How to promote your online store

Once you open the virtual doors to your online store, you need to attract, convert, and retain your target customers. There are many ways to do this, depending on what you’re selling and who you want to reach.

This guide will help you understand your buyers and develop tailored ecommerce marketing strategies to reach them, including:

1. Knowing the buyer’s journey and using it to create effective content
2. Using social media to promote your products and services
3. Implementing basic SEO strategies to help customers find your business

Let’s get started!

Step 1: Understand the buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey is a term used to describe the process that shoppers go through when making a purchase.

Understanding how your customers will interact with your business at each point in their journey, from the “discovery” phase to a purchase, will help you in every aspect of promoting your online store.

Here are the steps in the buyer’s journey:

Awareness: The consumer becomes aware that they have a need or problem that can be solved by your product or service. At this point the shopper will begin seeking solutions to their problem. This step is sometimes called “discovery.”

Example: If you are a masseuse, the discovery phase could begin for your potential customers when they develop neck pain or look for ways to reduce stress through self-care.

Consideration: During the consideration phase, the consumer will compare their options and start to narrow down the potential solutions.

Example: A soccer parent needs a new chair to take to their children's outdoor soccer games. They want the chair to have specific features, such as a high back and a cup holder big enough to hold their favorite water bottle. They’ll perform online searches, read product descriptions, compare reviews, and more as they consider their options.

Decision: In this stage of the buyer’s journey, the consumer purchases a product or service to solve their need. For the business owner, this decision is also often called a “conversion.”

Example: A gourmet pickle enthusiast has been on the hunt for the spiciest pickle on the market. After comparing many options, they purchase the Firey Inferno Picante Pickles from your online store.

Retention: The journey doesn’t end when a shopper makes a purchase. The customer may come back to your business as a repeat customer in the future. This post-purchase phase also involves “advocacy,” during which the shopper might leave a review or share their experience with their peers.

Example: Let’s say your online store allows users to reserve space at your doggy daycare. For this type of business, retention is a very important goal: you’d like your new furry friend to keep coming back! If the customer was satisfied with your services, they’ll likely to repeat their visit and tell other pet owners about their positive experience.

Now that you’re familiar with the buyer’s journey, let’s think about what you can do to target and influence a buyer at each stage of that journey.

Fuel a promotional powerhouse with your content

You can encourage organic growth (growth not associated with paid ads) through your content. For an online store, content includes things like:

• Product photos and videos

• Product descriptions

• Website content, such as “About Us” pages, blog pages, etc

• Your social media posts and profile information

It can be helpful to plan your content strategy around the buyer’s journey, with specific content supporting specific stages in the journey. This is a simple way to use content that you’re already “creating” (such as product information) to your advantage.

Here’s how to do it:

Content to increase awareness

Content that shares your “why” is great for this stage. Here, you can try content that tells your brand story.

This can be as simple as making a social media post that describes why you opened your business and what makes you different than the competition. It's helpful to find a place on your website or online storefront to share this story as well.

Another easy format is to record a short video of yourself telling your brand story. It doesn’t have to be perfect! Shoppers will appreciate getting to know you and learning why they should choose your store.

Content to encourage consideration

Consideration content can vary significantly depending on the type of online store you are opening. For ecommerce stores, detailed product descriptions, photos, videos, and reviews are critical during consideration.

For services with an online storefront, it may be best to focus on testimonials and detailed explanations of the services you provide. It’s also helpful to include some of the reasons that customers can trust you.

Consideration content doesn’t have to be overly “salesy” either. For example, if you sell audio gear, you can engage customers with informative articles about equipment care and repair, audio gear preferred by famous musicians, and audio setup design.

Interest-based consideration content shows that you know your stuff, and that you care about the same things as your customers.

Content to help shoppers make a decision

Once your customer has made it to the decision phase, they’re done comparing services and shopping around. They just need the motivation to take that final step and complete the online checkout process.

Content on the shopping cart and checkout screens are especially important to the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. You can also consider “abandoned cart” emails which can remind the shopper to come back for their purchase.

