Do you want to increase online sales for your ecommerce store? For online store owners with additional responsibilities like a full time job or raising kids, marketing can seem like an overwhelming endeavor. But it doesn’t have to be. In this post, we’re going to look at how you can boost online sales on your Shopify store using the most effective marketing strategies in one hour a day.
Post Contents
- Search Engine Marketing
- One Hour Keyword Research
- One Hour On-Site Optimization
- One Hour Content Creation
- Social Media Marketing
- One Hour Social Network Analysis
- One Hour Account Creation
- One Hour Social Media Maintenance
- One Hour Ad Creation
- One Hour New Features
- Email Marketing
- One Hour Account Setup
- One Hour Email Marketing Shopify Integration
- One Hour Email Marketing Content Creation
- Influencer Marketing
- One Hour Influencer Discovery
- One Hour Influencer Engagement
- One Hour Influencer Outreach
- One Hour Influencer Campaign Creation
- In Conclusion
- Want to learn more?
Search Engine Marketing
According to SEMrush, one of the top sources of traffic for top online retailers like Amazon, Apple, Home Depot, Walmart, and Target is Direct traffic. Direct traffic encompasses any source of traffic to a website that is not traceable to a specific search, social, or referring website. Direct traffic includes, but isn’t limited to:
- Visitors who come to your website by typing the website URL in their browser’s address bar.
- Visitors who browse your website using a browser that doesn’t allow analytics tracking.
- Visitors who browse your website using a browser within a mobile app.
Any online marketing tactic – search engine marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, etc. – will ultimately help you generate Direct traffic to your website.
The second source of traffic for top online retailers and ecommerce brands like BH Photo, NewEgg, Hayneedle, Musician’s Friend, and Build.com is Search traffic. Search traffic consists of visitors who find your website on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and DuckDuckGo.
Search engine marketing is the art of gaining organic (non-paid) visibility and traffic from search engines. If you haven’t looked into search marketing for your ecommerce store, here’s how to optimize your ecommerce store for search in one hour a day.
One Hour Keyword Research
Keyword research allows you to discover the top keywords searched by customers seeking the products you sell in your ecommerce store. The fastest way to find the best keywords for your ecommerce store is to use free tools like Ubersuggest, which allow you to enter a keyword and get the top suggestions, based on search volume. For example, if your ecommerce store sells power tools, Ubersuggest would give you the following suggestions.
Export these suggestions to CSV (spreadsheet) – you will need them for most of the upcoming marketing-related tasks.
One Hour On-Site Optimization
To optimize your website’s individual pages for search engines, you need to use one or two of the most relevant and popular keyword phrases in the following places.
- The SEO title of the page.
- The URL of the page.
- The content on the page.
- An image filename and ALT text on the page.
Free and paid SEO tools will allow you to make modifications to SEO-specific fields and elements on each page of your ecommerce store. Depending on how many products you sell, on-site optimization may take a day or a couple of days.
One Hour Content Creation
Once you have optimized the existing pages on your website for specific keywords, you can target new keywords by creating content on your website to match the keywords. For example, you can target power tools on product pages, category pages, and informational content about power tools – new product announcements, how-to use videos, top ten lists, and similar.
In a survey of over 2,500 B2C marketers, over 53% use content marketing to increase sales. 63% of these B2C marketers have found that content marketing has been effective in increasing sales.
Content marketing is an ongoing process – you can devote one day’s hour per week or per month creating a new piece of content optimized to promote your top products with popular keyword phrases. You can also invest in outsourcing your content creation to a freelance writer through marketplaces like Fiverr or by connecting with writers in your niche.
Social Media Marketing
Social media itself can be overwhelming. It’s hard to get your closest personal friends and family to agree on whether they want to use Facebook Messenger, Facetime, or Snapchat. For ecommerce store owners with limited time, the number of social media platforms and features within each platform can be daunting. But again, it doesn’t have to be if you focus on one task at a time.
One Hour Social Network Analysis
There are two ways to approach social media. You can start with the best social network for your products and target customer base, or you can start with the top social network so you reach as many possible customers on multiple platforms.
For the one hour a day marketer, it’s important to think about the features each social network has to offer and the type of content you will need to create to engage with audiences on that network. Ideally, you will want to use the social network(s) that you are most comfortable using on a personal level. If you enjoy creating content and engaging with people on it, you’ll be more successful as a whole.
One Hour Account Creation
If you haven’t already created a social media account, profile, page, or group for your ecommerce store on the social network of your choice, then take an hour to do so. It will typically require (depending on the social network) a name, category, description, custom username (try to keep it consistent from one social network to the next), photo, cover photo, and entering of a few custom details. Non-designers can use free tools like Canva to design great cover photos, as well as social posts and ads.
One Hour Social Media Maintenance
For each social network you want to use to increase sales for your online store, you will want to do the following basic social media activities, as applicable to the network.
