25 Best Marketing Articles for Each Stage of Growth

There’s a whole lot of marketing advice out there, and not all of it is accurate.

The ability to filter signal from noise is now more important than access to information. You need to build your own curriculum from the many places offering advice. We’ve noticed that when it comes to marketing, people are quick to build their reading list by channel—email, ads, content marketing, you name it.

但它不是通道,一直很重要, it’s the stage your business is in. Why? Because the real value of information is helping you figure out what you need to know at the right time.

That’s why we organized all of our must-read marketing articles by stage of business growth. From first sale to full scale, here’s a collection of guides to help you at every step of your entrepreneurial journey.

The best articles for every stage of business growth

Pre-product stage

A core tenet of product–market fit is that a great market can actually draw out a strong product. In other words, deeply understanding the real demand of the people you’re selling to can help you create a great product.

And, of course, even a best-in-class product can’t survive without a market. While you’re gearing up to launch, make sure to check out these marketing articles on how you can best prepare beforehand.

1.Need a Catchy Online Store Name? Find Ideas With These Tips and Free Name Generators

It all starts with a big idea. And then—a name! As brand strategist Marty Neumeier says, “The right name can be a brand’s most valuable asset.” While there’s no surefire way to pick the perfect name, there are some consistent elements of easy-to-understand and catchy brand names that every new business owner should consider. For additional ideas to get the gears turning, be sure to try ourfree business name generator.

2.How to Do a Competitive Analysis (+ Free Template and Examples)

Every appealing business idea feels like a blue ocean of opportunity. But before you dive in, it’s best to know who already inhabits the waters. Competitive analysis helps you understand the current landscape, market shifts, and marketing trends. By filling in the spaces with known competitors, it also becomes easier to spot areas where you can have a competitive advantage. But competitive analysis is much more than stalking other brands on Twitter.

3.How to Validate Your Product Ideas

There’s nothing more discouraging than pouring sweat equity into a product you think people will love, only to hear the sound of crickets when you finally launch. The simple solution is to validate your product ideas before you fully commit to a business. How? Well, by ringing the cash register. But if you haven’t done that, we have a few other ideas to try.

4.A 14-Point Ecommerce Checklist to Launch Your Shopify Store

You’re finally launching your Shopify store after all your hard work. It’s exciting, but can quickly become overwhelming. Deep breath. It’s time to create a checklist. Take time to study Shopify'swebsite builderor hire a professional. Take a methodical approach to your launch, ease your mind, and stay organized with this handy Shopify store launch checklist.

5.How to Get Your Online Store to Rank on Page One (With Checklists)

Samantha Renée is a former Merchant Success Manager and current Course Producer at Shopify. She’s helped thousands of new business owners grow their business, and if there’s one consistent pattern she’s noticed, it’s that most founders struggle to understand search engine optimization (SEO).

而SEO常常似乎是不透明的,现实是there are a few fundamental things you can do to your store today that will help you create website visibility in Google over the long term.

6.How to Define and Reach Your Target Audience

You’ve poured tons of time and effort into creating your products and online store. Now, you have to get those prized products in front of therightpeople, with messaging that resonates with them. By knowing your audience, you can market products more effectively and invest in marketing campaigns that actually work.

Do you know who your target audience is? If not, this article will walk you through how to find and reach them.

7.The 5-Step Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business

A good marketing strategy gives you a clear path to attracting and retaining customers. But if you’re creating your first one, it’s easy to get lost in all the tactics and best practices. Not to mention all the marketing channels—should you invest in email, social, SMS, paid ads, or all of the above?

This article gives you a five-step framework to create a digital marketing strategy for your business. Learn from experts like Ezra Firestone (Smart Marketer), Ben Zettler (Shopify Plus Partner and Expert), and Taylor Holiday (Common Thread Collective) as they teach you how to build a strategy that works.

