The Who, What, Why, & How of Digital Marketing

With how accessible the internet is today, would you believe me if I told you the number of people who go online every day is still increasing?

It is. In fact, "constant" internet usage among adults increased by 5% in just the last three years, according to Pew Research. And although we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed along with it — meaning offline marketing isn't as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

Enter digital marketing — in other words, any form of marketing that exists online.
→ Click here to download our free guide to digital marketing fundamentals [Download Now].

What is digital marketing?
Why digital marketing?
Digital Marketing Examples
What does a digital marketer do?
Inbound Marketing vs. Digital Marketing: Which is it?
Does digital marketing work for all businesses?
Why is digital marketing important?
How to Do Digital Marketing
I'm ready to try digital marketing. Now what?
So, how do you define digital marketing today?

What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers.

A seasoned inbound marketer might say inbound marketing and digital marketing are virtually the same thing, but there are some minor differences. And conversations with marketers and business owners in the U.S., U.K., Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, I've learned a lot about how those small differences are being observed across the world.

What is the role of digital marketing to a company?
While traditional marketing might exist in print ads, phone communication, or physical marketing, denver digital marketing agency can occur electronically and online. This means that there are far more possibilities for brands to reach customers, including email, video, social media, and search engines.

At this stage, digital marketing is vital for your business and brand awareness. It seems like every other brand has a website. And if they don't, they at least have a social media presence or digital ad strategy. Digital content and marketing is so common that consumers now expect and rely on it as a way to learn about brands.

Long story short, to be competitive as a business owner, you'll need to embrace some aspects of digital marketing.

Because digital marketing has so many options and strategies associated with it, you can get creative and experiment with a variety of marketing tactics on a budget. With digital marketing, you can also use tools like analytics dashboards to monitor the success and ROI of your campaigns more than you could with a traditional promotional content — such as a billboard or print ad.

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How does a business define digital marketing?
Digital marketing is defined by the use of numerous digital tactics and channels to connect with customers where they spend much of their time: online. From the website itself to a business's online branding assets — digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond — there's a spectrum of tactics that fall under the umbrella of "digital marketing."

The best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each digital marketing campaign supports their overarching goals. And depending on the goals of their marketing strategy, marketers can support a larger campaign through the free and paid channels at their disposal.

A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company's social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We'll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.

Types of Digital Marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content Marketing
Social Media Marketing
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Affiliate Marketing
Native Advertising
Marketing Automation
Email Marketing
Online PR
Inbound Marketing
Sponsored Content
Here's a quick rundown of some of the most common digital marketing tactics and the channels involved in each one.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is the process of optimizing your website to "rank" higher in search engine results pages, thereby increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic your website receives. The channels that benefit from SEO include websites, blogs, and infographics.

There are a number of ways to approach SEO in order to generate qualified traffic to your website. These include:

On page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the content that exists "on the page" when looking at a website. By researching keywords for their search volume and intent (or meaning), you can answer questions for readersand rankhigher on the search engine results pages (SERPs) those questions produce.
Off page SEO: This type of SEO focuses on all of the activity that takes place "off the page" when looking to optimize your website. "What activity not on my own website could affect my ranking?" You might ask. The answer is inbound links, also known as backlinks. The number of publishers that link to you, and the relative "authority" of those publishers, affect how highly you rank for the keywords you care about. By networking with other publishers, writing guest posts on these websites(andlinking back to your website), andgenerating external attention, you can earn the backlinks you need to move your website up on allthe right SERPs.
Technical SEO: This type of SEO focuses on the backend of your website, and how your pages are coded. Image compression, structured data, and CSS file optimization are all forms of technical SEO that can increase your website's loading speed — an important ranking factor in the eyes of search engines like Google.

7 Things to Look Out for When Hiring an SEO Agency

If you’re relying on billions of people to find you through Google search every, search engine optimisation (SEO) needs to be at the top of your priority list.

