How Hiring A Growth Marketing Agency Is The Best Way To Grow Your Shopify Business

In recent years, ecommerce stores are popping up everyday. There are more than 500,000 stores on Shopify alone, and over 24 million ecommerce sites around the world.

In recent years, ecommerce stores are popping up everyday. There are more than 500,000 stores on Shopify alone, and over 24 million ecommerce sites around the world.

This is because most people have the wrong idea about running and growing a store on Shopify.

What Most People Get Wrong About Growing a Shopify Store

Many people start Shopify stores with a lot of hope and expectations. They dream of owning a lucrative business, and not have to deal with the 9 to 5 grind. While there are certainly many success stories, the failure rate is overwhelming: over 95% of Shopify businesses fail.

Finding good products to sell, and setting up a good looking store is already hard enough, what many Shopify business owners fail to acknowledge is that’s only part of the battle. They forget that after setting it up and packing their virtual store with goodies does not automatically translate to a flood of eager purchasers. Unfortunately, the cliche, “build it and they will come” does not apply.

The most-often overlooked (and daunting) piece of the Shopify puzzle comes down to marketing and allocating resources for critical marketing activities such as:

  • Coming up with a growth strategy
  • Drive traffic to your website
  • Convert visitors
  • Crunch and analyze data
  • Write and post ads
  • Write emails

All of the above are vital to growing a Shopify Business, but it’s simply too much for one person to handle. So what can you do to bring on some marketing help?

There are three options for you: bring on in-house employees, recruit freelancers, or hire a dedicated growth marketing agency.

In-House Marketing Employees vs Freelancers vs Growth Hacking Agency

It’s a lot of work to do everything including marketing yourself, so what are your alternatives? Is hiring an agency the only way to grow your online business? Not necessarily.

Some common alternatives that people take are hiring employees and outsource jobs to freelancers. While each has their benefits, there are also very obvious downsides.

In-House Marketing Employees

Hiring employees is the most common way businesses have run since the birth of the free market. For many people, it’s often the first choice they think of.

  • Need help programming your website? Hire a programmer.
  • Need help strategizing? Hire a marketing consultant.
  • Need help with ads and content? Hire a writer.

This can work very well, for certain businesses. Many businesses, from mom-and-pop shops to big conglomerates, will choose this model. On top of that, a team of your own will typically understand your business more than anyone else.

However, depending on the state of your businesses, there could be a lot of problems.

The first and most obvious is the fact that you need to pay your employees a salary. In many ways, employees are an investment. You need money in order to invest. In addition, highly skilled people are very expensive to employ, especially when you have to pay a team of them every month.

Depending on the stage of your businesses, it might not even be possible for you. If your Shopify business is struggling to make revenue, you won’t even have the money to hire full-time or even part-time employees in the first place.

But what may not be so obvious are all of the “human resources” that goes into hiring, onboarding, and training employees. There is significant administrative overhead that goes into having actual full-time employees that is challenging to quantify. There’s a reason why corporations have dedicated departments (and we are not even talking about legal) dedicated to managing in-house human resources.

Freelancers

In recent times, it’s becoming more and more common to hire freelancers. If you need help with a particular task, you can just hire someone to do a one time gig. No need to pay them recurring salaries.

However, you might run into some challenges.

First, you have to know exactly what kind of problem you need help with. Say your ecommerce store is not growing, you’ll need to know exactly what the problem is and identify the expert with the proper skillset to solve it.

Is it because your website is not optimized? Is your store too difficult to navigate? Is it because your ads aren’t good enough to convert buyers?

For many Shopify owners, identifying the issue is already hard enough. You won’t even know what kind of freelancer to hire if you don’t know what the problem is.

You might try to hire multiple freelancers, but then you’ll have to manage them and possibly get them to work together. It’s still a lot of work on your end.

Growth Marketing Agency

A growth marketing agency, as the name implies, is an agency that specializes in growing online businesses. You can think of them as a marketing agency, but hyper-focused on “quick wins” and immediate ROI.

A growth marketing agency is a team of marketing professionals. They have the experience, they have people of varied skills, and most importantly, they work together. There’s no need for you to hire multiple individuals and find ways to communicate among them. An agency has already developed the necessary protocol for streamlined communication both internally and with you as the client.

Growth hacking agencies help clients craft custom-tailored marketing plans to help grow their client’s businesses.

Some of the things they do might include:

  • Analyze the market
  • Identify your target audience
  • Evaluate suitable advertising opportunities
  • Configure and create engaging ads
  • Drive targeted traffic (bringing relevant “eyeballs to the table”)
  • Optimize your website to improve conversion (CRO)Setting up websites
  • Nurture leads
  • Create offers
  • Make marketing funnels
  • Write ads for websites, landing pages, or email marketing sequences
  • Do Search Engine Optimization, or SEO
  • And more

In a way, a growth agency is the perfect blend between in-house employees and freelancers.

Why Hire A Growth Marketing Agency?

An agency is the total package. They will help you every step of the way to grow your online business. From creating a custom strategy for you, to doing the nitty gritty technical work, they’ll do it all. You might want to hire a growth agency for various reasons, such as:

  • You want to expand and grow your Shopify business
  • You don’t know much about marketing
  • You don’t have the time or energy to learn about marketing
  • You have little to no employees
  • You are building a Shopify business as a side-hustle
  • You are busy with your 40 hour/week job

If you need further information on whether hiring a growth agency is for you, then you’ll find more information here: When to Hire a Growth Hacking Consulting Agency.

Where to Find a Growth Marketing Agency?

If you want to grow your Shopify Business through a growth agency, the best way is to look online. If you are looking for a top growth hacking agency Stateside, this article Best Growth Marketing Agencies in the US may be helpful.

However, there are quite a few of them out there. So what should you look for when choosing one?

The most important thing to consider is to look at the agency’s track record. To get the best bang for your buck, you’ll want to hire one with a proven track record. If you are looking for a growth agency that has worked with big names and delivered big results, then you can contact us at Deviate Labs.

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