59 Content Marketing Tips to Energize Your eCommerce Store
Implement these 59 fantastic content marketing tips to help you connect with your customers and increase organic traffic to your site.
Influencers, wholesale & more
Inventory effective & expiration datesNo more spreadsheets required
Multi-status, multi-location inventoryWarehouses, stores, and channels
Fulfillment holds & order editsAuto-hold on new CX ticket
Automate fulfillment rulesBundles, marketing SKUs, and more
Influencers, wholesale & more
Inventory effective & expiration datesNo more spreadsheets required
Multi-status, multi-location inventoryWarehouses, stores, and channels
Fulfillment holds & order editsAuto-hold on new CX ticket
Automate fulfillment rulesBundles, marketing SKUs, and more
Here are the top 200 marketing hacks and tools from around the web to help your startup dominate right out of the gates. You'll love #132.
Are you getting ready for your startup to absolutely crush it? If you are, marketing should be one of your first concerns. Your ability to market your new creation will determine it’s success or failure. That’s why I’ve taken the time to find 200 marketing hacks, big and small, to help your startup dominate the market right out of the gate.
Because this list is so long, and marketing is such a massive subject, I’ve divided the individual hacks into segments:
Without further ado, let’s dive into these marketing hacks:
General marketing hacks that apply to any business.
Many startups never even get started with their ideas and business. One of the best tips I can give you is to skip trying to perfect your idea and just get started!
You should look around blogs and companies in your niche, and find some influencers to partner with. You scratch their back with a backlink, and they might scratch yours.
Yes, even I am lazy. You probably are too. It’s human nature. Make everything you want your visitors to do as easy as possible. Give them obvious signs of what to do next, and reduce the steps to complete the task as much as possible.
No offense but your opinion doesn’t matter to most of the world. They care about what they want, not what you want. Think about everything you do from your customer’s point of view.
Additionally, people don’t care about the fancy features of your product or service. They want to know how it helps them. So tell them!
And by that, I mean do your market research. Find out who your ideal customers are, where they go every day, where they work, what social media sites they’re on, and even their birthday. The more you know about them the easier it will be to show them the benefits of your business.
Some of the tasks in this list are quick and simple, and some are massive tasks that may take weeks or months. On the bigger ones, break them down into small manageable pieces to keep from feeling overwhelmed and to make daily progress.
People love getting stuff for free. Think about the last time you got an unexpected free gift – did you appreciate the company that gave it to you more?
Mondays suck because people are catching up with work, and by Wednesday people are in the groove of things. Tuesday is the perfect day to get people interested in something. In fact, many artists release their albums on Tuesday because of this fact.
One of the best FREE ways to get tons of traffic to your site is by ranking high in Google’s search results. Ensure you’re using SEO best practices on all your pages.
Marketing means nothing if you don’t track the results. How will you ever know what’s working and what isn’t? You’re leaving money on the table by ignoring the data.
Backlinks are a crucial piece to proper SEO. Start looking for influential partners, guest blog opportunities, and blogs to comment on to start building links to your website ASAP.
If you’re not ready for a full launch (or are ready but aren’t sure how well your system will work), open a beta version and allow the early adopters a lifetime discount for hopping on board. Not only will this net you some early customers, but you’ll also get some crucial feedback on your system or product.
If you can think of a way to build a chrome extension for your app or service, do it. It only costs $5, and having one allows you to get easy publicity and potential additional customers.
There are tons of bloggers who post weekly or monthly roundups of news, tools, and blogs in virtually every niche. To find those people who are hungry for content, go to Google and type “intitle: monthly roundup [your industry or niche]” (Of course, you can also try weekly instead of monthly).
Simply reach out to the owners of these blogs and ask to be featured in their next roundup. For an idea of what to say, check out this guide for reaching out to influencers.
One of the best ways to make more sales and beat your competition is by providing incredible, over-the-top customer service. As Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, famously stated:
“Historically, our number-one growth driver has been from repeat customers and word of mouth.”
They’re a multi-million dollar company, and most of their money comes from great customer service.
If you have an app, try submitting it to a daily deals site to get more publicity and downloads. Try:
SnapGuide and Guides.co are communities in which people submit how-to guides for free, and in return, they can receive traffic back to their website. If you know how to do something helpful to your audience, teach them!
Use an app like Exit Monitor to create a popup window giving your visitors an offer when they move their mouse to leave the website.
Instead of your button saying “Start Your Free Trial”, make it say “Start My Free Trial”. Use the first person in the rest of your copy, too!
Add a newsletter signup form in a fixed position on the sidebar of your page. Emails are like gold in today’s marketing world.