If you want to increase web traffic, you have 2 choices: a) master search engine optimization (SEO) and manage an inhouse team or b) hire a professional SEO agency.

The process of hiring an seo agency can be daunting, especially if your knowledge of SEO is limited.

There are many great SEO agencies out there, but there are also the mediocre ones – and sometimes it’s hard to tell the real deal from a total fraud.

Choosing the best SEO agency for your firm is similar to evaluating any investment: you’ll want to conduct a diligent investigation of historical performance, speak to references, and try to get an inside look at how the agency is run.

To make your life easier, we put together 7 points that help you identify the best SEO agencies:

#1 Best SEO agencies provide results not generic services
People don’t buy services, they buy results. Make sure that the agency you hire offers customised solutions to your particular business objectives.

Every business is unique and as such needs a customised SEO strategy to help build traffic, increase visibility, and help you reach your goals.

A great SEO agency will spend time talking to you to understand your business objectives and will ensure the strategy is tailored to your requirements.

Unfortunately, there are too many agencies that provide cookie-cutter services on autopilot. Don’t waste your time with them.

#2 Best SEO agencies optimise for search-intent not just keywords
The SEO industry has evolved and matured into a fully grown-up customer-centric marketing discipline.

True SEO professionals put their audience first, and as such, optimise a website for search engines considering user’s search intent, user experience, and site usability (not just keywords).

So when an SEO agency you are speaking with is talking about ‘charging per keyword’ – this is a red flag! Search marketing isn’t about keywords anymore.

Keyword research is still important, but an understanding of how Google is extracting intent from users’ search queries and matching it to relevant pages will get you much further.

In fact, a critical part that we have been working on over the last few years at Digivate is increasing the richness of the Schema mark-up for our clients.

Schema mark-up allows us to be far more explicit on the function of the page – either informational, transactional or navigational.

Any SEO agency worth working with will take the time to research your target personas (check our unique approach to developing MIND personas), understand what the target audience is looking for, and come up with a keyword strategy that relates to your audience’s pain points.

Search engines are only the medium through which customers find your business, so while it’s important to improve your website’s visibility, you want to make sure that your SEO agency understands what your customers are looking for and what value your content provides them.

Ask your SEO agency: How do you decide which keywords and topics to target?

#3 Best SEO agencies report on meaningful KPIs that drive business growth
When you’re working with an SEO agency to come up with your digital marketing strategy, make sure that they are using specific and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to measure the success of your campaign.

KPIs like “increasing rankings” are vague and mean very little, while specific goals like “organic revenue”, “increase in conversions” or “number of signups” are what drives business growth.

A great SEO agency will discuss specific KPIs and reporting with you during the onboarding process.

Ask your SEO agency: Do you have previous examples of reporting I can look at?

#4 Best SEO agencies create authoritative content
Thought leadership marketing is a great specialisation to look for in an SEO agency.

While it is more time consuming to implement, this kind of content marketing takes the “content is king” approach to SEO by establishing credibility in your field and making you a valuable source of information for your customers.

If your website hosts authoritative content, it’s more likely to be linked to by others within your industry, helping to increase your visibility on search engines.

Stay away from SEO agencies that recycle short 300-word articles that don’t add any value to customers.

We see too many businesses blog for the sake of blogging, without really understanding why they are doing it and who are they writing for.

Ask your SEO agency: Can you show me examples of your thought leadership work, preferably in my industry?

#5 Best SEO agencies understand the importance of content pillars and content clusters
Look for an SEO agency that utilises pillar pages and content clusters in their content strategy.

Pillar content (or cornerstone content) is a comprehensive and evergreen resource with detailed and in-depth information upon which your blog strategy is built.

The ultimate purpose of pillar pages from a business perspective is to serve as the main lead-generation page for a particular service or product.

Pillar pages form the centre of your blog strategy and they can’t exist without supporting content (also known as topic clusters).

