Shopify is an online store service that allows companies to set up and maintain an online store easily. It provides a platform and tools for setting up and maintaining an online store. Shopify offers many extensible plugins and themes to customize the look and functionality of your online store. The Shopify e-commerce platform is a popular choice for both small and medium-sized businesses that want to set up an online store without technical know-how or high costs.

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What are the main benefits of Shopify?

Here are some of the main benefits:

Shopify is designed to be easy to use, so setting up and maintaining an online store is possible without technical knowledge.

It offers several different payment methods, including online banking payments, credit card payments and mobile payments.

It has a rich selection of themes and add-ons that allow you to customize the look and functionality of your online store to suit your needs.

Technical maintenance is taken care of for you, so you can focus on the most important thing, i.e. sales.

Shopify offers customer service for questions related to setting up and maintaining an online store.

It is a safe and reliable online shopping service, so customers can shop with confidence.

Shopify online store design

Before setting up an online store, it is important to plan what kind of products you want to offer and to what kind of audience. This helps to choose a suitable theme and correctly define product categories and information so that website navigation works reliably.

In the planning phase, it is also important to define how your online store works technically. For example, what kind of payment methods do you offer to customers and how are deliveries handled. It is good to define these things before setting up the online store, so that they work smoothly after opening the online store.

Of course, you can get help from us to plan your online store.

Setting up an online store with Shopify

Setting up a Shopify online store is easy after planning and only requires a few steps:

The first step is to sign up for Shopify. This is done by entering the necessary personal information and choosing a payment method.
Shopify-themes offers a rich selection of themes that can be used to customize the look of your online store to your needs. Choose a theme that suits your company and the products offered by your online store.
Next, you can start adding products to your online store. You can add product information, images and prices through the control panel. You can also classify the products into different categories and add discounts.

Define how deliveries are handled and which payment methods you offer to customers. You can choose from several different options, such as traditional mail and express delivery or mobile payments.

You can create pages such as a front page, a contact page and an information page for your online store. You can also add blog posts and other content to the pages of your online store.

Before publishing the online store, it is important to test that it works according to your expectations. This can include testing adding and paying for products, and checking things related to site navigation and layout.

When you’re done, you can publish your online store by pressing the “Publish online store” button in the dashboard. Your online store is now open to customers.

Of course, if you want, you can completely outsource the creation of the online store to the Menestytarinos team, in which case we will be responsible for setting up the store from planning to implementation.

Shopify maintenance

A Shopify online store requires some maintenance after it is set up. The most important maintenance tasks are related to adding and removing products, defining pricing and delivery methods, and updating the site’s content.

In addition, the online store administrator must monitor the operation of the online store and the purchases made. This may include reviewing statistics and creating reports, as well as handling customer feedback.

Shopify takes care of technical maintenance for you, so you don’t have to worry about server maintenance or software updates, for example. This saves time and effort on the part of the online store administrator.

The number of maintenance tasks depends on the size and operation of the online store. In a small online store, the maintenance tasks can be quite minor, while in a larger online store, they can be more.

If you want, you can purchase the maintenance of your Shopify online store from the success story, in which case we will make the changes you want to the online store for you.

Is the Shopify online store suitable for international companies?

Yep, it’s well suited for international companies, as it offers several features that make it easier to set up and maintain an online store in different countries. Here are some examples of these features:

Shopify offers several language options, so an online store can be set up and maintained in different languages.

Several different payment methods are available, including online banking payments, credit card payments and mobile payments. This way, customers from different countries can make purchases in the online store easily.

You can define delivery methods in different countries and price them separately if necessary. You can also add different delivery methods to the offer according to your needs.

Shopify offers tools for managing taxation in different countries. You can define tax rates and add taxable products if necessary.

The system has tools for managing international SEO, so it is easier to find your online store in search engines in different countries.

All in all, the platform has versatile tools for setting up and maintaining international online stores.

Shopify Search Engine Optimization

Shopify offers several tools for online store search engine optimization. You can use these tools to improve your online store’s discoverability in search engines and to get more traffic to your online store:

Define site metadata, such as title and description tags, that describe the content of your online store. This information appears in the search results of search engines and helps search engines understand what the content of your online store is.

Add keywords related to products or services to the content of your online store. This helps search engines to understand what the content of your online store is and helps the online store to be found in search engines.

Define content categories for the products or services of your online store. These categories help search engines to understand what the content of your online store is and help the online store to be found in search engines.