One of the most overlooked, and paradoxically most important, pages on your website is the thank you page. You should use this page to wow the customer and get them to take the next step.
Rather than simply writing “Get Started Now” on your call-to-action buttons, try something unique like “Improve Conversions by 50% Now!”
Notice how I showed you a big red “Start My Free Trial” button above? Instead of making it blue like the rest of our theme, I made it red to really stick out and capture attention.
This point is minor, but some research has shown that adding “>>” to the end of your call-to-action button actually increases conversions. Who’da thunk it?
Don’t get too fancy with your CTAs. Stick with buttons being buttons.
Check out Hubspot’s guide to tweeting embeds.
Testimonials and social proof are a major factor of any great website. Without them, your viewers have less trust in you.
This is great for subscription based companies. If you accept recurring credit card payments, a credit card expiration reminder like Churn Buster can save you a lot of potentially lost account. It will email them to update their payment information when their credit card is about to expire.
If you’re able to, showing your customers on a leaderboard where they can compete with each other will raise their loyalty to your company.
Warning: This may cause some unhappy customers.
Gamification is becoming the new big thing in business and (hopefully soon) education. It’s so popular because it simply works. You can use an app like Smar7 Apps to gamify your store and increase your average order size.
By giving your users a task list, they will not only know exactly what they need to do, but they will also feel accomplished as they cross them off. Literally, show the item being crossed off and greyed out when they complete them; and when they complete certain ones, grant them achievements with badges they can show off on their profile!
Once they earn the achievements, allow them to share them via social media.
If you can find a way to make your platform social, you can increase customer loyalty exponentially. In fact, the more social elements you add, the more sticky your platform becomes.
When a customer goes to cancel their service or order, try to keep them as a customer by downselling them. For example, when I went to cancel my audible subscription, they offered to give me 3 months at half price if I stayed. They suckered me into keeping my subscription, which I still have to this day.
You can use your analytics software (like KISSmetrics, MixPanel, or Trak.io) to tag a customer any time they are “at risk” of unsubscribing. You could use a simple tag like “hasn’t logged in for 2 weeks” or something similar; when they get tagged, re-engage them with emails or through social media.
Use a popup box to capture more emails.
I don’t mean force them to enter their email; definitely keep a way for them to close the popup. To stop them, make them click a text saying something like, “No thanks, I don’t want to grow my business” or “No thanks, I don’t want to be healthy”. You can trigger a psychological reaction in some people who don’t want to click that button because it goes against their beliefs; and thus, they’ll sign up.
Simple, but often overlooked.
If you get a lot of questions, create a page with their answers.
Instead of offering your visitors a discount when they try to leave your website, why not ask them to complete a quick survey of why they decided not to buy?
These marketing hacks are specifically for eCommerce stores.
Include social proof, like product reviews, on your product pages.
Include a security badge on your product pages, like PayPal secure or McAfee secure, to increase trust.
Optimize your product titles to play on emotions; for example, instead of saying “Necklace”, say “Dazzling Sterling Silver & Rhinestone Necklace”.
Ensure your product images are only high-quality 1080p with no pixelation, and you show it from every angle. For more info on taking great product pictures, check out this article.
Your description should focus on the benefits of your product, not the features. Make it easy to read and touch on emotions.
Include product variants, like color or style, to increase your average order size.
Limit the number of items per customer to give them an extra sense of scarcity. For example, if you say “Limit 3 Per Customer”, there is a chance people will want to buy 3 instead of 1 because it makes the item seem like a better deal.
Scarcity increases conversions. Use a countdown timer like POWr.
If your shipping cost is free and arrives in 3-5 days, say so. If it costs $10 and takes 2 weeks to arrive, still say so. Keep surprises to a minimum to increase conversions.
Content marketing hacks and inbound marketing hacks for any business.
No amount of marketing hacks makes up for planning. Check out Hubspot’s Content Calendar guide.
Never run dry on headlines by always keeping a list to choose from.
People listen to and engage with stories more than any kind of article. Tell them a story they’ll never forget, and you’ll be rewarded with more shares, comments, and likes.
According to BuzzSumo: Awe, Laughter, and Amusement are the emotions contained in the most shared articles across the web. Share more content that captures these emotions.
The majority of top search results in Google are 2,000+ words. Make sure you’re writing in-depth, long form articles.
That said, don’t just write crap. Make sure the stuff you’re creating is actually useful.
The vast majority of people in this poll stated they prefer to read “how to” articles above all else.
