With the leap of innovation on the Internet and its growing role in everyday life, I can say that a
marketing strategy is incomplete if it doesn’t address digital channels. In other words, digital marketing becomes an indispensable part of marketing in any business that wants to captivates 4.0 audiences.
In 2018,
Marketing charts published a study about Industrial Marketing Budget Trends in 2017 (vs. 2016). They revealed that there is a
50% increase in the digital marketing budget compared to 2016. The Gartner CMO Survey 2018 - 2019 also foresees the trend of shifting more marketing dollars to digital channels. The
spending on digital marketing is expected, with an increase from
44% of the marketing budget to 54% by 2024.
Digital marketing comes close in your daily life as you’re
using digital platforms like social media, email, and more. But you might be not sure about what digital marketing is and what to with digital marketing in your Shopify store.
This post is aimed at helping you nail down digital marketing and have winning
digital marketing strategies for Shopify stores at your fingertips.
What is a digital marketing strategy?
A digital marketing strategy is an overall plan that you and your company implement to attract qualified leads and achieve business goals through available
online marketing channels. Simply say, digital marketing strategy is the marketing strategy that focuses on the digital side.
Like a
marketing strategy, you plan a series of actions and implement them to achieve a goal or multiple goals. For instance, your overarching goal might be to increase by 10% of the conversion rate on your website compared to the last year.
You can vary your
digital marketing strategy by using multiple digital strategies and channels, depending on the scale of your business and your goals. Digital channels include earned, owned, and paid media.
Before starting a digital marketing strategy, you need to understand each channel first.
Earned media: it is the publicity gained from the promotional or advertising efforts. You don’t pay for the exposure, but it’s free or earned media. For example, your site ranks on the top 500 sites on the web, according to Alexa.
Owned media: the media your company owns, including blogs, social media profiles, websites, and images. It’s easy to track the performance of your earn media to see the result of your efforts and what you’re missing out. Do you have a consistent schedule for your blog posts? Are your social media accounts active and updated regularly?
Paid media: you use external marketing efforts to get the exposure, or you pay for it. Paid media includes PPC advertising, branded content, and display ads. It is closer to
traditional marketing, whereby you pay for a third party to spread your brand as widely as possible. Look back at your business, did you pay for your article to appear on the top of the search page? What’s your return?
As more and more businesses and people are using the
Internet as the leading purchasing resource, knowing your customers and where they are is critical to market your digital efforts to the right person. It’s also a good idea to address multiple digital channels.
The importance of a digital marketing strategy in a Shopify store
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Digital marketing is central to the success of your
business online. People increasingly spend their time online; your target customers must also lie in the majority, shifting from traditional shopping to online shopping. That’s why every business in the modern economy needs digital marketing to go with the flow.
It’s easy to identify where your audiences spend time and money in the social media space, but to reach and attract them, establishing a digital marketing strategy is essential. Social media marketing is only a piece of digital marketing, but it’s an imperative one. On average, an Internet user has at least seven social media account, and 22% of the world population uses Facebook. With such amazing stats,
social media marketing should never be optional. It’s an effective way to drive traffic to your Shopify website as well as improve customer care.
Besides, digital marketing is optimal for
small businesses with a limited marketing budget. It’s hard to compete with famous giants who put a lot of effort and money into marketing and reputation management. But with digital marketing, small businesses, eCommerce, and personal brands can hope for the opportunities to hold a top-ranking position if they manage, and target their digital strategies effectively.
When the ads are more targeted, the company knows where to focus and spend time, money on. They have full control over the data that support their
decisions.
7 Best practical digital marketing strategies for Shopify stores
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When it comes to digital marketing,
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective strategies.
SEO is the process of getting traffic from free, organic, editorial, or natural search results on the search engines. It aims at boosting your website to rank higher on the search engine results through keywords and phrases related to your business.
In 2019, Google accounted for over
82% of all global desktop and mobile search traffic. To win at
SEO, you have to play Google’s rules. Keeping up with the changes in Google’s algorithms ensures you’re on the right track with the most used search engine and can make changes promptly.
Did you know that more than 30% of searchers click on the first page on the search result to find what they need? That’s why reaching the first page is one of the significant milestones for your website. An
effective SEO strategy is essential for your business to hold the top position. Once you know the
importance of SEO for your Shopify store, find the most practical guide, and plan out a working strategy.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
Another powerful digital marketing strategy is pay-per-click advertising (PPC).
PPC is a strategy in which advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ads. In other words, you pay for the visits rather than earning those visits through organic searches.
Search engine advertising is the most popular form of
PPC. Advertisers can bid for ad placement on the search engine when someone clicks on a keyword related to their business offering. For example, when you bid for the keyword “digital marketing tools,” your ad might appear in every top position of the search engine.
To kickstart a
PPC strategy, you need to research and choose the right keywords, then organize those keywords into well-organized campaigns and ad groups. Then, if you want to see an influx in conversions, set up an optimized landing page so that more leads will be converted when they click on your ads from the search result pages.
Fantastic content with Shopify’s blog
Content is an integral part of the overall
marketing. That you have excellent quality content is vital in making your website to be favored by the search engine. It’s time to leverage inbound marketing to make your website over others. Out of the content marketing methods, blogging is the best and easiest to do this. Fortunately, Shopify allows you to blog everything effortlessly.
To have
excellent content in the
world of digital marketing, make it well-written, engaging, and marketable. But most importantly, your content must be as relevant and useful to your target audiences as possible.
Social media marketing
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You may think social media is easy to manage if you simply schedule your content, and everything will be automatically posted. However,
successful social media marketing is more than just doing it. You need a strategic social marketing plan and devote your efforts to make it work for your business.
Each social platform has a
different target audience and approach. If you’re an online fashion retailer, it’s better to run an Instagram or Facebook account store than selling on LinkedIn. Before employing your strategy, consider which platform is the most suitable for your products and your business.
Email marketing
Email marketing remains one of the fastest ways to drive immediate results in terms of a website’s traffic and sales.
Collecting
customers’ email is the first thing to do. You can add an opt-in form in your blog, require your customers to leave their email in the checkout.
The key to
email marketing is getting a bigger and bigger email list. Gamifying the process of email list building is a wise way to do this. You attract customers to your reward programs. After filling in emails, customers have a chance to get gifts or discount coupons.
Video marketing
Video is a
powerful digital marketing tool for every business that wants to increase reaches, brand awareness, drive revenue, and expand the operation.
In video marketing, it’s also vital to create valuable content that targets the right audiences. There are many different types of video marketing, for example:
- Instructional
- Announcement
- Advertising and promotion video
- User-generated video
- Customer video
- Company video
- Interview
- Vlog
Regardless of kinds of video, if you’re making videos for a specific purpose, make sure your videos deliver valuable content and message to target audiences.
Referral marketing