Link your online store to other sites that are reliable and trustworthy. This helps search engines to understand that your online store is reliable and increases the findability of your online store in search engines.

Use the Google Search Console tool to monitor your online store’s traffic and the changes you’ve made. This helps you understand what works and what doesn’t in your online store and helps you improve your online store’s discoverability in search results.

Success stories help you achieve your goals with years of experience in search engine optimization. You can get all the necessary service and support from us to succeed in increasing your visibility in search engines.

Shopify and hosting

You don’t need a separate hosting contract when using the Shopify e-commerce platform.

Is it possible to add videos to it?

Yes, you can add videos to your Shopify online store. You can add videos to product pages so that customers can see the products better. You can also add videos to other pages, such as the homepage or blog posts.

You can add videos through the dashboard by adding a video widget to the page or by adding the HTML code of the video to the page. You can also add a video via a YouTube link.

Remember that adding a video to your online store’s pages can improve the customer experience and help them decide on a purchase. However, remember that the video should be of high quality and relevant to the content of your online store.

Is the Shopify online store compatible with Google Analytics 4?

Yes it is. We recommend using the Tag Manager tool when implementing Google Analytics 4 on the Shopify e-commerce platform. Tag Manager enables accurate event monitoring of activities performed by users of the online store. Analysis of shopping cart behavior, product sales, turnover and other online store monitoring features are possible with GA4.

The correct installation of web analytics, ensuring data collection and using it for business development are the most important components of online shopping’s competitiveness. For the implementation and utilization of network analytics

I hope this blog will take you forward and you will learn how to bring your website into the search engine optimisation decade. It should always be remembered that Google’s algorithm changes daily. SEO measures that were considered good years ago can now even be detrimental to the organic visibility of your website.

In the following, we will go through what SEO strategy means today, and how the importance of measurement and following the MRACE® model is becoming a more important part of this digital marketing channel every day.

A brief introduction to the history of SEO and how search engine optimisation has changed
It is good to understand that SEO today is very different from the SEO of ancient times a few years or decades ago. We have come a long way from the days when Google’s search results were determined mainly by who could mention a keyword most often in their content and HTML tags. In the old days, if a page topped the search results with 100 mentions of a relevant keyword, the competing SEO strategy was essentially to create a landing page with even more mentions. Fortunately, from a user experience perspective, things are moving on!

While many digital marketers today know not to engage in the aforementioned keyword stuffing or overuse of keywords, Google’s algorithm, which changes daily, still poses a huge challenge even for professionals.

We often come across the misconception that, for example, the inclusion of keywords in the meta description has an impact on organic rankings, even though this criterion is no longer part of Google’s way of determining rankings. Meta description is an important element of a page in terms of click-through rate, but it does not affect the ranking itself. It should primarily be written in a way that attracts clicks, not so that the keyword is mentioned in a particular way or in a particular place.

Another problem we often encounter on websites is over-optimisation, which certainly goes back to the days when a keyword had to be mentioned as often as possible on the desired landing page. Nowadays, you can get to the top of the rankings with just a couple of mentions of a keyword, as long as the content of the page is of high quality, it matches the search intent and the site is otherwise skilfully optimised.

Another big turnaround in search engine optimisation has been the acquisition of links. Of course, external links have always been important, but the change has been about what those external links can and cannot be. Whereas a few years ago it was important to acquire as many external links as possible in terms of quantity, and sometimes to use dubious means of acquiring them, such as buying them for money, nowadays the quality of external links must be taken into account. Nowadays, it is more a question of earning links rather than acquiring them. A tip – create content that others want to link to, even without being asked.

Another big, holistic and permanent change in search engine optimisation has been the fact that globally, 58% of all Google searches are now done on mobile devices. Naturally, this also means that websites need to be optimised for mobile first and foremost. Things like responsiveness were certainly not optimised for in the early days of search engine optimisation, and even today it is not difficult to find websites that lack mobile-friendliness.

Whereas at one time in history search engine optimisation was determined by three different criteria, today the ranking of a single landing page is determined by more than 200 different criteria. In addition, these few hundred criteria have different weights, so it is good to be constantly aware of which ones will make the biggest changes and to weigh up the cost-benefit ratio.

Avoid these in search engine optimisation, for example, these days:

Excessive use of keywords
Overuse of search engine queries
Optimizing for desktop users only
Focusing on only a few SEO criteria
Forgetting quality and unique content
Failure to follow SEO strategy
The challenge, and at the same time the fascination, of creating an SEO strategy and optimising search engines is that it is constantly changing, requiring constant monitoring and reacting to changes. It also seems that the future will bring new technologies faster than ever before. Artificial intelligence, for example, could soon give Google’s search results a whole new lease of life.

