Does Shopify Advertise For You?

Advertising your store is paramount for success. If you can’t get people to look at what you offer, how is anyone going to buy anything from you?

That’s why it’s easy to worry about it, and a common doubt people might have when creating their own stores is whether or not they’ll need to handle this side of their venture.

To answer the question right away, Shopify doesn’t advertise on your behalf; that goes for both your products and your store in general. You’re in charge of marketing your business, getting customers, and converting them.

Shopify is only responsible for their own advertisement to get people onto their platform.

Fortunately, you don’t need to worry a lot about it since I’m here to help anyway. You have several approaches to marketing, and while they might be a bit confusing at first, you just need to practice until they become second nature.

You have free and paid marketing methods, and you’re in full control of what you want to use and how.

Shopify’s own advertising

Shopify is one of the most successful eCommerce solutions today, and it’s not just because of all the benefits they offer. It’s actually because of how they make you see these benefits without annoying you or making it complex to understand.

Since its release 14 years ago, they’ve gathered over half a million users thanks to their flexible plans and countless features. Time only helped them grow and their reputation, and you can see that in the number of people who stick to them in spite of all the alternatives.

However, we care about how they get new people: their marketing. You’ve probably seen social media ads for the platform and its benefits, but you’ll never see them advertising user stores.

That’s different from other solutions like eBay or Amazon, which handle your advertising. However, that’s still a service that needs to be paid, and you do that through added fees on your sales.

Advertising your Shopify business

With that out of the way, let’s see how you can advertise your own store without Shopify’s aid. Keep in mind that this is an intricate topic due to how many ways you can approach the task and how it depends on your brand and niche.

Therefore, we’ll stick to the basics. You’re going to learn the foundations of how you can market your business, and from here, you can branch out and adapt to your own context.

Also, keep in mind that marketing and advertisement is always changing. Each update to social media platforms and search engines tend to alter the playing field, so you also want to keep track of these changes and how you should change your strategy to fit them.

Free marketing

Let’s start with the most interesting one: SEO and content marketing.

Content marketing is simply generating value for free in the form of videos, blog posts, etc; people interested in a topic will read your content, and you can direct them to your store with it.

SEO refers to ensuring your website shows up whenever people look up certain keywords on search engines. This goes hand-in-hand with content marketing.

Make sure you take advantage Shopify’s blogging features and research your keywords so that you can get free traffic from Google and other engines. This is optimal because you’ll receive traffic that’s actually interested in what you’re covering.

You can then write different articles about how your products benefit others – or even about how to solve common issues within your niche, mentioning your products among the solutions. You can then rank those articles as well and get more traffic.

You can also keep your social media profiles active by sharing your products, and content, and even just interacting with your audience. Just keep in mind that organic traffic from FB and Instagram isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Paid ads

This is the meat of marketing for most businesses today, and it’s just paying for ads on different platforms. It requires less work than the free methods, and the costs aren’t as high as you’d think, but you still need to invest in them.

Facebook Ads (and to some extent Instagram) are the most popular approach for a reason. Nearly all businesses use it, and for good reason: the amount of traffic it gets is massive. Besides, targeting is a great feature here, and it’s a great function to ensure the right people see your ads.

Google Ads is a similar approach due to its efficiency, but it works a bit differently in that it works by essentially pushing your site to the top results when users search specific keywords. That means you still have to research your keywords as with SEO.

A nice advantage of Google Ads is that you can pay for clicks, so you only need to spend money on people who actually click on your ads.

Finally, email marketing combined with sales funnels can be considered free strategies, but you’ll have to invest money in them once your business starts growing. The benefit of this strategy is that you’re marketing to people who already showed interest in your business.

Besides, you can use email marketing to keep customers updated about new products and promotions.

If you really want to learn how to market your business effectively on dozens of platforms (even more than what I listed here), then you really want to consider taking Franklin Hatchett’s eCom Elites.

It’s one of the cheapest courses out there for $197-297 depending on the package. It’s the best price-value ratio right now, and it has lots of knowledge on all the aspects of running an eCommerce business.

Conclusion

Shopify won’t run your advertising, but that isn’t really a bad thing. If you like to have as much control as possible over your business, then it’s definitely an advantage.

Running a business requires you to understand all the factors that play a part in your success, and marketing is a huge one, so you still want to learn how to run it nonetheless.

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