Hubspot has a great visual representation of how content pillars are related to the blog posts that support it:

content pillars and clusters

Ask your SEO agency: What is the purpose of blog posts in relation to the main lead generation pages?

#6 Best SEO agencies have over 5 years of experience and killer case studies
One of the best ways to find an excellent SEO agency is to see their case studies.

You should ask the agency for detailed case studies and references of previous clients to see how exactly they improved their business.

Not only will case studies demonstrate the agency’s knowledge and experience, but it’ll give you an idea of whether the agency is a good fit for you and your business or not.

Ask your SEO agency: Do you have any case studies from other businesses in our industry? What percentage of your clients renew every year? How long have your oldest customers been with you?

#7 Best SEO agencies are transparent about their practices
There are 2 types of SEO agencies: those that follow Google webmaster’s guidelines (known as “white hat” SEO agencies) and those that don’t follow Google’s guidelines (known as “black hat” SEO agencies).

Any SEO agency you choose to work with should be willing to discuss their practices with you and show that they follow Google’s guidelines.

If they’re not fully transparent, they’re likely to be using “black hat” SEO techniques like private link networks, keyword stuffing, and content scraping to generate false results.

While on the surface, it may seem like these unethical techniques are helping to generate short-term traffic, they will eventually lead to penalisation of your website.

Ask your SEO agency: What SEO techniques do you use to increase search traffic?

What SEO agencies do exactly?
An SEO agency helps to define and implement your SEO strategy to achieve your business objective. Your SEO agency team usually consists of technical SEO executives, strategists, content creators, and outreach specialists.

A great SEO agency will take care of every aspect of your SEO, from the technical (like ensuring your website’s pages can be indexed by search engines) to analysing your content for keyword usage and potential inconsistencies.

Top 10 Most Important Things To Consider When Hiring an SEO Agency.

According to clutch.co there 17,369 advertising and marketing agencies. Over 10,000 of these advertising and marketing agencies offer some form of search engine optimization. So how do you choose which SEO agency is best for meeting your company’s goals? In this article we will explore the top 10 most important questions to ask the SEO agencies you are interviewing.

1. Expertise – Although there are over 10,000 marketing companies that offer SEO, we recommend hiring an seo agency that specializes in search engine optimization, not just one that simply offers SEO. It should be the primary service they offer and the main focal point of their company. We firmly believe that if you are a jack of all marketing services, your are likely a master of none. Look for agencies that focus on perfecting a few services, with SEO being the primary.

2. Experience – We recommend looking for established SEO agencies with 10+ years of successful SEO business experience. This should assure the company has had several years to refine and improve its SEO business practices. Many SEO startups fail or fizzle out in the first 5 years of business. SEO agencies that are at least 10+ years old have proven to weather the storm of business cycles and beat their competitors, we assume based on results, performance and customer loyalty.

3. Case Studies – Ask to see several case studies, preferably in the same industry your business operates in. SEO case studies should contain clear data in the following SEO key performance indicators (KPIs): Overall organic visibility (impressions), Rankings, Organic Traffic and Organic Goal Completions (Conversions). Additional SEO KPIs may include data from Google My Business listings including: Search Visibility, Map Visibility, Clicks to Website, Click for Directions and Clicks to Call. Performance of these SEO KPIs may vary widely from industry to industry and by company size, but we usually look for 50%-300% increase across several of these KPIs.

4. Reviews – Look for both quantity and quality of reviews. We recommend looking for agencies that have at least 30+ reviews on Google. Reviews should extent back a minimum of 5 years. Companies that have lots of reviews in a short period of time and all 5 stars should be flagged. This usually indicates fake reviews. Like most businesses, reviews tend to be either be 1 star or 5 star. We expected established, good SEO agencies with a long history to have negative reviews from time to time. That is expected in the industry with honest companies not seeking to scrub their reputations. Probably 1-2% will be negative, however, SEO agenies with 4.5 star rating or less should be avoided, this would indicate a higher percentage of negative reviews.

