modified if you are experienced and have tested your target keywords well.
Mícheál Brennan from ImpactBND
Relevancy is Key
I once audited a campaign for a photographer in Boston who specialized in wedding photos. He was absolutely astounded that his campaign had yet to yield a single lead even though he spent a few hundred bucks on it in a short space of time.
Pinpointing Your Ad’s Most Powerful Words
The few pieces of content that are on your landing page, for the headline, subheadline, bullet points and call to action, this content needs to be carefully crafted. What are your most powerful phrases and the best words that you can use to improve the probability of a visitor converting?
#2. Content Marketing
By definition content marketing “a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
I consider content marketing as subtle sales.
Content marketing is where you first add value to the potential audience’s life.Wondershare does a great job of content marketing for their products.
Now since I only use their video editor, I’ll tell how brilliantly they market it.
Wondershare has Wondershare Filmora, which is a video editor.
Their target audience ?
Mainly youtubers or people who do frequent video editing.
How do they reach out to such people ?
By ranking on relevant keywords that their potential target audience is searching.
They are #1 on google for “video editing software for mac” and many other search phrases.
If you look at the big picture, they have monthly audience of 2 million !
This sales stream works for them, and will continue driving traffic, sales for their product.
How this Works :
I can’t dive into details on how content marketing works since it’d be too much for this blog post.
But, if you are interested in learning content marketing, or how to start content marketing for your brand, you can always sign up for our free consultation where we explain how brands can market themselves better.
In a nutshell, content marketing is done in multiple steps :
You make a blog for the audience. This blog doesn’t promote your product, it rather helps your target audience. Remember, Wondershare ranks for “video editing software for mac”, “iMovie alternative for windows” and so on. They help people who are searching for iMovie alternatives.
If you visit their blog, they have Call to Actions all around to make sure you know they are a video editing software.
Once you make a blog around the topic that helps your audience ( here is a guide on how to start a blog ), you find out topics that you know your target audience would love reading about. For example, Filmora knows that youtuber would want intros, so, they’ll cover that on their blog to bring target audience to their blog.
There are tons and tons of work that goes into content marketing, but it can be divided into two phases : content production, content promotion.
- You create content that your target audience wants. If you need help finding topics that’ll benefit your audience and drive sales to your brand, you can use our keyword research services. Not only are they affordable, we give you a detailed content calendar that grows your blog.
- You ensure that your content reaches your target audience by building backlinks. ( Google judges your website on multiple factors, one key factor is number of backlinks you have. Backlink is when a website links to your website/page. )
But content marketing isn’t only ranking for keywords. It goes further than that.
I understand, Content Marketing sounds wonderful when it comes to results it drives, but it’s overwhelming when you try to do it.
You need to learn and master SEO, content creation and link building. Which is a big learning curve and can affect your Shopify store if you pay attention to these instead of your store.
Solution ?
Scribbify has a hands-free blog management service.
We’ll do the research and find out keywords that your brand can benefit from, we write and publish the content, and we build backlinks that rank your blog !
#3. Facebook / Instagram Ads to Drive Traffic to Shopify Store
Instagram ads are run from inside the Facebook ad platform, hence I am including both of them under a single heading. Although the target remains same, but ad-creation has to be tweaked in order to better suit the platform. For example, you can shout “swipe up to get this discount” and use it on both Instagram and Facebook.
To start advertising your Shopify store, go to your account’s ad manager section.
This is your “advertising dashboard“. Within this dashboard you can create ads, see how existing ones are performing, and so on.The real ad-creations happens outside facebook. This is the time where you think about how your ads are going to look like, or more importantly, what exactly are going to be my ads ?
Now as a general rule of thumb, images can you get more attention as compared to text, and in the same manner, video can help you get more engagement ( if it’s good ) than images.If you are into service sector, you should consider putting a video montage of how your business looks like while offering that service.
If you’re into a product, you can talk about benefits of your product in a video or show testimonials of people who’ve used your product. There can be tons of other ideas you can work on like a whiteboard animation etc.
