We’re on a mission to make Shopify Blogs more ‘Jazzy’. Barry Manilow is not the answer, but how do you drive traffic with a Shopify Blog and keep visitors there? Well, here’s Blend Commerce’s 5 steps to creating a super sweet Shopify blog.
1. Finding topics and themes.
This is hard for us to take, but our potential customers do not only care about having an amazing Shopify store. They care about time with their family, getting a work life balance, knowing the best beers to drink at the weekend and a whole bunch of other stuff which seems totally irrelevant to running a Shopify business. Whilst this may initially seem like a bit of a bummer, this actually provides some great opportunities for finding topics and themes for your blog.
Let’s look at an example of a recent client of ours looking to launch a niche clothing brand. After working with us on a demographic profiling report we created the following customer avatar:
From this customer avatar, we were able to understand a lot more about the target customer. Specifically, topic types that would gain interest beyond just the product our client was looking to sell. This prevents overload for the potential customer and enables the ability to sneak in subtle references to products.
2. Setting out the blog persona
Now that we have topic ideas, it’s important to be think about the blog and brand persona. For example, is your target customer a highly affluent, middle class lady who shops at designer boutiques or are they working 3 jobs just to get through college? Either way, we could write a blog about staying fit and active, but the style and overall content of the blog would be completely different. To get ideas on writing styles, look at the blogs and marketing materials of businesses that sell to the same target customer to you as a guide.
Here’s Becky from Blend doing her best persona impressions.
3. Creating your structure and title based on your objective.
Blog structure is a crucial one, as it's highly dependent on what you want the customer to do after reading your blog. Typically, these are the actions you’ll be aiming for with a blog:
- A sign up to an email list to use email marketing as part of a sales funnel.
- Sharing to create awareness on social media of your brand.
- Make an initial purchase on your Shopify store.
Whilst the ultimate aim for any Shopify store owner is to generate sales, it’s important to think carefully about the stage of interaction that you’re going to be at with the reader. For example, someone who has seen a shared article is less likely to respond to a purchase call to action than a reader who has already signed up to your email list. In terms of a general rule of thumb, the less your reader knows about you, the more you need to write.
4. Choosing a design.
Ahh the fun part! Let’s face it, the design of blogs are never that inspiring. Let’s take this one for example. It’s plain, easy to read and has images that add value and fun to the reader. Oh, Ok, not too bad then. The key point is that the design should reflect your brand, but also help you communicate your message. We’ve cooked up these little beauties below as some inspiration. If you’d like to make these a reality on your shopify store, just mail us for a quote.
5. Test. Test. Test.
I’m sure you’re always hearing about testing with social media marketing for Shopify, but the situation shouldn’t be any different with you blogs. We recommend testing 2 blog approaches initially, alternating between the approaches week to week. Once you’ve completed 3 of each style (over a 6 week period) evaluate which has performed best in terms of the action you were hoping the reader to complete.
We hope this blog has been a useful read - if you’d like to discuss your Shopify blog or anything shopify related, just click on the big purple button below to book a free consultation.