5. Keyword Research & Integration Strategy – Properly setting the stage for an SEO campaign is critical to its long term success. Assure the research aspect of the SEO company is thorough at gaining a deep understanding of your business model and products or services. Discuss how they go about taking that information and translating it into search. What metrics do they use to determine the best keywords to optimize? Search Volume? Relevancy? Competition? Assure they have a thorough understanding of your competition so they can properly position your SEO campaign targets for success.

6. On-Page SEO Strategy – Good SEO campaigns start with on-page SEO. Ask the SEO agencies you are interviewing what their on-page SEO strategy looks like. Do they have a checklist? How many elements do they check during the on-page SEO strategy.

7. Link Building Strategy – Link building is one of the most challenging, yet important aspects of search engine optimization. Its important the SEO agency you choose has white hat link building methods. Any type of black hat or old school link building methods should be completely avoided such as: any type of bots, comment links, forum links, etc. Discuss the link quality standards the SEO company puts in place. Do they seek links from websites with a minimum domain authority? Do they seek links from website pages with a minimum page authority? Do they do guest posts or advertorials? We recommend using an SEO company that takes a diverse approach to link building, incorporating a broad spectrum of link acquisition methodologies.

8. Content Strategy – Content is king and a critical part of search engine optimization. Ask the SEO agency you are interviewing what the content strategy they would outline for your company. A good way to approach this is discussing which existing products or services you offer that need to have the content expanded and optimized. Discuss additional products or services not listed on your website that might need to have pages created, content written and optimized. Ask the SEO company about their blogging strategy. Do they blog? How often? How do they go about choosing topics to write about. Good SEO companies will have strategic content optimization strategies as a part of their overall SEO campaign. Assure the SEO company you choose is excellent in this area.

9. Reporting & Consultation Methods – Looking at reports and stats can be extremely boring to some people. When interview SEO agencies find out what a typical SEO report that send looks like. How often to they send reports? Do they have a dashboard or login, so you can see the SEO data at any time. We recommend finding an SEO company that allows you to access your SEO progress data at anytime via a dashboard. Here a few SEO KPIs that you should assure are reported on regularly or tracked in a dashboard. 1. Overall organic visibility or impressions. This is tracking via the Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. 2. Keyword rankings. You should select a set of keywords to track and focus on. Your SEO company should provide clear rankings progress for this set of keywords. 3. Organic traffic statistics. Organic visitors is best tracked with Google Analytics. Your SEO company should provide you with a report that outlines all of the stats related to your organic traffic. 4. Organic conversions. Organic conversions are also best tracked in the Google Analtyics goals section. Your chosen SEO company should discuss conversions or goal completions with and the value of those goals. The main goals to track are phone calls, form submissions, ecommerce purchases or certain events…..like a button click or white paper download, etc. Discuss how the SEO agency plans to help you interpret the SEO reports and the actions they will take based on the data.

10. Client Retention Rate – The final question we recommend asking the SEO agencies you are reviewing is their client retention rate. This can be a good indicator to how long other companies are sticking with that company’s SEO services. When it comes to SEO retention rates, sometimes they are better understood by converting the metric into months vs. percentage. If you ask an SEO company what their client retention rate is, and they respond with a percentage metric like, “96%”, you can re-phrase the question too “how long does your average client work with you”. This should yield a months or years response like, “22 months”. We’ve found that average retention rate for good SEO companies is usually somewhere between 94%-98%, which means they should keep clients for 1.5 to 2+ years on average.

Plan an Entire Year of Content with this Retail Marketing & Events Calendar Template

You’re probably thinking that it’s a little too soon to be planning next year’s retail marketing calendar. But why put off until tomorrow what you can do today?

In fact, there are a lot of benefits to planning your retail and e-commerce marketing campaigns early. A few include:

You’ll start filling your sales funnel early, which means people will be closer to making a purchase decision by the time peak buying periods roll around.
Working far in advance means you’ll have more time to build up plenty of marketing runway.
You can be more creative, since you’ll have plenty of time to do it right.
There will be fewer last-minute fire-drills, making your work life more manageable.
While I’m not expecting you to have all of your retail marketing activities for next year planned, this template and infographic should help you build up at least a quarter or more of marketing campaigns.

If you’re not ready to start planning yet – no problem. It’ll be here waiting for you when you’re ready to get started.

There’s even a printable retail marketing infographic and calendar template to help you when it’s time to get planning.

Retail Marketing Calendar Templates
Before getting into the nuts and bolts of planning your ecommerce marketing calendar 2020, you’ll want to download these templates.

You’ll find:

A Marketing Campaign Planning Template to organize your entire retail marketing campaign.
A Retail Marketing Calendar with all the upcoming holidays to plan your campaigns around.
A Printable Retail Marketing Infographic to keep up with all the key marketing dates.

What is a Retail Marketing Calendar?

Let’s start by discussing a little about what a retail calendar actually is.

A retail marketing and events calendar is usually a spreadsheet that gives the marketing team a single source of truth for all the upcoming marketing activities.

It’s the birds-eye view of the marketing strategy, new merchandise launches upcoming events and promotional schedules.

A robust calendar should outline deadlines, tasks, and all required actions that must take place for content to publish on time.

It's the document that makes sure your marketing activities go from imagination to reality.

Companies who sell a product via a brick-and-mortar, e-commerce store, or pop-up shop can all benefit from a retail marketing calendar.

Planning Your Retail Marketing Events and Campaigns
When sitting down to start strategizing about your upcoming retail and sales campaigns, there are a few things you can do to make sure your initiatives are successful.

Some marketers feel that these steps are a waste of time and take away effort that could be used to produce customer-facing content.

However, marketers are 356% more likely to report success when they engage in a few planning activities before launching a campaign. Here are a few areas to focus on:

Goal and Objective Setting
The main goal of retail marketing is to bring visitors to the store… be it a digital or physical location. Then, we need to convert these visitors into paying customers.

Rarely does a visitor complete a purchase their first time in the store. The buying cycle typically involves numerous interactions prior to making a sale.

The individual will visit the store, see an ad or social media post, follow the company, sign up for its mailing list, visit the store again, put something in the shopping cart, abandon the shopping cart, click an ad, go cold for a few weeks, open a discount email, visit the store again, and finally complete their purchase.

It’s a convoluted process… and it can take weeks or even months.

Defining goals and objectives can help you make sense of the often complicated marketing funnel.

Let’s go through how to set goals that actually contribute to the bottom line.

“Get more visitors.”

This is not a very well-thought-out business goal.

Why? Because it doesn’t specify much more than an outcome.

Your marketing goals need to provide clear guideposts for what success looks like. In other words. Your goals need to be S.M.A.R.T.

Here’s what your goal should look like instead:

‘We need 20,000 website visitors and 5% converted into leads, within the next 12-months in order to achieve our revenue goal of $1.2 million.”

Find Your Retail Marketing Goal With This Step-by-Step Process
Start by figuring out how much revenue you need to generate and how much you want to grow.

Step 1:

Figure out how much revenue you need to generate and how much you want to grow.

Your company sold $1 million worth of merchandise last year. You want to grow by 20% in the coming year.

That means you need to sell $1.2 million next year.

Here’s the equation:

Total Sales Previous Year x Percentage Growth = Revenue Increase

$1 million x .20 = $200,000

$1 million + $200,000 = $1.2 million

Step 2:

Calculate the average price of your sales.

So, you sold $1 million dollars in merchandise last year and you had about 20,000 total customers.

That means the average person spent $50 in your store.

Total Sales Previous Year / Total Number of Customers = Average Price of Each Sale

$1 million / 20,000 = $50

Step 3:

Figure out how many customers you need to reach your revenue goal.

Assuming the average sale of $50 remains constant...

You’ll need about 24,000 customers next year. OR 4,000 more than you had last year.

Total Revenue Next Year / Average Sale Price = Total Customers Needed Next Year

$1.2 million / $50 = 24,000

Step 4:

Calculate your visitor conversion rate.

Not everyone who visits your store will make a purchase or become a customer. You need to figure out your conversion percentage to make an accurate approximation for how many total visitors you’ll need to bring in to meet your revenue goal.

Taking the numbers from above, your store had 1 million total visitors last year and 20,000 of them turned into paying customers. In that case, you converted 2% of visitors into paying customers.

Total Customers / Total Visitors * 100 = Conversion Rate

20,000 / 1,000,000 * 100 = 2%

Step 5:

Calculate the total number of visitors you need to reach your growth goal.

The final step is to figure out how many visitors you need to bring in as a marketer to reach the revenue goal of $1.2 million dollars in sales. Assuming you continue to convert 2% of visitors

Total Customer Needed / Conversion Rate = Total Visitors Needed

24,000 / .02 = 1.2 Million Visitors

That’s your north star as a marketer. Everything you do should be focused on driving 1.2 million people to visit your store.

WHY (AND HOW) SHOULD YOU HIRE A SHOPIFY EXPERT FOR YOUR GROWING BUSINESS?

When building your own online store, it can feel like you are drowning in to-do lists. You attempt to be an accountant, content manager, marketer, and CEO. Wearing so many hats can be downright exhausting. Although acting as a one-man band may feel like the only option, your startup will not be able to thrive unless you add passionate people to your side; but let’s be honest, it might be too expensive to hire a web coordinator when you’re just starting out. It may be out of your budget and time span. That’s where Shopify experts come in. Hire Shopify experts as they understand your company’s needs and will help take some of the burdens off of your shoulders.

confusion

Who is a Shopify Expert?
Shopify experts are trusted and motivated community members that work to help companies as yours grow. Shopify expert services provide high-quality services that are developed to help businesses thrive. Also, Shopify SEO experts empower prosperity through exclusive partner resources and learning opportunities.

we-are-shopify-experts

Why should you hire a Shopify expert?
When just starting out, it is easy to underestimate the amount of work that goes into an online business. You may think hiring a few designers, developers and marketers is enough to get your site online and thriving. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. There are many decisions to be made at that start that can affect your company long term. You need to form a solid plan, strategize the best way to complete tasks promptly, and actually execute that plan to completion. To hire a Shopify expert with experience who will stick to your plan and help it thrive is a huge undertaking. You will need time to screen potential hires, go through onboarding, and take time for the actual training process. When you are just starting out, you don’t have room for errors. Hiring one bad employee can, unfortunately, sink your ship. That’s why companies trust Shopify expert services to get them off the ground.

4 most sought after benefits of hiring a Shopify expert are:
1) Quality Work
The experts of the Shopify community ensure that the job they do has class so that you can have the maximum number of satisfied customers. Whether you want to get your online store customized or get digital marketing done for your online store, make sure that everything is fine from head to toe.

2) Saves Time
Different experts require different time-frames for completion of a single job. Therefore, you can reach out to an expert as per your choice and requirements. Therefore, assigning a particular task to a helps you devote your time to other business activities. Hence, you can focus to grow your business.

3) Improved Customer Experience
Shopify expert mostly leads to the evolution of your strategies based on their data and their years of experience. When you convey the demands of your customers to the experts, it helps to accomplish a job in a customer-oriented manner. Therefore, enhancing the user experience of your customers.

4) Ongoing advice
Shopify experts hold your hands, they remain available for you 24*7 for as long as you want them to be. Hence, you get continuous support and coordination which prevents you from getting stuck at any point in time. This is a great way to keep updating your Shopify services and grow your business.

Dream Online Store

By bringing on a Shopify expert, you are giving your business the experience it needs to hit the ground running. Generally, experts will listen to your needs and use their years of experience to help you reach your goals.