You can check dollarshave’s ad to get a gist about creating advertisements that work.
How to Get Started :
Usually people hurry to put ads online as quick as possible. In this rush, the quality of ad is compromised with. You should invest as much as possible into your ad creation.If you can’t arrange a video, you should consider making an interesting image as ad.
In this, if you can make an eye-catching and interesting ad all yourself, good, but if not, I’d highly suggest that instead of learning, hire someone off (its a freelancing marketplace).
Once you have your ad final with you, open your ad manager and click on Create an Ad.
From their, if you’ve created a video ad, you’d want video views ( duh ), if you have a image ad, you should go for engagement. This ensures your ad is optimized to be engaged with not simply liking.
Up next comes the most important step, targeting your audience. This is a huge topic in itself and can’t be explained here. Adespresso has an excellent blog post which explains how to target your audience.
But a general rule of thumb is to pick big company in your industry, or popular sources ( radio channel, celeb ) that are related to your potential audience.
For example, I write a crime novel, I’ll promote it to Sherlock Holmes fans, and so on.
Best Practices to drive traffic to your Shopify stores
Emma Siemasko from WordSteam Blog
Simple Language that’s Easy to Understand
Copywriting is not high literature. Maybe you were a poet in college, but flowery language will muddle your message. It’s time to cut the verbosity.Your number one priority should be writing a Facebook ad that’s easy to understand—for anyone, even a 5th grader. When someone sees your ad, they should immediately know: What you’re offering how it benefits them what to do next
Track Sales, Not Vanity Metrics
Clicks and social engagement are important, but what really matters is how much money you make, not how many people share your ad. If you’re getting a lot of clicks, it’s easy to get false expectations because your ad is apparently “working.” This is a big mistake – clicks do not necessarily mean it’s a high-performing ad (unless your only goal is to get clicks).
Consider the Psychology of Color
If you’re not harnessing the psychological powers that different colors can have, then you’re missing out on a vital creative force that every top Facebook ads pro is using. 90% of all the snap judgments that we make about products can be traced back to color, according to a study in Management Decision.
Here are some of the major science-backed trends in how people perceive colors that you should keep in mind:
- Older people like blue, purple, and green,
- while younger people are more into yellow, red, and orange.
- As we age, our preferences tend towards the darker and cooler colors of shorter wavelength over the excitatory, long wavelength colors.
It comes down to appropriateness and fit, not a silver bullet. The truth is that if you have a crappy product, you’re not going to turn things around by throwing a blue logo on it. Most of our tendency to appreciate certain colors in marketing actually appears to do with how well that color fits with the product that we’re looking at.
Sherman Standberry from Lyfe marketing
Build a Proper Sales Funnel
Selling on Facebook isn’t reserved for the elite few or brands that have deep pockets. Your business can actually sell on Facebook with the help of organic content, paid ads, and a few of our Facebook advertising tips. Selling on Facebook is a lot more effective when you create a sales funnel that helps you achieve your purpose.The purpose of a Facebook sales funnel is to warm up your target audience or nurture them before pitching them a product or service.
This tactic works because using relevant messages for different users (at different stages) can make it easy for you to convince them to convert.
Tell great story stories is an integral part of human communication. And storytelling — whether in-person, through the written word, or social media — plays an important role in building connections with others. When you’re planning on creating Facebook Ads, stories are essential to capture the interest of your target customers.
#4. Influencer Marketing
How this Works :
Mouth of the word, still remains, and will remain the best way to cut down sales resistance. It works because we as a human, like to connect, and trust other human beings. In fact, we trust humans, we learn everything and grow up by trusting on someone and so on.People love recommendations from other people, their friends, their relatives and so on.
The more your company’s admiration is on your customer’s mouth, the mouth customers you’ll get over time.Influencer marketing works on this principle. An influencer is anyone famous for a particular reason/community. For example, Jake Paul is good influencer in kids-teens. A author might be influencer in author niche and so on.
