Shopify is a really popular choice of website platform for many online retailers. It offers an out-of-the-box solution for businesses wanting to set up a fuss-free online store and has many beneficial features. However, getting the most from this platform does require a forensic approach to marketing, utilising multiple disciplines and channels.

At Hitsearch, we’ve been working with online retailers that have Shopify websites for many years. This experience as a dedicated Shopify partner makes us ideally placed to offer specialist support to brands and businesses using this platform to get the best possible short, medium and long-term return on their marketing spend.

We have developed a range of Shopify-specific services to assist clients with all stages of the ecommerce journey, including tailored approaches to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), to help our clients achieve success from the outset.

Shopify Marketing Approach

Our approach to Shopify marketing has been refined over the last 15 years of helping ecommerce businesses to reach and exceed their goals. However, every business is different, and each marketing strategy comes with its own set of challenges, USPs and objectives. Even ecommerce brands within the same industry can have:

Different products
Different competitors
Different customers who have different buying journeys

This means that while there may be some common factors across sectors, each Shopify marketing strategy requires a tailored approach. A typical campaign will involve a number of disciplines and it’s essential that the groundwork is done properly to make sure that all of the activity is aligned and the most effective solution for the variables, factors and circumstances involved.

Shopify Marketing Planning

There are several key areas that we spend time analysing in order to develop a Shopify marketing strategy that will be most effective for that particular client. These include:

A competitor review, SWOT analysis and breakdown of their marketing approaches
Analysing customer behaviour – what potential customers are searching for, what their buying triggers are and what the lifetime value could be if they become repeat customers
Review key products and the related buying journeys, making profitability a priority
Analysing legacy data such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console and Google Trends to gain insight into what has and hasn’t been effective in the past

This research, analysis and the insights gained enable us to devise a unique marketing strategy that can include all of the digital channels in a cohesive way that all contributes to the business objectives. They may include:

Content marketing
SEO
Paid media – PPC, remarketing, shopping services
Social media – Organic and paid
Outreach – Digital PR, blogger and influencer partnerships
Email marketing – Both broadcast and trigger
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

Shopify SEO

Our approach has been refined over many years of working with Shopify clients on optimisation strategies. Some of the many facets that are included in effective Shopify SEO activity can include:

Technical SEO – Making changes to the core platform and site architecture to ensure SEO best practice is observed, along with installing the right Shopify apps for success (without the site bloat)
Content for SEO – Aligned with a wider content plan that may include the creation of new content as well as optimisations made to the existing content
Off-site SEO – A natural and ethical approach to generating marketing signals that utilises our great existing relationships with journalists, editors, bloggers, influencers and thought leaders in the retail sector
Detailed analysis and measurement – Site performance, competitor activity and performance and changing customer trends

Shopify PPC

Getting your paid activity right is key to ecommerce success and our experience with paid media for Shopify sites means that we can develop tailored paid search solutions for your business. These may include:

Google and Bing campaigns to cover as much of the available market as possible
Campaigns designed to meet the needs of individual customers
All aspects of campaign management being geared towards ROI, such as keyword selection, bidding strategy, the creative used and the optimised landing pages

Shopify Shopping Campaigns

We help retailers to market their products effectively with shopping campaigns in Google, Bing and Facebook by:

Preparing shopping feeds – Including supplemental feeds to ensure the creative stands out and daily analysis so tweaks and improvements can be made when necessary
Utilising dynamic bid strategies – Where we bid on those most likely to buy based on their location, the device they use and other targeting that is specific to your customer base

Shopify remarketing

It’s rare for customers to buy from a brand on their very first interaction with them, which makes remarketing a really powerful tool to bring back shoppers to complete a purchase at a later date. By remarketing to potential customers via Bing, Google and Facebook, we can have a big impact on return rates and revenue. Using impactful creative, we can target the segments that are most likely to convert, such as basket abandoners and checkout abandoners, serving them different ads to more top of the funnel users, such as website visitors and product viewers.

Shopify analytics

The built-in analytics provided by Shopify are a good tool to help you understand performance, but they should not be used in isolation as they only tell part of the story. We complement and expand on this data with actionable insights from Google Analytics, Google Search Console and UX tools such as Hotjar or Crazy Egg, as well as the information from paid media tools such as Facebook and Google Ads.

Using the insights gained from this data, we refine the strategy and activity to maximise performance and return on investment.

Shopify CRO

Some of the tactics we use are:

Persona work to better focus on the most profitable shoppers
Enhanced navigation support
One-to-one follow up sessions
User research
User journey mapping
A/B and multivariate testing

Why choose Hitsearch as your Shopify partner?

At Hitsearch, we’re a digital marketing agency with a proven track record of working successfully with Shopify websites to drive up online traffic, sales and revenue. Our Shopify tips and tricks are tried and tested, meaning that every new project benefits from our experience. Some of the reasons we think you should choose us to help your business move up to the next level include: