If you have a thriving offline business, you are no stranger to marketing. However, the strategies for driving traffic to your online store can be a different animal altogether.

With your online store, you’ll be able to reach more prospective customers than ever before — and you’ll have complete control over their shopping experience. But this isn’t an “if you build it, they will come” situation.

In this article, we’ll go over some of the best ways for you to get your new online shop in front of the people who want to buy. We’ll consider not only how to drive traffic to your website, but also how to integrate marketing between your online store and your offline businesses to make the most of all your channels.

You can think about marketing your ecommerce site in terms of three main audiences:

1. People who have shopped with you before or at least know about your store

2. People who are looking for the kind of product that you offer

3. People who would want the product that you offer if they knew about it

For your first audience, people who know about you, you should have a direct line to them — either through email communications, content marketing or via social media. You can communicate with them directly and for “free” (not counting any budget you might spend on tools).

For your second audience, you’ll need to find ways for them to discover the products you have that meet their needs. This can involve search engine optimization (SEO), content creation (like blogging) and search engine marketing.

And for your third audience, you’ll need to think in terms of brand awareness. Are you offering a fix for a problem they don’t know about yet? Or is your target audience using a competitor’s solution? The answers will have an impact on how you approach your marketing.

Once your store is set up, you can start promoting your site to your existing customer base. We’ll also talk about how to make your website easy to find for new customers interested in your product and spend your advertising budget wisely to put your message in front of high-intent traffic.

From marketing to existing customers to acquiring new ones, let’s look at eight tactics you can use to drive traffic to your new online store.

Even in a brick-and-mortar store, it’s important to have a strong email marketing strategy. Collect as many email addresses as you can — customers, prospective customers, people interested in your events, etc. When you launch, you’ll be able to send an email to all of those people letting them know that they can visit your store online.

With your online business, you’ll want to take every opportunity to boost your digital engagement. One of the easiest and most effective ways is to give a little extra love to your social media channels, and make sure they’re stocked with vibrant images and engaging videos. Increase your post frequency and invest a bit more time in creating rich visual content and short, engaging videos. Boosting engagement with your followers increases the chance for brand awareness with their followers. Encourage sharing, and incorporate user-generated content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses many things, and trying to optimize can lead you down a deep, deep rabbit hole. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you’re just starting out.

Pay attention to on-page content. On-page content refers to product titles and descriptions, images, any blogs or other content you might have, etc. You want to make sure that content naturally uses language your customers might use when searching for related products and answers their questions.

Creating great content for people looking to buy your product is a great way to bring traffic to your site and provide helpful information that positions your brand as an authoritative voice in your vertical.

Using Google Ads for search engine marketing gives you an opportunity to bid on keywords, so that you can show up first in search engine results pages. Getting the coveted “top spot” is what search engine optimization is all about — but, a head’s up, Google Ads will still show up first.

Search engine marketing is a great way to advertise your website because it doesn’t require any design and can be very effective in driving new traffic. You’ll get results in real time and can adjust your campaign strategies based on performance as you go.

Social media is a great place to focus ad spending because you know people are spending time on social platforms. If your audience spends a lot of time on Instagram but not Twitter, you’ll want to focus your spending on Instagram.

You are most likely to buy something if you know someone who has bought the product and has given good feedback. Use this to benefit your store. Ask repeat customers to vouch and recommend, it’s an indirect and sometimes the best way to promote sales.