- Post at least one or more new updates per day. This may be a photo, video, link to an article, link to a promotion, meme, etc. that you publicly post to your social media profile, page, group, or stories.
- Review and respond to comments and private messages to your social media profiles, pages, and groups.
These activities will help you connect with fans and customers on each respective network. Most importantly, anyone who finds your online store via a social network will get to see your latest news and get directed to your best products or content.
One Hour Ad Creation
Social media advertising allows you to reach new customers and re-engage current customers. You can create ads that appear in the news feeds of your target customers on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. Simple ad designs on each of these networks require you to create a small amount of ad copy and an image or video to accompany it.
Plan out at least one hour when launching an ad campaign for your top products to create your ad creative (tools like Canva will help), ad copy (write your ads like your competitor’s do), define your target audience (your top customers), and configure additional settings for your campaigns duration and budget. Then plan to dedicate 10 minutes a day to monitor the analytics for your ad campaign to ensure that your budget spend is getting results.
One Hour New Features
As you become comfortable with maintaining the basics on each social network, you will have more time to research new social networking features that could help you increase sales, such as tying Facebook Messenger to your Shopify store. Plan to spend one hour learning how to use the new feature to market your business, and then incorporate the new tactics into your daily social media maintenance.
Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to reach your fans and customers with customized messaging in their email inbox. Top email marketing services like Aweber, iContact, VerticalResponse, and GetResponse can easily be integrated into your Shopify store to collect the email addresses of visitors to your website and customers who make purchases into lists. You can then email custom messages to your lists to promote your latest products, content, and other relevant news.
One Hour Account Setup
New to email marketing? Give yourself an hour to review the top options for email marketing services that integrate well with Shopify and sign up for your account. You will need to set up your account details as well as your first email list before you can integrate it with your Shopify store.
One Hour Email Marketing Shopify Integration
For the next hour, you will will integrate your email marketing service with your Shopify store utilizing the apps mentioned earlier. For example, you can capture the emails of anyone who makes a purchase in your store as well as capture emails anywhere on your website with a simple form.
From there, you can set up advanced segmentation rules that will organize your email subscribers by their activity on your website. This will allow you to ultimately send customized messages that fit first time customers, loyal customers, and the customers you are trying to win back.
One Hour Email Marketing Content Creation
Once you start getting subscribers on your email list, you can start sending out regular email marketing messages. To start out, you can send a simple newsletter to everyone showing off your newest products, latest content, and other news. Use your favorite online brand’s newsletter as inspiration for your own.
With your email marketing service’s templates, you should be able to take one hour a week to craft a great newsletter and review the analytics for your last newsletter engagement, including opens, click-throughs, and conversions via your email marketing service’s analytics.
Influencer Marketing
Have you seen popular people talk about products they like online? Influencer marketing is a strategy where you find people who are popular with your target customer base to promote your product.
Influencer marketing can be a long, organic process where you network with the influencer in your niche with the hopes of gaining their attention naturally and ultimately getting them interested in talking about your product. It can also be a process where you find influencers in your niche who are already getting paid to do sponsored reviews of similar products and pay them to do a review of your product as well.
With either option, here’s how you can spend one hour a day on an influencer marketing strategy.
One Hour Influencer Discovery
Your first task in influencer marketing is to find the right influencers for the job. In your case, you will want to find the people who have a strong, engaged audience that will be interested in the products you sell. For example, if your ecommerce store has a popular YouTube channel, you may want to amplify your YouTube popularity by finding influencers who talk about the products you sell on YouTube.
One Hour Influencer Engagement
As you identify influencers who may be a good fit for an influencer marketing promotion, you will want to engage with them by following them and commenting on their public posts. For a YouTube influencer, this would mean subscribing to their YouTube channel, commenting on their latest videos, and commenting on their latest Community posts. As an added bonus, your comments will also be seen by the influencer’s fans, who are your target customers!
One Hour Influencer Outreach
Once you select the influencers you want to work with for your influencer marketing campaign, you will want to reach out to them via email and find out how they work with brands. Some influencers will require sponsorship, while others may be happy to do it for a free sample of your product.
One Hour Influencer Campaign Creation
Work with each influencer to create a promotion that their audience will love. The ideal influencer marketing campaign should ultimately drive new customers to your social channel and to specific products on your website. Note that each influencer is different, and thus may require more or less attention than others.
In Conclusion
As you can see, there are lots of things you can accomplish in the world of marketing in an hour a day. The key is finding the balance – if it only takes you 15 minutes to maintain your social media accounts a day, that gives you plenty of time to find new influencers. Or if you automate your social media, you have time for more content creation for your website and your email marketing sequences. In any case, remember that every hour you spend on your online store’s marketing will build your website’s visibility in search and social media, resulting in more fans and ultimately sales.