Contact: shopify marketing agency

Do you need a Shopify Web Developer? Rates, Where to Find, What to Use For (End)

4. Ensure that your store is functioning properly.
shopify web developer
There are a lot of “T’s” to cross and “I’s” to dot when it comes to building a successful web store. In all of this, it’s easy to have glitches occur on your site. When you face such issues that you can’t fix, a Shopify web developer is the exact person you need to reach out to.

You can be the type of businessWhen you experience a problem, break something or cause an error, you can reach out to the developer to help fix your goof-ups.

5. Optimize store performance.
Have you ever experienced trying to access your favorite shop’s online store on Black Friday but the web page never seems to pull up? This can also happen to your customers. Sometimes, your website can get so much traffic that your load speed seems slow, images are not appearing on the site, buyers are stuck on checkout.

A Shopify web developer ensures that the performance and functionality of your online store are in top shape. Some of their tasks include doing quality checks such as testing and monitoring to provide an amazing experience for your buyers and potential customers.

How Much They Cost
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The freelance economy opened up the opportunity for business owners to outsource this part of their operations to skilled and experienced Shopify web developers from anywhere in the world. However, before you take the first step into hiring one, you need to understand the total expenses you will have to invest in setting up a successful web store.

There are several factors you need to consider when thinking about the cost of hiring a developer.

First, you need to understand that these experts have different rates depending on the type, difficulty, and volume of work they will take.
Second, their rates also vary on experience which means that the more experienced a developer is, the higher his/her rate will be.
However, you can still have a seasoned Shopify web developer to do complicated features and functionalities at a fraction of a price. How is that possible? The answer is, of course, outsourcing.

Web developer rates can also depend on their location. Freelancers who live overseas, for example, typically follow the rates based on the standard wages of professionals in their country.
Let’s look into all of these factors to give you an estimate of your total cost for setting up your Shopify store.

US vs Non-US Web Developer
shopify web developer
The statistics presented in this section of this article is based solely on a survey conducted by Codementor 2017 that estimated the cost of freelance web developers across the world.

The average hourly rate of web developers is $61-$80. This includes countries in the regions of Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East
In Canada and the US, the rate is higher at an average of $81-$100
Developers from Australia and NZ is on par with the US, averaging at $70/hour
From a different source, as of 2018. Shopify web developers from Asia can work from an affordable range of $20-$50 per hour, depending on the level of expertise needed. This coincides with Codementor’s results that the least expensive countries have, on average, 28% lower hourly rates.
Based on Scale of Work and Business
If you are looking at the amount and type of work of a Shopify web developer, rates can vary from hourly to a fixed price per project. Hiring a Shopify expert that will develop and do a complete setup of your web store will cost around $500, at an average. If you want to work on limited features and functionality, you can expect to spend around $100-$250.

In a 2018 article of Freelancing Gig, the cost of web developers can also differ based on how large or small your business is. A large scale Shopify store will take around $700-$1000 to complete full development. For medium to small scale Shopify stores, experts advise to get web developers who have specific experience on the work you need done to optimize your costs.

Where to Find Them
shopify web developer
A good thing about outsourcing freelancers is that you can tap a global pool of talents that you didn’t even know you could work with. There are professional developers in almost all parts of the world and you can hire them with just a few clicks on your computer.

Here are the Top 3 places online where you can find and hire a Shopify web developer.

1. FreeeUp

The web developers on FreeUp are among the top 1% of freelancers the marketplace. They have been pre-vetted and are world-class professionals. You will find a vast array of experts here to help you with every one of your projects. Among them are developers who can help build mobile apps, do backend development, build proprietary software, WordPress blogs, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, and Shopify stores among many other skills.

2 – UpWork
Previously oDesk, UpWork has been one of the longest-running freelance platforms with a global pool of talents. Unlike FreeUp who is specialized in assisting e-commerce businesses and entrepreneurs, UpWork caters to almost any kind of business. Just recently, they have revamped their application process to be able to assist their clients better. At UpWork, you can choose from different remote Shopify web developers with different rates, depending on their location, skills, and experience.

