Want to skyrocket your business’s success but not sure how? Let’s take a leaf out of Shopify’s marketing strategy.
Scott Lake and Tobias Lütke founded Shopify in 2006 as an online snowboarding equipment store. However, they soon realized the potential of their business idea and added an API that let users create their e-commerce websites over Shopify.
Since then, the platform has been the pinnacle of ecommerce website creation. Plus, its user-friendly interface and extensive focus on customer experience have made it the go-to ecommerce platform for businesses globally.
Their team puts in a lot of effort to achieve its mission of “Making commerce better for everyone.” Some top Shopify stats include:
- Shopify presently has around 4.36 million active ecommerce websites
- Their revenue went up by 25% to $56.2 billion with a 36%YoY gross profit
- Shopify has over $700 billion in sales since its foundation
- They hold 25% of the market share of the global ecommerce market
- Their merchants have over 700 million customers
An important reason for their exponential success is Shopify’s marketing strategy. After all, with millions of followers and stellar engagement, it’s no surprise at all.
So, in this article, we will look at what makes Shopify’s content marketing strategy work.
Table of Contents
Shopify’s growth strategy
Shopify holds the monopoly within the website-building industry with a 38.2% global market share, while competitors like Wix have 9.5%.
Since its inception, Shopify’s growth strategy has been innovative. In fact, Shopify has done well in
- Listening to its customers
- Using ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing strategy and referral programs
- Relying on integrations
- Focusing on quality rather than quantity
- Using a subscription-based revenue model
- Building a social media community
- Using different media platforms to market its services and offerings
Shopify has tailored its various offerings to the specific needs of its different customer demographics. They follow this strategy for marketing their services to their diverse customer base.
The constant upgradation of its services and integration of new features has let Shopify stay ahead of its competitors. For instance, in 2010, Shopify introduced a loose app that lets business owners screen stores, get client information, and complete orders using their smartphones.
Similarly, in 2013, Shopify through its Shopify 2, added 60 new features to its platforms. In 2015, they introduced Buy Buttons. Whereas, in 2016, they added a social media integration feature to allow business owners to merge their social media accounts with their websites.
Since its inception, Shopify has maintained its stance for being an ecommerce-centered platform and continuously upgraded its features to suit the needs of its website owners. This significantly helped Shopify to become the leading ecommerce website service provider.
Shopify’s marketing strategy: A closer look
Shopify has been tapping into the potential of digital media to promote its offerings. Here are the two most crucial aspects of Shopify’s marketing strategy-
- Shopify’s content marketing strategy
- Shopify’s social media strategy
Now, let’s take a look into how Shopify uses these two strategies to leverage its growth-
Shopify’s content marketing strategy
Slack’s content marketing strategy is an excellent example of how a well-executed marketing strategy can catapult a firm to unprecedented success. In fact, since its inception, Shopify has used content marketing to produce useful materials that inform and interest their target market.
Here are the top three sources of traffic to Shopify’s website:
- Direct Traffic: Maximum users of Shopify are already aware of the platform and their services. So, they access the website by directly entering the platform’s URL.
- Organic Traffic: Shopify actively promotes its services through unpaid sources. These unpaid or free sources often guide the users to the official website.
- Referrals: Shopify has an impressive referral program through which its active users can refer new ones and get attractive rewards. It acts as a key traffic source for Shopify.
The high traffic generated by Shopify’s website is because of its strong brand presence, word-of-mouth marketing, and high search engine exposure, exhibiting a mix of brand recognition and excellent SEO methods.
Email marketing
Shopify uses email as a potent channel for lead generation, enrolling new users, and interacting with their current client base since they are thoroughly aware of their consumers’ needs. Their emails are aesthetically pleasing and educational at the same time, offering helpful ideas to improve user experience along with product updates and insightful information.
Plus, the emails sent by Shopify as part of email marketing contain clear and actionable CTAs along with thoughtful designs, which while establishing the brand’s connection with its target audiences also helps in driving sales.
Shopify is well aware that its target audience is busy business owners. So, the emails are purposely kept short and to the point with immersive and value-centered taglines to convince the readers about the benefits they will get by having a Shopify account.
Lastly, the tone of Shopify’s emails is a distinguishing feature of its email marketing campaigns. It does not overcrowd its customer’s email. All they do is exchange onboarding emails and service optimization advice.
Marketing campaigns
Shopify has been using innovative marketing campaigns ever since its inception, and they have largely contributed toward its success.
For instance, as part of its 2010 marketing campaign, Shopify used the “Build a Business” competition. The campaign challenged the shop proprietors to start a new online shop in the next eight months, and the most successful store would get a cash reward of $100,000. This increased online stores by 1000+ and total revenue that year.
Resource Library
Shopify heavily invests in SEO to ensure a higher ranking in the different search engines. The brand does this through blogs, how-to-do guides, stories, and similar content pieces.
These guides provide the required information to Shopify users and ensure the brand has adequate visibility over the digital media. They positively contribute towards improving customer experience and enhancing their loyalty towards the platform. That’s why, Shopify’s content marketing strategy is worth studying for marketers across different niches.
Shopify’s social media strategy
The success of Shopify’’s social media strategy becomes apparent when you take the number of followers the brand has on different social media platforms into consideration:
- Instagram: 1.2 million followers
- LinkedIn: 742,684 followers
- Twitter: 395.4k followers
- YouTube: 404k subscribers
- Facebook: 4.2 million followers
Here are some of the key features of Shopify’s social media strategy:
Presence over diverse social media platforms
Shopify has an extensive presence on social media to ensure it can effectively reach out to all its prospective customers. Further, they post content by considering the nature of the content style dominant on the platform. It lets the brand get the desired results from using these social media platforms.
User-centered content
Shopify’s social media strategy can be categorized into — educational or informational and success stories. The success stories are testimonials of the brand’s existing customers. Whereas, the informational content provides important brand-related information to prospective customers.
Community building and engagement
The brand frequently uses different interactive posts and polls to engage its audiences and build a community. It also helps the brand gather leads and valuable insights about its prospective customers, which, in turn, helps them effectively target consumers.
Influencer collaborations
They work with industry leaders or influencers like Mr Beast to expand reach, exchange knowledge, and promote the platform.
Webinars and live sessions
As part of Shopify’s marketing strategy, they host Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, webinars, or live events to engage the audience directly, answering questions and offering insights in real time.
Summing up Shopify’s marketing strategy
Shopify’s brand personality revolves around its mission of ‘making commerce better for everyone.’ The brand also focuses extensively on its customers and their user experience which reflects in Shopify’s marketing strategy.
The effectiveness of Shopify’s content marketing strategy is largely responsible for the exponential success attained by the brand. This is an important lesson for contemporary brands struggling to leverage the power of effective marketing strategies.
Looking for more such deep dives? Check out Slack’s marketing strategy next!