These are the people that already have an audience. An audience, that loves them, and trusts them. You contact these people and ask them to promote / mention your product for a fee and they do that.
Influencer marketing can help your products sell more than advertising. Ideally, you should go for an influencer if you know their audience will love your product.
How to Get Started
You can reach out to two types of influencers: bloggers / social media influencers:
Instagram. Now, I use paid tools for outreach and link building, but I’d suggest a free method. It would be better for you to first test the waters and then start investing into it.
For Finding Bloggers
Lucky for you, a lot of people have already done the job for you by creating list of popular blogs under almost every niche. You can get started by searching for “popular *industry* blogs” & replace industry with the niche you are looking influencers in. For example, if I did influencer outreach for scribbify, I’d search “best content marketing blogs”.
This search will give you more than enough prospects to start working with. Make a list of top 30-40 popular blogs in your niche. You can do that by opening the blogs in different tabs, and saving their contact details. Once you have your list, you should send them a pitch about your product.
Remember: this email is about how they can be benefitted from this, not about what your product is, not about how badly you need a shoutout, or how cute the dog outside your company is. Stick to the point, and explain how giving your brand a shoutout/ mentioning you in their blog posts can benefit them. Usually the benefit comes in form of compensation fee.
The more popular a blog is, the more traffic it’ll have, and the more they’ll charge.
For Finding Instagrammers
In Instagram you have to find profiles rocking a particular hashtag. For example, If I were to do influencer outreach for Scribbify, I’d want startups consultants or mentors who are popular among startup and entrepreneurs to give a shoutout about our blog management subscription.You can simply head over to Instagram and start searching for hashtags related to your business and then find the people who’re on top of these hashtags, go to their profiles and start networking.
START NETWORKING, NOT PITCHING !
Best Practices
Base your pitch on the individual
Base your pitch on the individual and clearly list the essentials when reaching out to influencers, it’s helpful if your pitch isn’t the first interaction they’ve ever had with you. It’s wise to regularly engage with influencers to build and maintain relationships, whilst also recording influencer data, so that when you’re ready with a content opportunity you’ll know exactly who to target and that they are primed to take part.
Patricio Robles from Ecoconsultancy
Get comfortable relinquishing (some) control
Influencer marketing isn’t like traditional marketing in which brands (or their agencies) exert total control over creative, where it goes and how consumers will engage with it.
Authenticity is critical in influencer marketing and brands should recognize that the influencers they work with will generally have a better understanding than they do about what will resonate with their followers. Of course, brands need to maintain oversight of influencer campaigns to ensure they’re following all applicable regulations, but they should invite influencers to exercise creativity and avoid trying to micromanage them.
( Brian if you read this, I love your domain name ! )
Turn to Smaller CommunitiesPopular and well-known influencers can help expand your reach. However, if you want to get short-term traffic or sales, you should consider turning to smaller communities.
Beware of the hustler internet is awash with self-proclaimed experts at X, Y, or Z.
The more they need to yell about how great they are, the less value they will probably bring you. A true influencer does what she does because she genuinely has a passion for a specific topic or market. In other words, a real influencer knows their own value and doesn’t have to shout about it. Those are the influencers you want to go after.
Run strong brand promotions alongside micro-influencer content
When shoe brand Sperry’s started reposting Instagram users’ photos of their products, the results highlighted the potential of micro-influencers. A follow-up brand campaign promoted the company’s wet weather footwear used by fashion bloggers who were already fans of Sperry. The campaign generated more than 4.7 million digital impressions, half of which came directly via the influencers. In addition, click-throughs to Sperry’s website from Instagram increased by 66%.
#5. Giveaways
How this Works :
Giveaway helps you reach out to an audience and put them in the “A” of “AIDA”.
AIDA Stands for Attention, Interest, Desire & Action.
It’s a basic marketing principle upon which giveaways work.
