You have finally put the finishing touches on your website, and it is live – congrats! But…what now? How will people know that you have this brand-new website? To get the results you are wanting, you need to make a plan to market your site. Here are four ways you can easily market your Shopify website:
Social Media
You already knew this was coming…put that website on all your social media platforms! According to Statista, over 4.25 million people actively use some form of social media. Linking your website to your social media platforms can be very beneficial when it comes to promoting your website. Social media offers an excellent resource to build brand recognition and drive traffic to your website.
You need to make sure the content that you are posting is useful, interesting, and entertaining for your audience. You can actively see which posts are getting the most engagement. That is the content you want to stick with. When you mention a product or service in your post, make sure to remember to link your website in the caption so people can easily navigate to the next step to make a purchase. You can even tag specific products in your posts which users can click on to go directly to the product on your Shopify site.
Another way to grab attention on social media is to go live! A lot of brands go live to launch new products or give more insight into the day to day of running a business. This is a good way for your audience to get to know you on a more personal level which helps customers want to support you and your business.
You may also want to consider getting help from influencers. Influencer marketing is trendy, and it actually works. You can offer free products or payment in exchange for influencers to promote your brand/business on their social media platforms. This is a great way for you to gain followers, get more engagement on your posts and therefore drive traffic to your new website. You can also team up with similar brands to host giveaways. This will help you reach similar audiences very quickly. It is also a fun and fast way to build brand recognition.
While organic social media posts are affective, they have a limited reach. If you want your information to get further than just your followers, you will need to put money behind these posts. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn have an ads manager that makes it easy to create ads and see how your ads perform. With paid social ads, you can create targeted ads that will reach users based on their location, age, gender, interests, and even options like friends of current followers or people who like specific pages.
Search Engine Optimization
Most customers turn to google when they are interested in a product or new business. If your website does not show up on the first page of google, you can assume you missed out on a potential client. This is where SEO comes into play! SEO is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results. Google wants to be the best, so Google only wants to show the best websites. This equals happy people finding what they want fast and returning to Google the next time they need something. If Google showed terrible sites, people would stop using it. Makes sense, right?
Here are a few ways to improve your SEO
- Page load time / website speed are very important to Google. Google does not like to show slow websites. In fact, if you have over 5 seconds of load time you lose 40% of your customers. FYI, Twin Oaks can run a FREE DIAGNOSTIC to check your website for page load times and analyze page speeds.
- You can improve your SEO by doing regular content updates. This lets google know your site is still an active site. If Google hasn’t seen any updates in years, Google will essentially think your site is out of business.
- Analyze the content on your pages. Google can’t read pictures. So, Google doesn’t know you’re a mechanic by uploading a gallery of cars on your website. You must have keyword rich paragraphs on the pages you want optimized. The goal is for Google to be able to pull your site when someone searches “mechanic near me.”
- Lastly, make sure your Google business profile is up to date with matching info from your website.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a cheap way to spread the word about your new website. It is also a good way to promote directly to your customers. Chances are, over the years you have been in business you have gathered emails and addresses from customers. If you are starting from scratch, you can start gathering those now!
It is easy to create an email marketing campaign. There are lots of different platforms to help you do this. Here is a list of email marketing platforms that are all fairly inexpensive:
- Mailchimp
- Drip
- Constant Contact
- Zoho
- Mailer
- Moosend
Most of these platforms are affordable and will allow you to send out email campaigns as well as mass texts to your customers. Email marketing is a good way to promote your website before it is launched and to continue promoting it after it’s live. All you need to do is share a sign-up URL with your followers so that they can subscribe to your email list. Here are some good ideas for how you can promote your website via email marketing:
- Countdown for when your website will go live
- Send sneak peeks of your website and any new products you have
- Send a coupon to your followers to use once your website has launched
- Help convert abandoned carts on your website once it has gone live
- Get reviews from your followers
Once your website has launched, you can let people sign up to follow your email marketing through your website to stay up to date on new products and updates about your business.
Get Involved!
This may sound old school, but it works! Getting involved in events and activities in your community is one of the best ways to promote your business and website while spending valuable face to face time with your client base. You can sponsor events or even have pop-ups at other businesses. Volunteering in your community allows people to put a face with a business. Like we mentioned earlier, chances are if someone knows and likes you, they will be more likely to buy from you and recommend others to do the same.
Now get out there and promote that awesome new Shopify site!
Of course, our Marketing Team at Twin Oaks is here to help if you need us on all of the above.