Provide 10x more value than you charge. If someone pays $10 for your subscription, give them $100 of value. Not literally; but give them the content and help to make it worth $100. Give 200 marketing hacks instead of 20. 😉
According to Upworthy, you should write 25 headlines (yes, 25 headlines!) before you pick your headlines. Then, pick two and test them.
If you have some content that is just incredibly, over-the-top valuable, require the viewer to share it in order to see it. If you don’t like this idea, then let them access a chunk of it without sharing; once you feel you’ve captured their interest, ask them to share it to continue reading.
The great content that you don’t require sharing to view, but consistently gets views and is relevant even as it ages should be posted on your website to its own page as evergreen content.
As in, literally include more share buttons. Make buttons that float with the viewer as they scroll down the page, that sit fixed at the end of the article, and that pop up in the bottom left corner.
Using sites like Mashable & Techcrunch, you can stay on top of the latest trends. Capitalize on them by being one of the first to write about them.
Because, memes. People share them.
Not only will this help Google crawl your site, it will also keep your visitors there.
A picture is worth a thousand words. An infographic, then, is worth ten thousand. But seriously… they get more shares and engagement.
Offering a free course is an easy way to grow a newsletter. You could make it as simple as a 3 part email series leading to blog posts you’ve already written alongside some extra commentary.
If someone read your whole article, chances are they’re at least a little interested in your content. Offer them a next step.
Hubspot does this really well.
If you’ve found some influential people in your niche, send them discounted or free products/services to try out and, hopefully, review/spread the word.
The use of influencers goes on and on. Ask them if you can repost their blog post to your blog for easy, free content. As long as they approve and you link to them, you should be fine.
Find broken or outdated links, then content the blog owner about them. Maybe even point out some spelling or grammar errors. They’re certain to thank you… and maybe provide you with a small return favor. Like sharing your content or writing a guest post.
To make their lives even easier, rewrite the outdated or broken content and make it better. Then tell them, “Hey this link is broken. I wrote that content too; why not link to mine?” Then they barely need to do any work to replace the link, and you get a backlink and some traffic.
Marketing hacks are great, but you need content! You can repurpose your content over and over. Turn your best content into a video, a podcast, an infographic or a slideshare. Then share it as new content.
Those same influencers you’re after? Ask to interview them! Interviews make for interesting content, and the person you’re interviewing will probably share it as well. They’ll likely feel flattered you asked, so it’s a win-win!
Look for products or services that would complement your product or service well, then try to partner with them. You don’t have to actually become business partners, but help each other out.
Have some of your customers done extremely well using your service? Write about it! Tell their story – they’ll be flattered and share it, and you’ll have a great story like we talked about.
This is a well known, but still highly important marketing hack. Search for top keywords in your niche. Read the top results. Can you write something better? Do it, and try to beat them in the search results.
Ask your users to uploads pictures of your product, write testimonials, or even write guest posts on your blog!
The fatal mistake of many business owners and content marketers is that they spend more time creating their content than they do promoting it; promotion is just as important, if not more important, than creating the content in the first place. All the marketing hacks in the world won’t help if you don’t take action on them!
Markerly is a way to advertise with the top influencers in your niche; for a price, of course.
Click to Tweet is a free tool that allows you to see detailed analytics on your tweets.
Buzzsumo is a tool to search for top articles based on backlinks and virality, as well as top influencers.
Infusion Soft is an all-in-one marketing and sales software built for small businesses. The software automatically follows up with customers via email and social media and tracks your customers via their CRM.
HubSpot is an inbound marketing software and CRM.
Marketo is a suite of tools covering email marketing automation and analytics.
Email marketing hacks to crush it.
No amount of marketing hacks will help you if you don’t write a plan. Of course, Hubspot strikes again with their awesome guide to creating an email content calendar. They also have tons of their own marketing hacks and guides.
The rule of 7 states you should wait at least 7 days before promoting your product or service to your leads. During those 7 days, instead send them valuable content; be it yours or someone else’s. If you’re not sure what content to send, check out these next few marketing hacks:
Curating means compiling or organizing the best information in one place. This list isn’t a mere creation of content. It’s a curation of all the greatest marketing hacks I could find around the internet.
In your emails, send links other people’s content, as long as it’s relevant and you’re not competing directly with them. Then, tell them you shared it; they might return the favor.
Your email headlines should evoke some emotions, just like your blog post headlines. For example, try leaving people hanging with a good title like “This One Easy Trick Destroyed My Stress”.
Try to keep the headline short enough that it doesn’t get cut off. Of course, you could always use the cut off on purpose, like “I lost twenty pounds by…”
Email messages you receive with the subject “FWD:” or “RE:” are seen as more important and are more likely to be clicked on.
