Guest Post Article: Contributed by Experts from Secomapp.
1. Why The Need To Build Brand Awareness?
Low traffic has been often brought up as one of the biggest bugbears for most Shopify beginners. After all, no traffic = no sales.
This is when building brand awareness becomes the laser focus. Brand awareness, no different from your name analogically, is how familiar your target customers are with your brand and your products.
To build brand awareness for your Shopify store is to plant an ever-growing seed into the mind of your target audience. From a small seed grows a deeper understanding of your brand: who you are, how your brand stands out, how your brand feels.
It is never easy to build brand awareness in an eCommerce battlefield when an average online shopper is bombarded with ads every two seconds.
Do you remember what you had for lunch last Monday? That's how crowded our memory is. We are wired to filter out unnecessary information, only hold dear to the important one. The same principle goes with building brand awareness - to make your brand accessible, valuable, indelible.
Let dive in to gobble up the best practices to build brand awareness for your online store.
Related article: 6 Things You Need To Know To Build Brand Equity Effectively
2. Build Brand Awareness: Best Practices For Shopify Beginners
2.1. Website Design
2.1.1. Make Your Website A Sight For Sore Eyes
Apparently, good website design will help the buyers to have a pleasant shopping experience that increases the user-friendliness of your website, attracting more targeted-customers, thus keeping them on your online store.
Customers tend to spend a tremendous amount of time choosing their products, which means if your website design doesn’t bring comfort, they will find another store to fulfill their cart.
In addition, an expert site signals trust with your audience. They will trust your shop and feel satisfied checking it out further. The longer visitors remain on your site, the more possible your business captures those leads, thus rising the conversion rate.
Great website design ==> More trust ==> Better conversion rates
Every shop needs a professional tool for the stunning design; however, most merchants do not have sufficient technical skills to create the best one.
Fortunately, PageFly provides professional page builder tools to any merchant having the trouble with building an online store on Shopify, or finding it hard to make their online store beautiful and highly effective.
PageFly makes website building effortless and pain-free!
Good web design can do wonders to your growth
WEB DESIGN INFORMATION AND INSIGHT:
- How To Design A Homepage That Converts
- Anatomy of A Winning Web Design
- Universal Web Design Principles That Improve Usability and Conversion
- The 16 Web Design Best Practices For Better Brand Awareness
- Top 27 Best Website Designs To Inspire You In 2020
- Build Website Business Credibility To Increase Brand Recognition
- Top eCommerce Website Branding Tips and Guides by Shopify
WEB DESIGN TOOLS & RESOURCES FOR SHOPIFY BEGINNERS:
2.1.2. Amp Up Your SEO Efforts
High search engine rankings do wonders for your brand awareness. Not only will your Shopify shop be easier to find, the higher your rank is, the more credible your audience considers your brand.
Well-implemented SEO tactics improve your website's visibility on search engines. Basically, SEO includes on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the work of optimizing your content presentation, while off-page SEO refers to the work of optimizing the technicality of your website performance to generate traffic to your site.
It happens all the time: your target audience will search for a product or service in your business industry and will be exposed to your brand if your website is well-positioned.
Ranking higher on SERPs pushes more organic traffic to your website.
Better organic traffic = Better brand awareness
ON-PAGE SEO RESOURCES AND INSIGHTS:
- The Ultimate On-page SEO Cheat Sheet
- The Definitive On-page SEO Guide
- How To Perform On-page SEO Audit in 15 minutes
- 16-Steps SEO Audit To Improve Your Rankings
OFF-PAGE SEO RESOURCES AND INSIGHTS:
- What is Backlink? How To Build Backlinks In 2020
- The Complete Off-page SEO Guide
- How To Build Backlinks For Your Brand New Website
- 10 Important SEO Trends To Know In 2020
SEO Tools For Shopify Stores:
2.2. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a business rewards one or more publishers (affiliates) for each sale made.
Affiliate marketing can work wonders for your new Shopify store. The basic principle is that:
- You have a product and wish more people could be fortunate enough to buy it, from you.
- You open an affiliate program, in which, signed up affiliate marketer will help you to promote your products, using their own arsenal and expertise - that can be Facebook Ads, Google Ads, SEO, or Social Media.
- Affiliate Program is a commission-based model, so you only pay your affiliate marker for each sale made.
It is no doubt that affiliate marketing will promote your brand to their communities, through both their social media channels or personal niches, therefore your brand has better exposure to a larger population of the target audience or potential customers.