3 – Shopify
Shopify doesn’t only provide you hosting services to launch your online store but they also have a wide array of resources for you to tap into, including the services of Shopify experts. The advantage of hiring a Shopify web developer from the website itself is that you are assured that they are experts of that platform and how it works.

Conclusion
Anyone could learn and master the ins and outs of Shopify but not every entrepreneur has the time to wait for that to happen while their business is slowly going down the drain. There are a number of reasons for you to hire a Shopify web developer but the main goal is just one — to bring your online business to success.

Contact: shopify marketing agency

Do you need a Shopify Web Developer? Rates, Where to Find, What to Use For (Part 1)

shopify web developer

Shopify has become one of the most well-known names in the e-commerce industry. This platform is used by all kinds of businesses in the online store scene. It is highly recommended for first-time entrepreneurs because of its user-friendly interface. However, there seems to be that ongoing dilemma among store owners whether or not they should hire a Shopify web developer to set up their website.

Let's take a closer look at why hiring a Shopify web developer is a good idea for your business. We will delve in deeper to what a developer can do for you, where to find these experts and the rates you may expect to pay for their help ..

Why Consider Hiring A Web Developer
Think of Shopify as a customized hosting service where you can create your own website to display, sell, and ship digital or physical goods. For a monthly subscription, you can easily build a fully functional online store that has a shopping cart solution and an easy to learn and operate the admin panel that you can use to manage your products.

You'll find a wide range of demographic who are using Shopify as their platform for profits through online trade. We have entrepreneurs, internet marketers, broke bootstrappers and even rich celebrities. Take Kylie Jenner, for example. Kylie has been making a fortune selling her cosmetic products through her Shopify store.

Given the fact this popular e-commerce platform makes it pretty easy to start with zero experience building a web-store with beautiful and responsive pre-designed templates, why should anyone need a Shopify web developer?

Top 5 Things A Shopify Developer Can Do For You

There are a lot of requirements for building a winning web store. While Shopify provides templates that are pretty easy to use out-of-the-box, there are many things — other than creating an attractive landing page — that need to happen in order To create a successful business website. Setting up payment methods and other back-end development tasks may not be as easy for a non-Shopify expert as compared to an experienced Shopify web developer.

Here are some of the specialized tasks a freelance web developer can do for your Shopify store.

1. Customize the UI of your store.

One thing you need to understand with being an e-commerce entrepreneur is that website design and usability is important. Your site's goal is to attract customers and make sure that when they're in, they can navigate it easily. If a few more clicks can help get them to the payment button right away, you'll want to do it.

Understanding your customer interface design is the work of a web developer. Even the small adjustments made on your UI have a big impact on each buyer's shopping experience. Hiring an expert for your Shopify store is the best decision.

2. Make integrations.
shopify web developer
One of the first few things that you will need the help of a Shopify web developer for is integrating various components of your overall online presence, sales and marketing funnels, and other tools with your Shopify store.

This may include connecting your Shopify store with social media platforms such as a Facebook store, a Google store, and Pinterest. Integrations also include store compatibility with your CRM tools such as Klavio, Aweber, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, or whatever you use to email your leads and customers.

3. Make code changes.
Another reason you may need to reach out to a Shopify web developer is to make code changes on your website. For instance, you may want to make modifications and customizations to your website footer, navigational menu, product pages, blog pages or homepage for a more attractive look.

The template that you choose for your Shopify store may already have a lot of functionality and is available to you at the click of a button. However, you may quickly reach the limits of what you're allowed you to do. A web developer can edit codes for you to create a better shopping experience for your customers.

Obviously, web programming is not for everyone. Even if Shopify provides good instructions on how to make changes to the code yourself to achieve the goal you want, you simply may not be comfortable doing the work. In this case, hiring a skilled Shopify web developer would be a good option.

Contact: shopify marketing agency