Warning! Don’t overuse these marketing hacks, and don’t use them for just any email. Live up to people’s expectations of it being an important message or this strategy will backfire on you.
High-quality images are amazing. Unfortunately, having a lot of images increase your emails chance of ending up in the spam folder. All-text emails are not unheard of in the marketing world; or just one or two high impact images.
Embed real tweets from your customers or include testimonials in your emails.
Use a tool like Receiptful to enhance your email receipts and increase repeat customers.
One of your high impact images could be a CTA button.
Marketing hacks alone won’t get you customers. You need to show empathy and become personable. Use their first name in the email if you have it; most email marketing platforms do this automatically now.
Ask people to reply directly to your emails. Keep an eye on your inbox, and respond to everyone ASAP.
This marketing hack is important – No one wants to be spammed by emails. One or two a week is even pushing it. Try to find a number that works for you.
Your signature is a great place for quotes and links to important pages on your website.
An email drip campaign is a set of automatically sent emails which “drip” down to your customer one at a time over the course of the campaign. Send drip campaigns to increase engagement and conversions.
Set up autoresponders if you can’t reply to your email right away, to ensure your customer their email was sent and will be responded to shortly.
Every time you send an email, create a list of all the people who didn’t open it. A week later, resend the same email to that list.
There’s nothing worse than getting an email with tons of spelling and grammar errors. Please, for the love of all that is great, proofread your emails.
Testing, tweaking, and testing some more is what a marketer is all about. You can easily split test landing pages, emails, headlines and more if you have the right tools (like LeadPages, MailChimp, etc.)
Speaking of MailChimp – they have this awesome new tool called Wavelength which allows you to send your emails to other people’s lists.
The next few marketing hacks are really email marketing tools to get the most of your customer’s email addresses. Revue is a place for email newsletters. You can add your newsletter there to be seen by their visitors.
ListBuilder is a free email popup tool.
Vero is an email marketing platform in case you don’t like the others.
MailChimp; another, easy-to-use email marketing platform.
AWeber, a third email marketing platform option.
Active Campaign is the fourth email marketing automation tool on the list; I like them a lot because they have some cool workflows the others don’t have.
SendGrid is great for transactional emails.
sendwithus is a different email marketing platform in that they have a very modern design.
Customer.io is a messaging platform for your website.
One of the best features of Klaviyo is the built in abandoned cart recovery.
Social media marketing hacks to gain followers and customers.
Find hidden email addresses on LinkedIn with the SellHack browser extension prospecting tool.
If you’re not previewing how your website and blog posts look when shared on social media, you’re losing a lot of traffic. Start optimizing your title, image, and URL.
Regardless your chosen social platforms, you should be posting at a minimum of once a day. On Twitter, you could even post as much as 10 or even 100 times per day if done properly.
You shouldn’t need to hear this marketing hack, but so few people do it. Responding to your social comments and direct messages is easy money. People want to know they can trust your business; responding to them gives them that trust.
Overwhelming yourself with every social channel is bound to make you burn out and feel useless. Stick to one or two, master them, and build from there.
You can use AdEspresso to see the ads other people have been using for some insight. Just check their examples page.
Facebook has been optimized for images. Instagram and Pinterest are two of the most popular social sites. Media is the way to go. Of course, test this hypothesis to see what works for your business!
Post it on FB once today, once in a week, and once in a month. Post it on Twitter twice today, once tomorrow, once next week, etc.! No reason you’re limited to one share – you’ll miss a ton of people if you only share it once.
Marketing hacks are useless without a little tact. Don’t be stingy. Other people make great stuff your followers would appreciate, too.
They might even share your stuff in return!
Offer the owners of LinkedIn groups in your niche a discount or freebie of your product or service, in exchange for an honest review in the group.
Use a tool like StealthSeminar to record a webinar and play it over and over to your visitors. Just try not to make it obvious – you might piss them off if they find out.
When you get a new customer – tweet them! Say thanks, and welcome to the team!
Wistia, unlike YouTube, gives you the link and SEO advantages when someone embeds your video on their site.
Just as you market to the LinkedIn group owners, join the groups! Answer some of their questions, and maybe you’ll be able to offer your product as a solution.
Facebook groups, like LI groups, are a great way to connect with your audience in your niche.
What better way to start a community around your niche than by making one yourself? You can also answer people’s questions and get them around like-minded people who will help each other.
The next few marketing hacks are all about paid social media. Facebook is becoming pay-to-win. You don’t have to spend a lot, but you do have to spend something. Start brushing up on your FB ad skills.
Pinterest is not pay-to-win, but running an ad might help you get more traffic.
