If you are not browsing social media platforms daily, hiring an influencer to promote your e-commerce business seems like an abstract idea.  This post lays out how out to hire influencers to increase your sales on Shopify!

Think of Influencers as Freelance Advertisers

It’s a lot easier hire influencers for Shopify product advertising than you think:

1. Type in hashtags to major social media platforms (e.g. – Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, YouTube) related to your business. 

2. Treat hashtags like keywords. 

If you are selling car accessories, for example, try #cars, #carlifestyle, #carsofinsagram, #auto.  Check the hashtag finder here to get a good start! Click on influencer posts that appear to resonate with your business.

3. Click through to their personal social media profile

4. Use given business email or dm them with a clear, direct subject line

It could be as simple as “I want to hire you for an Ad campaign!”  Remember – social media influencers receive their income from these promotions, so they love receiving these business inquiries.

5. Set up payment agreement

Talk with the individual first to ensure they are an influencer in the space.  Review their engagement levels by scrolling through their last 20-25 posts (e.g. – comments and likes on each post), and establish clear guidelines to the number of sponsored posts you want!

Why Influencer Marketing is a Good Advertising Strategy for Shopify

Overall, hiring influencers is a great Shopify advertising tool.  It fits into broader advertising strategies for Shopify by amplifying your brand through an individual that has built up trust and credibility with their audience.  You can piggyback off that built-in credibility to reach customers on a more personal and intimate channel – especially compared to Shopify product ads on Google.

Conclusion: Assess the Success of Influencer ads with Ad360

After hiring influencers to “spread the word” about your brand, you’ll want software to retarget any customers that visit your store.  That way, you can continue to promote your Shopify products to interested customers across the web.  Ad360 is an affordable Shopify advertising tool that can help you track exactly where customers clicked through to your site, so you can analyze which influencers are doing the best job driving traffic to your store.  Try out our app for free today to make the most of all your Shopify paid advertising! 

Introduction: Learn Vital Ecommerce Marketing Strategies

Finding the “right way” to promote your e-commerce business can feel like a crapshoot.  With so many social media platforms and “search engines” to buy adspace on, unfocused or disorganized ad campaigns can quickly lose their sense of purpose.  If your promotional efforts are not organized into a coherent marketing strategy, you can end up draining your funds with no results!

This post provides a few key promotional skills for ecommerce business owners who feel flustered while attempting to increase sales on Shopify.  It will help you slow down your racing thoughts, consider different marketing angles, and put your marketing budget to good use!  If you believe in your product, it’s time to give it the strong marketing it deserves – read below to boost your Shopify sales success!

Trust Badges: Easy Way to Increase Sales on Shopify

They are so subtle you may breeze past them while browsing, but “trust badges” on your homepage and checkout window have a profound psychological impact on customers.  Trust badges are the little logos, usually the bottom of web pages, that indicate the following about your website:

• Verified “secure socket layer/transport layer security” (SSL/TLS) encrypted checkout

This trust badge means a third-party encryption system has verified and monitors your site’s security at checkout.  Seeing a trust badge from “trust lock,” for example, makes customers less likely to abandon their cart for fear of having their payment info compromised!  Check out a list of the best SSL/TLS third-party providers here

• Verified Accepted Payments Badge

To increase sales on Shopify and gain the trust of their customers, online businesses should apply for certifications from “accepted payment” giants.  “Verified by Visa” and “Verified by Paypal” are two of the most-recognizable badges, and you can start the certification process by clicking the links here and here!

• Third-Party Endorsement Badge

Trust badges verifiable from the BBB or Trusted Site are also well-recognized by customers.  To increase sales on Shopify, align your ecommerce business with one or both, linked here and here

One key thing to note: MAKE THE BADGES REAL AND VERIFIABLE BY “CLICKING THROUGH.”  Many sites will simply “copy + paste” an existing trust badge from Google or literally generate their own.  This is a big mistake, as trust badges are not legally binding.  They are only as valuable as the reputation of the third parties you link to. 

For example, if your “Trustlock” or “Verified by Visa” trust badge does not allow the user to “click through” and see the formal certification, it could actually make the users more skeptical, not less, or buying from your site.  To increase sales on Shopify, use only trust badges you applied for and got verified by trusted third parties for.  Don’t make up your own and slap them on your site.  They mean nothing at that point.

Go Mobile

The number of web searches (and web surfing) done from mobile devices has more than doubled from –  from 27% in 2013 to 63% in 2021.  That trend will only continue to go up, so it’s important that e-commerce business owners know how to create mobile-friendly websites and ad campaigns.  Mobile ad campaigns will become the primary way to increase sales on Shopify within the next several years, if it is not already.  Google has a nice breakdown of how to do so here, but, for the sake of conciseness and clarity, it boils down to a few key points:

1. Shorten text and simplify with “Call to action” buttons centered on the page
2. Include pictures/slideshows and videos
3. Using sitelinks to connect your Shopify page without taking too much space up
4. Add location extensions to connect mobile users to your brick-and-mortar location

Researching and implementing mobile-friendly ad campaigns is a promotional technique that very likely will increase sales on Shopify.  If you are running ads only viewable and optimized from a computer, you are basically missing out on two thirds of your potential customers!

Do Influencers Help Drive Traffic & Increase Shopify Sales? 

The short answer – YES.  There is a reason the idea of becoming an “influencer” is so trendy among young folk: they work.  They are an unaffiliated direct line to pools of potential customers who, for one reason or another, consider it worth part of their day to scroll and wonder, “I wonder what my favorite influencer is spending their money on?” 

The big advantage is the influencer themselves has done all the legwork of building a level of “credibility” and “trust” among their fanbase.  You simply ride their coattails to push your products, and thousands of followers deduce, “If my favorite influencer put their name behind this product, it must be worth buying.”

Now, you don’t have to hire the entire Kardashian family to have influencer-led ad campaigns increase your sales on Shopify.  There is a simple method to reach out to “nano” (1,000 – 10,000 followers) or “micro” influencers (10,000 – 50,000 followers) that can fit a smaller business’s budget while they scale up:

1. Go to Tik Tok, Instagram, or a similar social media platform
2. Search a hashtag relevant to your business (e.g. – #fashion for a clothing site)
3. Scroll through the pages until you find influencers worth reaching out to
4. Contact them!

Make sure you feel the payment process you agree to with the influencer is protected, and track the results to see if the influencer actually posted, and if that post got some nice engagement.  While these folks aren’t your friends, they are more than happy to provide access to their follower base for the right number!  Do not be afraid to contact influencers – they are looking to promote products that pay them well and don’t shred their reputation.  If you think you guys are good fit, reach out like you would any other business!

Conclusion

Verifiable trust badges, mobile-friendly ad setups, and influencer-promoted products are all highly effective techniques to increase sales on Shopify.  However, learning how to display the trust badges, establish mobile ad designs, and configure influencer outreach can sound like an arduous task to do yourself.

IF you want help implementing the promotional skills listed above, contact Ad360 today for a free demo!  We can help rebuild your website with trust badges, design entire mobile ad campaigns from scratch, and we’ll help analyze the impact of influencers on driving traffic to your store.  Reach out today!