One content strategy at the decision stage is to show customers that your online store accepts the payment methods they trust. Here, having logos and buttons with the customer’s favorite payment methods can make the difference between a conversion and an abandoned cart.

Content to retain shoppers and encourage repeat business

Along with actually delivering a product or service that exceeds their expectations, you can encourage retention through your content.

The communications a shopper sees after checkout begin to build the post-sale relationship. A “thank you” email after the purchase is a standard. Including a summary of the sale, contact information, and even FAQs can help a new customer feel confident and supported in their purchase.

You should monitor Google and Yelp for reviews at this stage, as well. The way you respond to reviews on these platforms is not just important to consumers—it can also help your business show up more prominently on those sites. Consistently leaving prompt responses can improve your SEO in the long run.

Leverage social commerce to promote your business

The popularity of social media makes it one of the easiest places to raise awareness of your products or services, and drive sales.

In a global eMarketer survey, half of shoppers worldwide said they used social media to discover products, and 59% used social media to buy something.¹

Social commerce—which blends social media with ecommerce—lets shoppers make purchases directly on their favorite social platform without leaving the app.

Getting started involves building a social media presence for your store. To begin, it helps to learn a bit about which platforms your target customers might be using.

The ideal social commerce platform for you may vary depending on the type of product you sell. According to a PYMNTS survey, shoppers use different social media platforms for different products—47% have used Instagram for clothing purchases, and 40% used YouTube for food and beverage shopping.²

Offering a payment option like Venmo, which has its own social feed, is another way to amplify your brand with Gen Z and Millennial customers who prefer social commerce experiences.

Outshine the competition

While tools like social media can make promotion easier in some ways, there are more ways to stand out from the crowd.

Some of the techniques below might have “technical” sounding names, but they’re all fairly simple to implement.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Many shoppers use search engines to find products and services. SEO for online stores helps you reach new customers by increasing the chances that your business will appear toward the top of their search results.

There are plenty of services that help businesses use SEO to increase the visitors to their website. Fortunately, there are also ways you can help optimize your online store and/or website yourself.

Easy SEO tips for ecommerce businesses:

1. Use words and phrases that describe what your business sells. For example, if you sell handmade knitted blankets, you’ll want to use the phrase “handmade knitted blankets” throughout your ecommerce platform or website.
2. Enter specific product names and descriptions. If your ecommerce store sells refurbished TVs, you would put important search details such as screen size, model, manufacturing year, etc in the product name. In your product description, you would include other features that shoppers might search for, such as “high resolution picture quality” or “smart device compatible.”
3. Do some “DIY” keyword research. Hop on your favorite search engine and start typing in words and phrases that people might hunt for if they were in the market for your products or services. Check out the top results and take some notes on how these businesses describe themselves and their products, keeping an eye out for words and phrases that are repeated frequently. These can be good inspirations for your own website and storefront.

Optimize for local search (if necessary)

Businesses that provide services aimed at local customers (customers living in a specific area) should add local keywords when working on SEO.

Let’s go back to our doggy daycare business example. Because a doggy daycare requires local customers, as the owner you should include your city name in search terms. For example, instead of “best dog daycare,” your search term should be “best dog daycare in Pleasantville, Indiana.”

Using the phrase “best dog daycare in Pleasantville, Indiana” frequently on your website or ecommerce store will improve your chances of appearing in search results for people looking for a pet daycare in their specific area.

This approach will also reduce the chance that you’ll show up in search results for people that are not potential customers because they live too far away from your business location.

Try using this SEO checklist to help you tackle SEO on your own, and increase traffic to your site.

Paid social media posts

Organic social media posts include the posts that you make and share without any extra costs involved. For example, you might share a post with your followers about a new product release. These free posts are a good way to establish your brand and build community with your customers.

Paid social posts are a little different. You can opt to pay a social media platform to “boost” your post by showing it to more viewers—even those outside your audience. You can also pay influencers to share content about your products or services. This can help you reach a bigger audience and target specific types of customers.

Paid search

If your marketing budget allows, you can generate traffic by paying to have an advertisement for your business placed among search engine results and in other online ad locations.

This is also known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and gets redirected to your site. Google offers one of the most popular PPC solutions.