5 Steps to Drive More Traffic to Your Shopify Store

Creating a successful ecommerce presence involves utilizing as many platforms as possible to reach your audience. Shopify is a great platform to expand your brand’s online presence and bring in additional revenue to your business. We’ve briefly discussed the strategy of building a Shopify store and using Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment before. In this post, we are going to cover ways to drive more traffic to your Shopify store.

The three ways we are going to drive traffic will be through search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing and affiliate marketing. These play an important role in attracting more shoppers to your website. Following these strategies will set your Shopify store – and your brand – up for long term eCommerce success. It all begins by increasing your online presence!

Increase Your Social Media Presence

Reaching your target audience is simpler than ever thanks to the innumerable social media networks that exist. Your brand needs to have as large a social media presence as possible. It’s important to be on the top social media sites for two reasons. Creating social media profiles gives you the opportunity to create links to your Shopify store – which is a huge part of SEO. It is known as link building. The Google search engine indexes your website based on a variety of factors and one of them is the quality of your links. It is important to have links back to your website from “quality” websites. You can read more about it here, but the idea is to get as many links from places like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. directing people to your website.

Having social media presence on a variety of websites will continue to pay dividends down the road. It will allow you to reach a larger audience and can snowball into additional backlinking to your website. A strong social media presence in combination with the steps below are key as you try to drive more traffic to your Shopify store.

Utilize Facebook Advertising to Better Understand Your Audience

Gaining insight to who your target audience is will be valuable. Facebook advertising provides a great opportunity to collect demographic information on who clicks on your links. Facebook tracks the behaviors and interests of their users. You can obtain that information by creating campaigns on the platform. Facebook ads can be used in a couple different ways. The easiest way to collect the information is to install a Facebook pixel into your Shopify store and create ads directly linking to your website. A Facebook pixel can be used to track different metrics you may be interested in – from page views to conversions. Having a pixel on your website will collect the demographic information as customers visit your site.

Another way you can use Facebook ads is to redirect potential customers to a landing page – either a Facebook landing page or an off-site landing page. The landing page needs to have some type of value proposition to attract shoppers. The value proposition could be a discount or a free eBook on a topic that the shopper gets after entering their email address. Email address collection is the primary goal of using a landing page. The email addresses can be used for future advertising campaigns or for email marketing campaigns in the future.

You will be able to collect the demographic information from either method. The demographic information will allow you to create “look-a-like” audiences in the future. This means that the customers you target on Facebook will have similar behaviors and interests to those who previously clicked on your advertisements. You will also use this demographic information in the next 3 steps as well to drive more traffic to your Shopify store.

Design and Create Content for Your Audience

The demographic data from Facebook will provide great insight to who your audience is. It will provide detailed info on ages, sex, location, interests and behaviors. Your job is to create content that people in those demographics will be interested in. For example, a target audience of 30-49 interested in home appliances may not care much about appliances in new rental units. That audience is typically going to be homeowners and content centered on that topic may not be important to them. On the other hand, content about the top, new appliances that will increase the value of their home could be hugely relevant.

Each audience will be different and you will need to design your content around your audience. Create content that adds value to your target audience and will keep them coming back for more. It’s not the quantity of content you put out, but how relevant and valuable it is to your audience. Use the social media profiles you created to distribute the content you create. Install a blog on your Shopify store and post the content there. Ensure the content always has links to your website and other relevant websites. As the content is liked and shared by your audience, more traffic will reach your website and, for SEO purposes, the links to your store will greatly increase.

Content marketing can be a great way to drive more traffic to your Shopify store. It will also be valuable in the next step.

Using Affiliate Marketing Programs to Increase Sales

Creating or enrolling your product in an affiliate marketing program can be a powerful way to get more sales on your Shopify store and increase brand awareness. Affiliate marketing is where you provide commissions for other people to sell your products. Many marketers make their entire living off affiliate marketing and are professionals at what they do. They utilize a variety of techniques like social media marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing and content marketing to reach potential customers. Each affiliate has their own link which records sales that their advertisements get you. You pay them a commission on each sale that they get you. Many times the content that you have created can also be used by – or improved by – affiliates to drive more traffic to your Shopify store.

Utilizing affiliate marketing may not be for everyone. There are 3 important factors to consider when deciding whether to use affiliate marketers. The first is if your product’s pricing allows for enticing commissions for the affiliates. A 50% commission on a $10 product is certainly not as enticing for a 50% commission on a $25 product. The second is if you have the margins to pay an enticing commission. Shopify may allow you to price your products higher than the Amazon platform, but if you’re costs are too high you may not make much or any profit from affiliate sales. This is not necessarily a bad thing however. Breaking even on an affiliate sale could make it worthwhile for you. The content they create may increase your brand awareness, drives additional traffic and increases links to your website. It can also increase customer retention for products that may be disposable. The final factor to consider is whether you have inventory or manufacturing capabilities to keep up with the increased sales from affiliates. Running out of inventory costs affiliates money as their advertisements may still be running. This may turn off potential affiliates from working with you.

Utilizing Influencer Marketing to Drive More Traffic to Your Shopify Store

The final step in driving traffic to your website is by reaching out to influencers. Reaching out to topic experts is a great way to get your product more visibility. Experts run blogs, podcasts or social media accounts with large followings. You may be able to get your product featured on their outlet by either sponsoring them, offering the product to them for free or guest blogging for them (great for SEO!). Each expert and what they may be looking for will be different. Trying reaching out to as many as possible to see if there is any opportunities available.

Social media influencers typically have massive followings that are interested in a topic. They typically use the Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or Snapchat platforms to reach people. You can propose having your product featured on their feed when you reach out to them. Influencers will charge you a few to have the product featured for a certain amount of time, but the fee can be reasonable. In our experience, Instagram is typically where you will find the most reasonable fees. It is important to see what their engagement is relative to their followers. Many pages will buy followers to artificially inflate that number. There are almost unlimited interest pages on Instagram so shop around and find a deal that is right for you.

These 5 steps to drive more traffic to your Shopify store will product incredible results. Some of our clients’ stores have been able to achieve over $100,000 in monthly revenue. Growing your brand outside the Amazon platform is key for your long-term success. There are incredible ecommerce opportunities available to those who are willing to put in the work. Continue to follow our blog for more ways to grow your eCommerce presence!

Contact AMZ Advisers to see how we can maximize your eCommerce presence

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