Landing your first sale

Coffee’s for closers, and now it’s time to join their ranks. Once you’re ready to ring the cash register for the first time, it’s best to have a clear message for your product, a high-converting product page, and above all, a plan.

Below, we’ll cover how to start acquiring your first customers consistently and profitably, so you can build your business for the long term.

8.How to Make Your First Online Sale in 30 Days (Checklist)

At Shopify, we’ve found that, with the right product, a typical store can expect to get its first order after roughly 400 sessions from relevant sources of traffic. You may already be on the road to your first sale. To help you get there, we put together a simple checklist you can follow for 30 days to help you stay focused and accountable.

9.What’s a Value Proposition and How to Write One

Too often, founders, and even marketers, assume a value proposition is a headline on a website or a tagline on a brand, but it goes much further than that. A value proposition is a distillation of why people buy from you (or should).

When your value proposition is clearly defined, it doesn’t just show up on your homepage—it influences every single point of contact with your brand.

10.Product Page Tune-Up: 9 Timeless Ways to Increase Conversions

Whatever path your customer takes, all roads eventually lead to your product page. It’s here, at this crucial location, that a customer decides whether or not to buy. In short, product pages matter. But before you go looking for the latest “must do” tactic to increase conversions, start with the timeless stuff. In this article, we run you through our checklist for tuning up any product page on your store.

11.Customer Acquisition: How to Calculate It and Create a Profitable Strategy For Your Business

If you can’t acquire customersprofitably, you soon won’t be able to acquire them at all. One of the most important concepts in marketing is understanding what you spend to get a new customer versus what they usually end up being worth to your business, especially if you can encourage repeat purchases. Knowing the numbers helps separate marketing math from myth and will help you create a profitable strategy for getting new customers in the door.

12.Driving Traffic but No Sales? Here’s How to Diagnose and Improve Your Store

The classic traffic jam. If you’re getting unique sessions to your online store but can’t quite seem to close the deal, there are a number of common culprits. Some of them are harder to address and answer, like if you’re selling a product that just isn’t appealing enough.

Sometimes, though, certain aspects of your store design, copy, or overall messaging are holding you back. If your symptom is no sales, this post will help you get a diagnosis.

13.How to Price Your Products in 3 Simple Steps

Remember the Four Ps of marketing from back in school? Either way, know that pricing is an incredibly important part of marketing your product. Your product’s price affects your cost of customer acquisition and profit margins, and, as we’ve covered above, if the math doesn’t work, the marketing doesn’t work.

Your price also affects the demand for your product. Price too low and you won’t capture enough value to stay in business. But price too high and you may scare too many customers away.

14.Drive More Ecommerce Sales with Live Chat Without Being Trapped at Your Desk

Businesses still underestimate live chat. They shouldn’t. Research fromForresterfound customers who chat with a brand convert three times more often and have a 10% to 15% higher average cart value.

Live chat helps you guide customers from conversation to conversion, but that doesn’t mean you have to be available to chat 24/7. Read this marketing article to learn about the right locations (and times) to greet your customers at the proverbial door.

15.How to Advertise on Facebook: A Beginner’s Guide

Facebook has around 2.45 billion monthly active users, making it nearly unique in terms of how many people you can potentially market to. While Facebook’s advertising algorithm gets smarter (and easier to use) all of the time, Facebook ads can still be very intimidating to newcomers. If you’ve been in search of a turn-key guide to follow in order to learn the ropes of Facebook advertising, read this article.

16.The 18 Best Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns

There are two assets you can own on the internet: your website and your email list. Email is an especially valuable channel because it can directly influence the three main levers of growth: increasing the total number of customers (C), increasing the total number of purchases per customer (purchase frequency, or F), and increasingaverage order value(AOV).

If you need a crash course on all things email marketing, be sure to check out this article.

17.12 Inspiring Social Media Campaign Examples

Social media is an excellent tool for telling stories. An effective social media campaign can help you launch a new product, promote a milestone, or celebrate a holiday. It can build community, drive engagement, and increase sales.