Why is it important to constantly monitor how search engine optimisation is evolving?
Search engine optimisation is often lumped together in companies with, for example, keyword advertising. In these cases, both digital marketing channels are handled by the same expert, but this is not the right way to work and often creates constraints and slows down the development of both channels.

How you rank in Google organic search is determined very differently from how you rank in Google paid search. And with time resources tied up in two different channels, keeping up with algorithm changes is almost impossible.

It’s even more efficient to monitor and improve if you have a larger team of search engine optimisers behind you. Google doesn’t offer a tray with instructions on which criteria produce the biggest gains, so a larger team can experiment with different approaches to see what works and what doesn’t.

If your business has seen a slowdown in organic traffic, it’s worth reflecting on whether you’ve been able to take account of what’s happened in the ever-changing world of search engine optimisation. For example, if a major algorithm update has gone unnoticed, it may be that competitors who have noticed the update have already fled far away and it will be a challenge to catch up.

Historically, search behaviour has also changed and will certainly continue to change in the future as technologies evolve. And they are evolving at a furious pace. As an example, the age of corona has made remote and hybrid working search terms commonplace, even though these topics were little known before 2020.

In addition, search terms such as voice search and voice search have lengthened as new smart devices with voice search have entered the market. Today, more than 45% of all Google searches on smartphones are already voice searches. If it’s been a few years since your company’s strategy and keyword research, it’s worth looking at how the world has changed since you did them.

Artificial intelligence in SEO
It’s clear that content creation will change with AI, but that doesn’t take away the role of a good writer. Search engines will certainly continue to evolve so that quality and useful content will rank the highest. As a result, Google will limit AI-generated content that does not add value for users. However, all this does not mean that AI is just a nuisance.

From a search engine optimisation perspective, AI brings opportunities to automate analytics and identify trends. For example, AI enables more efficient use of schema by automatically finding new potential data types on a site. AI also speeds up the creation of content clusters by finding content that lacks internal links. And let’s not forget AI’s ability to automatically create meta descriptions or headings, for example.

In other words, tasks that used to require manual time and the creation of complex Excel files will in future be done automatically by AI.

Will SEO strategy still be made for Google, even though we live in an age of video and AI revolution?
Much has been said about how TikTok and YouTube in particular are being used by young people as their primary source of information, which would see Google’s role in information retrieval diminish. This in no way means that Google should be forgotten in your SEO strategy.

I’m not denying that TikTok and YouTube provide excellent visibility, but from a business perspective, Google is still the core and without Google’s visibility, it’s as if the business doesn’t exist.

Your TikTok or YouTube video can get you noticed, but then there is often a demand for more information, which is still often found on Google. In addition, leads are still acquired primarily through your website, which should have good organic visibility on Google.

Keep up with change and maintain your SEO strategy
By creating an SEO strategy, you’ll be better able to see the big picture and how to develop your organic visibility over the long term. It also means you don’t get bogged down in the shuffle when optimising with a longer-term plan and goals in mind.

An SEO strategy is effectively a war plan that focuses on developing your search engine visibility and thereby increasing your organic traffic. In practice, it is a broad to-do list divided into different areas, and priorities of tasks. It takes into account all of Google’s best practices, and also reveals exactly where, for example, there are the biggest problems with those practices. The strategy is a way of moving from one big theme to another big theme, rather than jumping back and forth each month on different ad hoc problems.

An SEO strategy should be as broad as possible, even so broad that it becomes a blur and you lose sleep over it. If too narrow a strategy is implemented, it will quickly become just a scratch and eventually lead to sloppy search engine optimisation or the same issues being revisited over and over again.

Marketing technologies and the associated marketing automation have undergone a significant transformation in recent years. Taking marketing technologies seriously into the sales and marketing of companies is no longer the exclusive domain of the most advanced technology houses and stock market giants, and a shortcut to breathtaking results.

On the contrary – today, marketing technologies are within everyone’s reach and companies in all industries have embraced a variety of tools that speed up, facilitate and enrich their sales and marketing processes. It is therefore difficult to imagine that, in today’s environment, many companies can compete for the best customers just by stoically calling through cold contact lists.

Reach phase: make yourself discoverable and attract the attention of your audience
Tools to make your business discoverable to your target audience and drive relevant traffic to your website.