The affiliate marketers will deliver the images of your brand to their network, so you can extend the size of potential buyers and build a strong customer base. Affiliate marketing is one of the most sustainable marketing methods to build strong brand awareness.
AFFILIATE MARKETING INSIGHTS AND RESOURCES:
- Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Affiliate Marketing 101: Guide For Merchants
- The Beginner's Guide to Setting Up an Affiliate Program for Your Shopify Store
- Drive Sales With Affiliate Marketing
AFFILIATE MARKETING TOOLS:
2.3. Partnership Marketing
Partnering with other Shopify merchants can help you drive a fistful of brand awareness. There are numerous cases of successful collaboration in the real world, and we have one excellent example from the collaboration between Apple and Hermès.
The partnership between the two brands was first formed in 2015. It started so promising that Apple organized the release of the third Apple Watch around the new Hermès Apple collection.
Not only had Apple been able to sell the Hermès version of the watch at three times the normal price, but it had also exposed its product to more fashion-conscious consumers. Thanks to this collaboration, Apple impresses the targeted-customer and has a high revenue that year.
Similarly, the good result may come if you partner with other Shopify shops, so both of your brands can reach out to a wider pool of audience.
PARTNERSHIP MARKETING RESOURCES:
- A Complete Guide To Partnership Marketing
- Co-marketing: How to Reach New Customers With Strategic Partnerships
- Co-Marketing and Partnership Marketing Tips and Tricks
- How To Build Partnership Marketing Plan That Drive Sales
2.4. Social media
Social media is a powerful marketing tool, albeit depending on who wields the sword.
Social Media's attractiveness has been proven from time to time, where brands deploy a wide variety of tactics to compete for every pixel on users' screen - either fascinating branded content or heavy-handed ads.
Competition is high, people's attention is short (8 seconds). The clock is ticking James Bond, you have 8 seconds to plant your name inside a regular social media user - what would you do?
Here are some basic points we recommend to follow to utilize the power of social media.
1. Determine The Right Platform(s) for Your Audience
Each social media platform is preferred by specific demographics - you would not want to buy a Linkedin ad for your Pet Supplies store - and bank on sales going through the roof.
The example bears out when it comes to other social media platforms - Instagram might be the best for Fashion and Beauty products, but Facebook might be better when it comes to Food and Drink products.
That's why before you made any investments, it'd be wise to drill down into the stats.
SOCIAL MEDIA STATISTICS:
- Global Social Media Research Summary For 2020
- 140+ Social Media Statistics That Matter To Marketers In 2020
- The Ultimate List of eCommerce Statistics
- Social Media Demographics to Inform Your Strategy In 2020
2. Deliver Content and Engage With Audiences
It’s important to produce content tailored to your audience and the platforms that carry your messages.
Laying at the heart of effective social media content strategy is customer-centric and audience-centered content. It will take more than one day to get to the 1-minute-1000-likes level that you've been seeing sometimes but with the right mindset and strategy, Rome can be built.
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT STRATEGY:
- Free Social Media Strategy Template
- How To Craft An Effective Social Media Strategy
- How To Develop A Content Marketing Plan: A Start-To-Finish Guide
- The Ultimate Guide To Instagram Marketing
- Top 10 Instagram Marketing Tips That Work
- Facebook Marketing Strategy From Top 20000 Brands
- Grow Your Business With A Winning Facebook Marketing Plan
- Twitter Marketing In 2020: The Ultimate Guide
- How To Use Twitter Effectively To Build Brand Awareness
SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT TOOLS:
3. Invest in Ads
Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads or Instagram Ads, can help you fast-track your brand awareness growth by enabling ads buyers to reach a large population of the targetted audiences in a short amount of time.
SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING RESOURCES:
- Social Media Advertising 101 Guide
- Facebook Ads: The Complete, Always-Updated Guide
- The Beginners' Guide To Facebook Ads in 2020
- Everything You Need To Know About Linkedin Ads
- How To Advertise On Instagram: A Step-By-Step Guide
- How To Sell On Instagram With Shopify: A-Z Tutorial
- Twitter Ads Campaign: A Simple Set-Up Guide
3. Conclusion
Developing fruitful brand awareness is the key success of any Shopify online store.
Brand awareness indicates the popularity of your business name and plays a crucial factor in the purchasing decisions of customers. Whichever technique you prefer to utilize for your online store, make it unique, and consistent to get the best results.
You can test several techniques to find out which approach reaches out to more audience and produces more traffic to your site as well as social channels.