Stuck on ideas for your next marketing campaign? Check out these 12 examples, from major retailers to small businesses, with takeaways you can apply to your social media tactics today.

Driving sustainable growth

“Do things that don’t scale” is excellent advice—until you need to scale. Once you’ve covered the essentials and have started driving a few sales per day, it’s time to start thinking about how you’ll scale your acquisition efforts and improve customer experience, while keeping costs down. Also, now that you have a few customers, new forms of marketing (and remarketing) are available to you.

18.Shopify’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence: ‘No, Influencer Marketing Isn’t Overhyped’

You’ve probably heard the term “influencer marketing” at this point, and have most definitely seen influencer campaigns on Instagram or TikTok.Some 93% of marketerspartner with influencers to promote their products. It’s become a popular marketing tactic for brands, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

This article doesn’t offer a cookie-cutter “ultimate guide” to influencer marketing. Rather, it walks you through how David Gaylord, founder of skin care companyBushbalm, drives traffic and awareness with influencers, seeing a three to one return on every dollar spent.

19.How to Scale Your Facebook Ads (While Maintaining a Healthy Return on Ad Spend)

Scaling your Facebook advertising means increasing your ad spend while maintaining a positive return. It sounds simple, but it isn’t always so easy. Typically, successfully scaling your results on Facebook from $50 to $5,000 will require you to expand your audience, build your funnel, increase your overall budget, and develop new creative.

20.What is Customer Retention? 5 Strategies to Keep Customers

You’ve seen those statistics. It’s cheaper to retain a current customer than it is to find new customers. What you may not know is that a retention strategy is never one size fits all. There’s a right and wrong time to lean into retention, and there are strategies that work best at different stages of business growth. In this article, we’ll share how retention marketing fits your product (and business), along with the top five strategies to consider.

21.How to Improve Your Facebook Advertising Funnel with Sequential Retargeting

When a visitor lands on your website, there’s a sequence of events that you’d probably like them to complete before leaving. Naturally, not every visitor will make it all the way through to the end of the journey.

On average, only 2% of website visitors end up making a purchase. With sequential retargeting on Facebook, you can ensure visitors who stopped by your website and left see a variety of ads as they move through the funnel, increasing your chances of converting them.

22.The 18 Types of Google Ads and When to Use Them

Welcome to Google Ads, one of the most misunderstood platforms for paid advertising. To get a firm grasp of this channel, youmustunderstand the ad types available to you, as well as their individual strengths and weaknesses. In this marketing guide, we’ll share the essential terminology to know, along with what you can realistically expect from each campaign type.

23.7 Email Automation Ideas that Keep Customers Coming Back

Lifecycle emails are so effective because they can be based on behavior—once your customer takes a specific action, you can send them a context-relevant message through email. And there are some heavy-hitting campaigns in this category, including abandoned cart emails, win-back sequences, and re-engagement emails. Schedule once and prepare for revenue.

24.ob欧宝娱乐app下载地址市场营销Attribution: Seeing the Customer Journey More Clearly

沿着路径转换,你的客户encounter many touchpoints with your brand. Do you know which of those touchpoints have the greatest influence in closing the sale? Marketing attribution can help you peer through the fog and learn more about what’s really working and what isn’t. Before you can learn what’s working, you have to learn how things work, and understanding attribution helps you do exactly that.

25.ob欧宝娱乐app下载地址市场营销Analytics 101: How to Measure Your Campaigns

ob欧宝娱乐app下载地址市场营销your online store is a critical part of your success. Having a clear sense of what works and what doesn’t during your marketing campaigns can help you apply those lessons in future campaigns.

This is where marketing analytics come into play. You can gain more specific insight into your customers, what they buy, and how they interact with your content, and use that data to maximize your sales. Read this article to learn what metrics to track and how to use Google Analytics to measure and improve on your marketing programs.

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