1. Google Analytics
   Google Analytics, which is part of the Google Marketing Platform, needs little introduction. Google Analytics, also known as GA, is certainly the world’s best-known tool for monitoring, analysing and reporting website traffic. Even at the Reach stage, GA is unbeatable; properly installed, it makes it easy to see how your website visitors arrive at your website and how many times your ad is displayed to them across all the devices they use.
2. Similarweb
   Similarweb is a tool familiar to many because its free browser version allows you to estimate the monthly number of visitors to almost any website. Similarweb does this by collecting and aggregating data from a number of public data sources such as the Google index. At the reach stage, Similarweb is an excellent tool for building a relevant audience for your business and outlining your visibility vis-à-vis your competitors.
3. Semrush
   Semrush is the Swiss army knife of the digital marketing world, often associated with search engine optimisation and keyword mapping. When the goal is to bring relevant new visitors to your site, these search engine optimisation and analytics functionalities are essential. There is much more under the hood: at the Reach stage, Semrush’s competitor analysis and advertising tools are an invaluable addition.
4. Piwik Pro
   Piwik Pro is a powerful tool for analysing the customer behaviour behind websites, apps and login pages. Like Google Analytics, it allows you to build different dashboards, making it easy to explore daily metrics without having to dig into large amounts of data. User flow charts help you understand how customers come to your website and what they do there, which is a priority in the Reach phase.
5. Screaming Frog
   Screaming Frog is a tool for analysing your website from a search engine optimisation perspective. As well as allowing you to study what keywords are being used to reach your website and use this information to inform the content of your website, Screaming Frog allows you to see in real time whether any of your pages are missing, for example, title tags, which tell the search engine what the page is about and therefore have a significant impact on the findability of your website.
6. Ahrefs
   Ahrefs is a trusted tool for many SEO experts. Ahrefs’ offering is divided into five main tools that you can use to build a strong Reach phase for your digital marketing strategy.

Start by doing a competitor analysis with Site Explorer, audit your own website’s search engine accessibility with Site Audit, find out the most important keywords with Keywords Explorer, develop the most appealing content ideas with Content Explorer and stay on top of the results with Rank Tracker.

7. Buzzsumo
   For your business and brand online presence to be serious, credible and relevant, your business needs to appeal to a well-defined buyer persona with content that genuinely engages them. If coming up with content topics seems challenging, Buzzsumo can help you analyse trending topics in social media, news and other media.

If you haven’t yet developed a strong publishing network and calendar, Buzzsumo even offers tips on when and on which channels to publish your news and a list of subject matter experts who can help you get your message across to their networks.

8. Onalytica
   Influencer marketing is an effective way to reach your target audience, especially if you are still relatively new in your field and find it difficult to make your voice heard among the better known brands. Onalytica is a good way to start profiling influencers, thought leaders and experts in different fields and to connect with people who are relevant to you and share your brand’s opinions and values.

You can search for influencers from Onalytica’s own database of 700,000 influencers and connect with the most relevant ones directly through the app. You can also analyse the results of influencer engagement through the app’s analytics tool.

9. Google Marketing Platform
   The Google Marketing Platform is another example of a digital marketing implementation and performance measurement tool that is useful in many situations. It is the umbrella term (at the time of writing) for eight services, of which Search Ads 360 – formerly known as Google Ads – is the best known.

Google has the largest network of advertisers in the world, so placing ads in its search results is a profitable proposition for almost anyone. With Campaign Manager 360, part of the Google Marketing Platform, you can study the performance of your ads and, with Analytics, their impact on website traffic.

10. Adobe Experience Manager
    Adobe Experience Manager is a digital content management system that, under the surface, is a tool for personalising and clarifying the buying paths of key customer segments from a content perspective.

As is natural for Adobe, Experience Manager puts the graphic side of the brand at the centre. This is driven by Adobe’s powerful AI and algorithm engine, which makes it easier than ever to create omnichannel campaigns, despite their scale.

To start, it’s good to review the points that are all key to creating a successful campaign:

Setting objectives.
Choosing the right channels.
Finding the right target groups.
Creating attractive ads.
Monitoring and optimising the campaign.
Delivering a good customer experience.
In this blog, we’ll give you tips on how to create a successful advertising campaign for your online store using social media platforms and the MRACE® model, which takes into account the customer’s stage of the buying journey.