Like Pinterest, Twitter isn’t pay-to-win. However, knowing how to run a Twitter ad effectively will help your business.
Everybody loves getting free stuff. Run a contest or a giveaway to capture emails, increase your following, or gain UGC (User Generated Content)!
Another under-used marketing hack: Asking your customers to post images of themselves with your product can net you some valuable social proof.
Reach out to social influencers to repost your blog or products.
The best influencers are those not with the highest following, but with the highest % of retweets! You can get this information from BuzzSumo.
Here’s one of the best marketing hacks out there. Now that you’ve found some influencers that you could work with, start creating a large list (1,000+) of influencers. Then…
Turn that list into an audience on your FB or Twitter ads, and market your content directly to them. If your content is genuinely good and useful, they’ll share it without you even asking!
A list of some of the best marketing hacks and growth hacking tools on the web.
Marketing hacks and growth hack tools to help you gain more website traffic.
Google Keyword Planner is a great way to find new keywords to target your content to. Just type in a word and you’ll see similar keywords and how often they’re searched for. Additionally, you can search a competitor’s URL and find the keywords they’re using.
Ahrefs.com is a fancy little tool that tells you how many backlinks a URL has, and much more. You can use it to find easy-to-rank-for article ideas.
Colibri.io is an alternative to Buzzsumo.
SumoMe is an email popup, heat map, and social sharing tool you can use to increase your traffic and split test your site.
HotJar is also a heat map; however they don’t offer the additional features of SumoMe.
Branch.io allows you to easily link users to your mobile website or app, and also provides detailed analytics.
Pay With A Tweet lets you give discounts to people if and only if they share your content, or “pay with a Tweet”.
Canva is a free image editing software that allows you to quickly and easily create social media profile pictures, cover photos, ad photos, and other things like marketing materials, fliers, etc. It’s amazing – you have to try this one. (I don’t get paid for promoting them, I just truly believe they’re awesome.)
Nimble is a social monitoring app, and much more. You can see details on your customer like where they live and work, and what their hobbies are.
MixRank allows you to tap into other people’s email lists to market to highly targeted customers.
Twilighter gives your visitors the ability to highlight any text on your page and instantly tweet it.
Marketing hacks and growth hacking tools to help you convert that traffic into customers.
Hello Bar allows you to create a bar at the top of your page to advertise a sale or get more email signups.
Bounce Exchange views your visitor’s digital behavior sort of like a salesman views body language, and tailors their web experience to their unique behaviors to increase conversions.
SessionCam lets you record the screen of your visitors live on your website.
KISSmetrics is the king of analytics and ensuring quality data.
CrazyEgg shows you a heat map of what your customers are clicking on specific pages.
Totango analyzes your customers to tell you when they’re at risk of leaving, when they need more product training, and more.
Unbounce allows you to easily create and split test beautiful landing pages.
Optimizely allows you to test and personalize your desktop and mobile site.
If you want to easily A/B split test, including analytics and heat maps, try Visual Website Optimizer.
Clicktale is another possible heatmap platform with analytics..
Receiptful is a simple way to send high-converting receipts to your customers.
You can use Zapier to link multiple web apps together automatically. For example, you can link your gmail with dropbox to save important files.
Set up an eCommerce store in minutes with Shopify.
Use Qualaroo to have little “nudge” surveys pop up on your screen. Ask customers what they think of your website, products, pricing, and more.
Consumer Baromoter is a tool by Google to help you understand trends and the things people are searching for around the world.
Typeform helps you create beautiful and simple forms your customers can quickly and easily fill out.
Use Polldaddy to create surveys or polls for your audience.
With Olark, you can have a chat box pop up on your website for our visitors to contact you. Eventually you can send automated responses when you start seeing the same questions asked many times.
OK, you got me; this isn’t a marketing hack so much as a piece of advice. I’ve learned through the years that the saying “half the battle is showing up” is actually true. By being persistent in attaining your goals and consistently show up, it’s almost impossible not to succeed! Good luck, and I hope you’ve found these marketing hacks, tips, and tools helpful!
ChannelApe is an inventory management platform. We can automatically add your products to your online store, Amazon, eBay, or Jet.com. Whenever a purchase is made, your supplier is notified and your inventory quantity changes to match the new amount; automatically. Automation is the key to business growth.
Know of a marketing hack not on this list? Let us know of your favorite marketing hacks or tools in the comments below! Don’t forget to share the article if you found it helpful; I worked hard to curate this list, and want to help as many people as possible! Thanks!
Implement these 59 fantastic content marketing tips to help you connect with your customers and increase organic traffic to your site.
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