Developing a marketing plan

A marketing plan outlines your approach to reaching customers and growing sales. It helps you choose the right combination of tactics and channels for your store, set goals that you can track, and adjust your marketing strategy based on results.

If you need help developing your own marketing plan, then you can hire a Shopify Partner. You can also read what a marketing plan is and how to write one on the Shopify Blog.

Understanding the marketing funnel

Before diving into the steps of creating your marketing plan, it's helpful to understand the marketing funnel. The marketing funnel represents the different stages a customer goes through from initial interest in your business to becoming a loyal advocate. Each phase has its own goals and metrics for success, and your marketing plan might focus on different phases depending on where your business is in its journey.

The marketing funnel has five phases:

1. Attracting potential customers: This phase focuses on generating excitement and earning attention. Identify your target audience and determine who is most likely to need your products. Key metrics include page views, inbound links, and social media followers.

2. Nurturing relationships: After you have customers' attention, you need to build trust and understand their needs. This phase involves SEO, email marketing, and social media engagement. Success is measured through engagement metrics and time spent on your site.

3. Converting interest into sales: This is where you turn interest into purchases. Focus on making your store functional and easy to navigate, especially on mobile devices. Your main metric here is the conversion rate.

4. Engaging customers post-purchase: It costs significantly less to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. This phase involves encouraging repeat purchases through customer feedback and retargeting campaigns. Track your returning customer rate to measure success.

5. Building brand advocates: Your most loyal customers can become brand champions who tell others about their experience. Focus on referral programs and social media contests to encourage word-of-mouth marketing. Measure success through referral sales and social media engagement.

Your business might be focusing on just one phase or working across multiple phases simultaneously. As you develop your marketing plan, consider which phases are most relevant to your current business goals.

Step 1: Defining your message

Defining your store's brand message can give customers information that might help them decide to buy your products. Each time that you create an advertisement or a piece of content, make sure that it reflects your brand.

To develop a brand message, try writing a few words to answer each of these questions:

• What makes your store special?
• How are you different from your competitors?
• What do you have to offer to customers?
• What do you stand for?

After brainstorming, you can write a message that uses some of the words in your answers. For example, if your product is different from your competitors because it's more eco-friendly, then you might use words such as green and recyclable in your message.

Step 2: Understanding your customers

Imagine what kind of customer might be looking for your products, and think about their demographic traits such as age, gender, roles, economic status, and location. Consider a problem that your customer might be trying to solve, and specific personality traits. The more that you understand about the type of customer who might buy your products, the better you can tailor your marketing to them. You won't reach everyone with your marketing, but you'll attract customers who are more likely to buy your products.

Analyzing online store traffic

If your online store is already receiving visitors, then you can analyze your online store traffic. You can use Shopify reports to learn about your sales and customers in great detail.

You can also set up analytics services, such as Google Analytics. You can use these tools to understand how customers interact with your online store.

Step 3: Choosing marketing tactics

The marketing tactics that you use are unique to your store, and depend on the products that you sell, your customers, and your brand. You should choose the tactics that make sense for your business rather than trying to do everything.

Your marketing plan might include some of the following tactics:

• Research: Collecting feedback and analyzing data.
• Product pricing: Pricing products competitively within the market.
• Sales and promotions: Offering discounts and planning promotions.
• Content development: Creating visual or written content for blogs, social media, or other channels.
• Email: Sending branded emails to a segment of your customers.
• Advertising: Placing print, audio, or online ads to get the word out about a product or service.
• Public relations: Managing your store's reputation and brand.
• Customer service: Promoting customer loyalty through support.
• Community involvement: Connecting with customers based on shared concerns and interests.
• Store optimization: Building trust and credibility to increase conversions.

To learn more about choosing a marketing strategy, refer to How to create effective marketing strategies on the Shopify Blog.

Building trust to increase conversions

One important marketing tactic is optimizing your store to build trust with new customers who haven't shopped with you before. When customers trust your store, they're more likely to complete purchases, return for future orders, and recommend your business to others. Consider the following areas:

• First impressions and store design: Use professional photos and error-free copy throughout your store. Ensure your navigation is easy to use on all devices with a clean, uncluttered layout. For international stores, provide translation and local currency options. Learn more about choosing and customizing themes.
• Product information: Help customers make confident purchase decisions by displaying multiple high-quality photos on each product page, breaking descriptions into scannable sections, and including product reviews. Add size charts when applicable, back in stock email forms for sold-out products, and filters on collections for stores with many products. Learn more about adding products and managing inventory.
• Cost and risk clarity: Display shipping costs early in the shopping experience and communicate your return policy clearly. Display shipping costs in the cart before checkout, write a clear return policy, and for international stores, display taxes and duties before checkout. Offer familiar payment methods and provide order status tracking. Learn more about shipping and delivery and customizing checkout.
• Brand credibility: Create an About Us page that tells your brand story and add a contact page with your phone number and email. Use a professional email based on your custom domain and consider adding Shopify Inbox for online chat support. Learn more about adding pages.
• Social validation: Encourage customers to leave reviews and maintain an active social media presence. Collect and display product reviews on product pages, build a presence on platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, and monitor reviews on external websites like Google. Learn more about social media marketing.

Step 4: Setting goals

Each marketing initiative that you begin should start with a specific, quantifiable goal. If you set a goal, then you'll know if your marketing tactics are successful and you can adjust them as needed. A goal might be short-term or long-term, and it might focus on attracting new customers, gaining repeat customers, or selling a certain amount of product, for example:

• 250 new customers in 6 months
• $5000 USD in product sales during a promotion
• 75 email subscriptions
• 20% improvement on abandoned cart recovery
• 10% increase in sales over last year

Setting goals can be challenging, especially when you're new to selling. Start with short-term goals so that you can quickly determine if you're on the right track. It's easier to analyze the impact of marketing on a small, short-term goal. If you have trouble reaching your marketing goals, then try planning for a smaller goal and a stretch goal that is slightly more difficult. If your store reaches the goal, then you can work toward reaching the stretch goal.

Step 5: Choosing your marketing channels

There are many different places to market your store including paid advertising, blog posts, press releases, social media, and email. Some marketing channels are better suited to short-term goals, and others are better for long-term customer retention. You can develop a mix of channels that you use in different ways and to reach different segments of customers. For example, you could pay for online advertising to attract new customers, and maintain a blog to attract repeat visits to your store.

Whether you're investing time or money into your marketing strategies, there's a cost to marketing your products. Make sure that you set a budget before you choose your marketing channels and begin developing advertising and content. If you're exploring paid advertising for the first time, then Shop Campaigns is a lower-risk option where you pay only when a customer converts, with no upfront ad spend required.

Paying for online advertising

You can use online advertising to feature your products, such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Pinterest Ads, or Shop Campaigns, a paid customer acquisition program that runs ads on the Shop app and website.

You can create some online advertising from Shopify by using third-party apps and integrated marketing apps. You can use Campaigns to manage and track your marketing efforts from the Marketing page in Shopify. Learn more about creating campaigns and automations in Shopify.

Step 6: Analyzing the impact

Analyzing the impact of your marketing can help you make decisions about future marketing initiatives and prevent you from wasting time or money on marketing that doesn't work. You might realize a problem with your message, or decide that a marketing channel isn't a good fit for your store.

During a promotion or marketing campaign, keep track of progress by breaking your goal into milestones. For example, if you're trying to increase the traffic in your store by 500 new visits in a month, then you might want to divide that by each day or week to keep track of progress. If your store seems on track to meet or exceed a goal, then you could consider expanding your marketing or adding another goal. If your store isn't meeting the milestones, then you might be able to make changes to improve results before the end of the campaign.

At the end of a promotion or marketing campaign, you should analyze the results. You can review for patterns in store traffic and product sales. If you were keeping track of your progress during a campaign or promotion and made changes, then you can analyze the impact of each change. You can use the marketing performance reports in your Shopify admin to review the results of your marketing campaigns.

Planning for marketing and developing your strategy is never finished. Each time that you make a change to your marketing tactics, products, store, or brand, you should review your marketing plan to determine if you need to make any changes. As you gain more experience, it gets easier and faster for you to make decisions because you understand more about what increases sales in your store.

Optimizing your store for conversions

After you've set up your marketing plan, you can optimize your store to convert more visitors into customers. Use the following tips to audit and improve different areas of your store.

Testing your store

Before making changes, test your store as though you're a customer making a purchase.

Improving your store's loading speed

Even small improvements to page speed can make a difference. For example, a 1-second reduction in load time can increase conversions by up to 2%.

Learn more about improving your online store performance.

Making your store easy to navigate

A smooth shopping experience makes it easier for customers to find products and complete purchases.

Building customer trust and credibility

When customers trust your store, they're more likely to make a purchase.

Using social proof to build confidence

Social proof is the idea that people pay attention to what others think before they make a decision. It plays a major role in online sales.

Differentiating from competitors

Differentiation helps customers choose your store over others.