Set your goals with ROAS in mind
First things first, let’s start with the basics. Setting objectives will help you define what you want to achieve with your campaign. For example, do you want to increase the number of visitors to your online shop, increase sales or perhaps get new customers? Define your goals clearly and realistically so that they support your marketing objectives.

There are many ways to set marketing objectives. One concrete way of approaching them is the 5s model:

Sell or increase sales.
Serve.
Speak or build customer dialogue.
Save, i.e. improving cost-effectiveness.
Sizzle, building a brand.
Defining your objectives will help you plan the content of your campaign and choose the right channel. The objectives will also help you choose the right KPIs to monitor the progress and success of your campaign. I’ll tell you more about measurement in a moment.

Before launching an advertising campaign, it is a good idea to set a clear ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) target. ROAS tells us how many euros will be returned for every euro spent on advertising.

Good ROAS varies between sectors and companies and setting a good ROAS target depends largely on the objective of the campaign. It is important to monitor the ROAS of your campaign as it will help you to assess the success of your campaign.

When designing the structure of a campaign, you need to consider the purchase path and think about which stages of the path the campaign will be built on. Do you have a warm enough audience to run a campaign with only the Convert stage? Rarely is this the situation to start from. Often you also need to include a Reach phase, which is the way to reach a cold audience.

Different content is needed for different stages, because the buying decision is influenced by how aware customers are of your products. In the Reach phase, content is often interest-generating website content, which is important to appeal to the target audience. This is often done by offering a solution to their problem or by meeting their needs. Product advertising, especially promotional advertising, can also be engaging enough to make the customer take the first step towards a purchase and explore your online store further.

The content in the Act phase often teaches the customer how to use your products. The customer has understood their problem or need, and that they may be able to get a solution from your online store. In the Act phase, it is important to direct the customer to the right products, and provide enough useful information about them to enable them to make a purchase decision they can be happy with.

In the convert phase, the content is often very simple, but even more important. This is where we don’t want to lose the customer to a competitor. This is where the product becomes important, and it is good to have enough information about it. Delivery and payment methods and return conditions will also be of interest to the customer, so make sure that this information is easily accessible. Possible promotions, discounts and customer benefits are also often factors that often influence the final purchase decision.

During the Engage phase, existing customers are offered unique benefits. How do you turn your customers into loyal customers? The only limit is often your imagination, and even very small things often become meaningful. For example, a small surprise in a package can make your customer surprised and delighted, which is likely to leave a positive impression and emotional impression of the purchase. The next time the need to buy arises, you are likely to be the first thing on their mind.

Choose channels and reach the right audience
Do you know who your potential customers are and what their needs are? As a tool to identify customer needs, we recommend creating buyer personas.

With the information from the buyer personas, you can target your marketing campaign to the right people with the right messages.

Choose channels based on where your target audience spends their time and which channels work best for your products, without forgetting your objectives. Not all social media platforms are the same. Each channel has its own unique characteristics and user base.

The choice of channel will be influenced by factors such as:

Available budget > LinkedIn is more expensive to advertise on than Meta platforms.
Preferred targeting options > However, LinkedIn allows you to target uniquely.
Available advertising material > To advertise on TikTok, you need video.

Measurement, optimisation and data-driven decisions are key to every social media campaign
Measuring campaign performance is one of the most important aspects of running a marketing campaign. Measurement helps you understand how the campaign has performed and what factors have contributed to its success. It also helps you learn from the successes and failures of your campaign so that you can produce more successful campaigns in the future.

There are many ways to monitor campaign performance. Online, you can measure your customer journey throughout the purchase path and view campaign performance at different stages of the MRACE® model.

At the Reach stage, you can measure, for example, advertising reach and website traffic.
In the Act phase, you can measure the consumption of website content.
In the Convert stage, you can measure things like basket additions, number of purchases and average purchase value.
In the Engage phase, a good measure of online sales is the number and value of repeat purchases.
The key is to focus on the metrics that are most relevant to your online store and your campaign objectives.

Measurement also helps to optimise your campaign. If you notice that a target group or content is not performing as expected, you can make changes to your campaign and monitor the impact. Changes can include changing images, tweaking ad copy or adding completely new target audiences. This will help you improve campaign performance and achieve your goals more effectively.

Rarely is any advertising campaign perfect from the start. It’s important to monitor the performance of your campaign and make improvements where necessary.

Take advantage of tools to improve efficiency and effectiveness
There are a myriad of tools available to help you run your marketing campaigns. For social media campaign implementation, Smartly is unbeatable. In short, Smartly is an optimisation, automation and scaling tool for paid social advertising that allows you to work efficiently and agilely while saving time.

