6-step Guide to Create a Brand with your Shopify store

Okay, you’ve finally found a great product with AliInsider with a low competition level and high-profit potential. Well done!

But, here’s the thing, even with the low competition, you won’t be the only one selling those fabulous shoes that everyone went crazy for, and you won’t be the only one dropshipping that smartwatch that has thousands of orders per day.

That’s why you should stop and ask: what can I do to stand out from my competitors?

Well, next time you come back from the supermarket, take a minute of your time and observe the reasons why you have bought exactly that milk, exactly that toothpaste and how did you decide on exactly that bottled water, when they all, let’s face it – taste the same.

The answer is simple – they made a brand out of their product. 

You’ve seen their logo thousands of times, you know their commercials, voices in videos, recognize the music they use… you trust them and identify with them.

And before you say – “Yes, but I’m dropshipping it, I’m not able to make a fancy package, a personalized tag, or to put my logo on it” – indeed you can.

Here are 6 simple branding tricks that will help you add value to your products, raise your business on a higher level and increase your profit.

1. Choose a niche, find your tribe

Making an e-shop and selling everything from cat pillows to makeup and fishing equipment can only cause confusion and rejection among your potential customers.

If you target a wide range of different people, the chances are low that any of them will feel connected to your brand and identify themselves with the big chaos of everything available in your store. Moreover, it would be challenging and expensive when it comes to advertising and content making.

Then use all of that to create your design, content, photos, and promotion strategy according to it. Your customers would like to see influencers they admire to advertise your products. They’ll want to see their favorite places, songs, movies, or whatever you can use for the content in your advertisements.

Additionally, in this way, you are creating a community around your store. People will appreciate and consider the reviews, comments, likes, and ideas coming from ones similar to them, plus it’s a great way to build your brand awarenes with word of mouth among a clearly defined group of people.

2. Put your product in the context

After you created a niche store, there comes the next step: letting people hear about you and promoting your products.

When creating commercials and Social Media posts, try to avoid overloading your customers with a bunch of look-how-amazing-my-products-are posts and reasons why they should buy them. That’s something they’ll figure out on their own once they visit your store.

There’s a hidden adventure, legend, or meaning behind every single product. Your job is to make a story out of it.

3. Be an educator, not a salesman

This is a stop where you need to put a lot of effort into creating an informative website and Social Media pages.

If you are, for example, selling tents, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment, you probably won’t have daily orders from the same people because those are the things they need to buy once in a while. Still, it’s important to make potential customers follow you on a daily basis so they can have you in mind once they need to buy a new tent or recommend your store to a friend with the same hobby.

Create the content in a way that makes people follow you for fun, useful information or ideas about a specific topic, and eventually, they’ll also need your product and buy it. It can be a blog on your website with cooking recipes if you sell pans, makeup tutorials on Instagram if that’s the niche you decided to go with, or a traveling blog about places to visit if you sell suitcases.

4. Be recognizable and consistent

When you see red color, Santa Claus, commercials that send a message of bringing family and friends together, you know it’s Coca-Cola without a doubt.

Being recognizable among your customers, with a carefully chosen style and image that fit their taste gives you an exclusive opportunity to make your customers choose you over the competition because they choose to buy your brand actually.

Of course, that’s not something built overnight, and most probably, you’re going to change it a lot at the beginning. You’ll create it, test it, change it, modify it and change it again. But once you find it – be consistent. It will solidify your brand’s recognisability and provide you trust and loyalty from your customers, as well as a superior market position.

5. Product packaging does matter

Take one more look at your supermarket bag from the beginning of this post. Is there a product you’ve chosen by the color, innovative, funny, or better quality packaging? Or maybe some of those reasons made you try them for the first time?

Although you don’t have physical contact with your products if you’re dropshipping them, there are still some ways to organize the custom packaging from a distance. Therefore, once you’ve tested the product and have seen you have a winning one, go the extra mile.

For example, you can find one supplier who sells both – jewelry and small boxes and ask him to pack the necklaces into those boxes before sending them.

You can go a step further and find two suppliers, one that sells jewelry and the other that sells different kinds of packages and make a deal with them. The latter would need to send the small boxes to your main product supplier, who will then pack the products in those boxes and pass them on to your customers.

There are also companies like Packtory that are specialized in producing custom branded packaging for dropshippers and shipping it for free to your suppliers in China. In that way, not only that you’ll have a characteristic packaging, but you’ll also have a chance to add a personal touch to your product. Besides a branded bag or a product’s box, you can add a tag, promo material inside the package like cards with messages, discount coupons, stickers, and many other things.

Pay attention to every single detail because everything matters. Ask a supplier to change the company name on the label that goes with the product. Instead of the AliExpress price, tell him to put your price on it or completely remove the product’s cost from the label. And don’t forget: you only have one chance to make a first impression.

6. Make customer support part of your brand

Putting a lot of effort into making designed material, content creation, and being recognizable is a great start, but the relationships that you create are what makes a difference.

If we look at it from the point of financial profitability, the first thing to have in mind is that a new customer is expensive.

So how it goes from the beginning – you target potential customers, then you advertise your store to them on different channels, you see from the statistics that they are interested, then you show them some more advertisements, you pay for those ads, and then they finally buy something from you. Congrats!

But if you don’t manage to keep those customers, you’ll need to go all over again with new potential customers, which will affect your bank account for sure.

Instead of that, once you’ve found them, stick to them, offer them honesty, reliability, personalized approach, and they’ll continue to return to you on their own.