Giveaway means giving away something, either your product, or something close to it, for free. This could be a song of your full album, a chapter of your full book, a t-shirt of your band, and so on.
When we have a service upcoming, we usually do a giveaway to promote it in the community.
For small businesses, I gave away Press release on popular blogs, and for our upcoming keyword research services, I did a content calendar giveaway and so on.
For example, if you a clothing brand, you can do a giveaway of giving out 5-10 t-shirts free of charge.
Every giveaway has some conditions which people have to follow in order to participate in the giveaway. This is the thing that gives you attention or the benefit you need. This is the part you have to plan, this is the part you have to focus on, on what are you getting from giving away stuff for free.
How to Get Started
You can start your giveaway by simply registering a free account on rafflecopter ( a giveaway tool ). Rafflecopter lets you run a giveaway from your website or your facebook fan page.
Head over to rafflecopter, and sign up for a free account.Once you are in your dashboard, head over to “New giveaway” option.
The first thing you have to set up is what is the prize being offered in the giveaway. It can be anything that you can offer without going in loss. For example, for our merchandise store, we often giveaway hoodies or coffee mugs. If you’re into service sector, this could be hard. I understand that because we offer services.
For our “Keyword Research Service” we gave away 5 content calendar. They didn’t come at extra cost since I had hired the people prior.Once you’ve finalised what product you’re going away, you can focus on what return does your brand get from the giveaway.
Rafflecopter gives you a couple of options.
Remember, you are doing giveaway as a marketing campaign. You need some value out of that giveaway. In our content calendar, I asked the participants to post a review about our service which further leads to an increase in positive reviews about us. I don’t need to explain how that helps Scribbify.
After you’ve selected what are you giving away, and what do contestants need to do, you have to select the time period for which the giveaway is live.
Rafflecopters gives you an embed code that you can use on your website. You can also host their giveaway on your facebook fan page.
Best Practices
Don’t make it last too long
when deciding on a length for your Instagram giveaway, don’t assume the longer it lasts the more people will enter. Limited time offers are still widely used for a reason because they give your audience a sense of urgency. So, to capitalize on that, I suggest sticking to 3-7 days. Or, if you have a larger account with a highly engaged audience, a 24 hour contest can be great, too!
Marcela De Vivo from Jeff Bullas
Establish benchmarks
before you launch your Giveaway, create a document for yourself with your benchmarks. Here are a few that you can consider:Number of likes on FacebookNumber of Google +1’s to the pageNumber of Retweets to the pageNumber of inbound linksAverage monthly visitorsConversion
RateCarlo Pacis from WishPond Blog
Share entries
One best practice I see all the time for companies that run social media giveaways is sharing great entries. Though you shouldn’t do this for any type of vote contest (you don’t want to appear biased towards certain entrants), this is a particularly great strategy for photo contests because it lets you use utilize the user-generated content you’ve been collecting from your giveaway. Share these images on your social platforms, tagging the user who created the content.
Make it easy to understand.
While you’re being specific, don’t make people have to puzzle through your headline. For example, it’s not completely clear right away what “Win an Internet-to-TV Device for Digital Streaming of Entertainment and Music” is. Instead, how about: “Win a Roku—Stream the Internet Right to Your TV!” The first is correct, but it makes your entrant have to think—and most won’t think; they’ll just pass you by. Make it exciting and easy for them to get interested in entering!
Takeaway:
I’ll lie if I say I am not biased in saying that Content Marketing is the best method to drive sales and building brand for your Shopify store.
Content Marketing works hand in hand with Facebook Ads, Giveaway and Every other method mentioned.
You find out that your target audience is people who are trying to lose weight. You can do a Facebook Ad and offer an ebook “how to lose weight naturally” to appeal to these people and collect their emails. Later on, you can send them an email asking them to check out your keto diet book which is worth some amount.
But that’s in my head.
If you’re a Shopify store owner, let us know how you drive traffic to your Shopify store and what do you think about the methods mentioned in this blog post.