Smartly’s automated rules allow you to create orders based on your goals. Based on the rules, Smartly handles ad optimisation and budget scaling for you, ensuring that the money you put into your campaign isn’t wasted. In the Finnish digital market, our social media team uses Smartly for campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and TikTokk.

Find out more about Smartly’s amazing capabilities for building and optimising social media campaigns.

Consider including other channels to boost your bottom line
We just talked about building a social media campaign, but it’s worth noting that if your goals are high, social media alone may not be enough. Therefore, it’s worth considering whether to include other channels as well. Multi-channel marketing offers the opportunity to broaden your target audience. By advertising through multiple channels, you can reach different people and ensure that your message is seen and heard by as many potential customers as possible.

Multichannel also increases the visibility and memorability of your campaign. People are exposed to a huge number of ads and messages on different channels every day. By implementing a multi-channel campaign, you ensure that your message is seen more often and in different contexts.

I recommend that you include at least Google Ads and email marketing. This way you can reach people searching for your products on the Google network and get personalised communication about the campaign content via email.

In the B2B market, buying processes can be very long. With Google Ads, you can effectively market your business at different stages of the buying journey. Through keyword advertising, you can reach an audience with an existing intention to search for your products or services, from the information gathering stage to the decision making stage. Display and discovery advertising allows you to reach a variety of audiences, either predefined or customised by Google. In the B2B market, this is particularly important for remarketing audiences who are already familiar with your company.

However, using Google Ads for B2B advertising requires careful planning, management and optimisation to ensure that the campaign delivers the desired results.

The potential of Google Ads in B2B marketing

In the B2B market, companies sell their products or services to other companies, while in the B2C market, companies sell directly to end users, i.e. consumers. In this case, B2B marketing is also different from the usual marketing to consumers. The essential differences between the two in terms of marketing are:

The length of the buying process, which generally involves several people or even teams in B2B companies.

Customer relationships and contracts are longer and require more care than with direct consumers.

Pricing of products and services and negotiation of contracts is more complex and flexible than in the B2C market.

Multiple possibilities for advertising targeting

Google Ads allows for highly targeted advertising, enabling your B2B business to reach the audience you want. For example, you can target ads based on geography, user interests, demographics, device type or search history. For example, targeting could be; “25-54 year olds interested in business services in the metropolitan area, including computer users and excluding mobile users.”

In search advertising, targeting is presumably done with different keywords that are desired to be used in the ad. These keywords can be used to market your company’s products or services at different stages of the purchase path. In the B2B market, localisation is often essential for businesses. Google Ads allows not only geographic targeting but also the use of keywords related to a municipality or city, such as “machining helsinki” in the example.

Cost-effectiveness

Compared to traditional advertising methods such as print or TV ads, Google Ads can be a very cost-effective solution for your B2B business. The ability to set a daily budget and only pay when someone clicks on an ad will help your business ensure you get the most out of the money spent on advertising.

Even if your business market has high click-through rates, for example €5, and a conversion rate to leads of 1%, you will pay €500 for quality leads. If your business is trading 20% of leads, you would have spent €2500 on acquiring a customer, which would hypothetically bring in tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

Brand awareness

Even if your B2B company is using advertising to drive direct sales, Google Ads advertising also helps to build brand awareness. Google is the world’s most popular search engine, so Google Ads has huge potential to reach new customers.

Search advertising helps you stay top of mind with Google search users related to your business, and Display and Discovery ads also visually put your brand in front of either a larger or highly targeted audience.

Flexible advertising to suit your needs

Google Ads offers a lot of flexibility for your B2B business. You can create ads in a variety of formats, including text, image and video, to suit your marketing strategy.

You can also adapt your ads in real time to reflect business changes, such as new products or services. Unlike many other marketing strategies, Google Ads can deliver results for your business quickly. Setting up and launching your campaign settings is extremely agile, especially for a professional, and ads can start appearing within the same day at best.

Measurement and analysis

Google Ads provides detailed tools for monitoring and analysing the performance of your advertising campaigns. This allows your business to optimise ads in real time, using data to analyse which messages and visuals work best for which target groups or buyer personas, for example.

The data can also be used for more concrete business development. Keyword data or visitor behaviour data can also be used to develop new products or services and optimise pricing strategies.

For example, a search for a single product might result in a material/feature + product that leads to your company’s website, even if that particular material/feature is not exactly available on your company’s website. In this case, it is worth considering whether it would be a good idea to add the material/feature for that search to your own range.

Measure

Google Ads provides your business with detailed metrics and analytics to help you measure the success of your campaign. This includes data on clicks, impressions, click-through rates, trend changes and more.

For example, you can measure which landing page is the most effective in generating a final bid. The data can be used to improve and optimise existing and future campaigns for better results.

Reach

The first step in the MRACE® model is Reach, which involves getting the message about your products or services across to potential customers. As an advertiser, you can use Google Ads with a number of different targeting variations.

But targeting alone is not enough – to reach potential customers effectively, your company needs to create an engaging advertising message that resonates with the right target audience. This is where website content writing is an essential value-added activity. By creating high-quality website content that speaks to the needs and pain points of your target audience, you can create a more cohesive and effective marketing strategy that integrates with your Google Ads campaign.

Act

The Act phase involves encouraging potential customers to take an action, such as taking an action on a website. This could be, for example, advertising product samples or other downloadable materials. Once users have clicked on an advertisement and landed on the website, the content and user experience of the website will ultimately determine whether they take the desired action.

By creating quality website content that is optimised for the user experience and the most important action, such as a purchase or contact request, you will improve the effectiveness of your website. This drives results in the right direction and maximises the return on investment in Google Ads advertising.

Convert

The main purpose of the conversion phase is to convert potential site visitors into either leads or direct customers. With Google Ads, this stage can be promoted by targeting advertising to distinct groups of users who are still engaged in the buying process, such as those who have previously visited your website or interacted with your business in some other way.

But converting potential customers requires more than just effective targeting – it also requires a strong value proposition, persuasive messaging, and a user-friendly website experience that makes it easy for users to move through the buying process and make a final decision.

One of the most powerful tools in the Convert phase of Google Ads is remarketing through Display and Discovery advertising. These can be used to visually highlight your company’s brand to visitors to your website or to show visitors to specific product pages other products related to those products.

However, if you are selling products or services that have a long buying process or are being considered very carefully, then I recommend you read our blog post on creating a marketing strategy first. With a marketing strategy, you can significantly increase the long-term demand for your business, differentiate yourself from your competitors and win more of the customers you most want.

Then let’s get back to the tactical level. To grow your company’s sales, you need demand, and to get demand, you need marketing. You probably already knew this equation. In this blog post, I’ll focus specifically on how, by increasing demand, sales can also take off. With marketing, of course.

Whether your business is a large B2B company looking for leads or a smaller B2C online store, this blog post will be useful for you.

So without further ado, let’s dive straight in – to the funnel.

The importance of the sales funnel for driving sales and demand

For your business marketing to work the way you want it to, you need to build a sales funnel so that each stage of it talks to and supports each other.

So you can think of a sales funnel in the same way as a normal funnel. When the funnel is tight and has no holes, any liquid poured through the funnel flows directly into the bowl. If there are holes in the funnel, it is almost impossible to get all the liquid to hit the bowl. With a funnel with holes, some of the liquid will spill over without help, and someone else may be ready to catch the liquid you pour into their own bowl.

In the above metaphor, the liquid is your company’s leads and customers, and the bowl is your company’s main conversion point. A tight funnel indicates a well-planned marketing strategy, while a holey funnel indicates a poorly planned and executed marketing strategy. With a holey funnel, some of your customers will most likely flow past your main conversion point, possibly even to a competitor lurking near the funnel.

Building an effective sales funnel also requires that you know your market. Only then will you be able to deliver marketing value that stands out from the competition and attracts customers. This is the key to securing long-term demand and building a more profitable sales funnel. For this process, we’ve created the MVG model to help you create a management team-level marketing strategy, from understanding your target audience to measuring your objectives.

Numbers don’t lie – data-driven and measurable marketing (Measure)

Before delving into the different stages of the sales funnel, let’s go through the basis of each stage, the first letter M of the MRACE® model, Measure.

Of course, your company can do things like visually high-quality marketing that is also targeted in the right way. You can also get good results. But if you’re not measuring anything, your company’s marketing may not be very far-reaching.

Measured, data-driven marketing will help your business to grow demand and therefore sales more easily than if it relies solely on methods and channels that don’t measure results.

So why is measurement so important? Here again, let’s continue with a similar funnel metaphor that we discussed earlier. In this example, we add a juice concentrate as a liquid.

Using the funnel, you have successfully poured the juice concentrate into the bottle. Now it’s time to make yourself a bottle of juice, for which you need not only the concentrate but also water. You don’t know how sweet the concentrate is, so you’ll have to start by experimenting to see what kind of concentrate/water ratio will give you the result you want. Finding the right ratio will require some testing at first, but once you find the right ratio, it makes sense to take measurements so that you can continue to make equally tasty juice in the future. If you ever want to make a sweeter juice, it’s easy to increase the amount of concentrate you use now that you have the exact measurements and ratios to adjust the sweetness of the final juice dose.

If you didn’t record the tried and tested ratios from your testing, you’d find it quite a challenge to always get the right sweet, delicious dose of juice. Sure, with luck you could occasionally succeed without the measurements, but wouldn’t it be more convenient to always know how to achieve the desired result?

So, with luck, you can achieve results without measurement, but from the business perspective of your company, the better way to get the results you want is, more generally, data. When your business marketing strategy and execution is based on data, you are more likely to get results than if you just rely on good luck.

From a measurability perspective, it is also vital that your business has clear and realistic objectives that you want to achieve through marketing. By realistic, I don’t mean particularly easy targets, but that they should be achievable in the light of the resources and budget available. For example, if your business aims to double turnover, you often need to increase your budget and resources. If, on the other hand, you have to cut budgets and resources, doubling turnover may not be a very realistic goal.

When you want to reach a new audience (Reach)

In the quest for high conversions, the importance of a cold audience can sometimes be forgotten. However, to keep your sales funnel consistently churning out customers and leads on the way to conversions, reaching out to a cold audience is absolutely vital. You can’t keep pouring liquid into a bowl forever if you don’t pour more into the funnel.

To reach the cold audience – that is, to fill the top of your sales funnel – you need to know and have the courage to choose the right channels to reach your customers.

Social media marketing is an effective way to reach the cold audience you want, as the targeting possibilities are very broad. In social media channels, it is possible to target advertising from your interests and family background to your job title and place of residence.

In addition to social media marketing, Google advertising is also effective and profitable. The choice of the right channel will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

The Reach phase in a nutshell:
The purpose of this phase is to attract a cold audience to the top of your funnel, for example through social media and various Google channels.
In the ideal channel for your target audience, a properly targeted, arresting ad is the key to success in this phase.
Don’t forget the importance of a cold audience! A cold audience is like graphite that, on its way down the funnel, eventually turns into a diamond under heat and pressure.

So how do you choose the right channel for your target audience?

When choosing a marketing channel for your business, it’s good to be sensible, but also bold. For example, if your business is in the B2B sector and your top priority is lead acquisition, Meta’s Facebook and Instagram channels, as well as LinkedIn, are probably the most viable options. Pinterest or TikTok, on the other hand, may be wild cards that you shouldn’t count on, but also be open to. When choosing a social media channel, it’s worth considering which would be a winning advertising channel for your business.

Meta’s Facebook and Instagram channels are the social media channels that serve businesses on the widest scale, as they allow your business to easily reach both consumers and business decision-makers. Regardless of your company’s industry, marketing on Meta’s channels is often a safe bet, and it’s a good idea to expand into other channels as your business needs grow.

LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a great solution when you want to reach people in a particular sector, and especially business decision-makers, as LinkedIn allows you to target advertising based on professional skills, titles and experience.

TikTok advertising can give your company’s brand unique visibility, especially among younger consumers. This booming social media channel is more fast-paced than Meta’s and features high-quality, short video content designed to entertain, among other things. With TikTok, your business can reap the commercial benefits of participating in trends and staying ahead of the curve. In TikTok, different trends can live very quickly; a month is already quite a long time for one trend, so TikTok marketing often requires quick thinking, the ability to react to changes and the willingness to interact with customers.

Another visual advertising channel like TikTok is Pinterest, where your business can reach a cold, but even willing audience. Pinterest advertising is even a little more Google-like in its features, as it is a visual search engine that can also display ads based on keywords and search terms used.

Now that the social media channel options have been explored, it’s time to consider the potential of Google advertising to reach your target audience. When your potential customer may already be searching for the product or service they need, but not yet know about your business, Google Display and Discovery advertising is often an effective option.

If, on the other hand, you want to increase your brand awareness, for example, YouTube advertising is a very good option.

In addition to choosing a channel, it is also important for your business to be visible in organic Google searches. This can be achieved through search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation means that your business ranks high in the search results that matter to you, resulting in a free flow of visitors that leads to uninterrupted marketing.