Online Marketing Strategies and Tips for Small Businesses

Online marketing is a catch-all term for the collection of marketing strategies you can use to expand your business via the internet.

In the US, ecommerce is so ubiquitous that nearly 90% of consumers shop online, with clothing, shoes, and food and beverages leading the way in popularity.

Read on to learn about the different types of online marketing and how to create a comprehensive online marketing strategy for your business.

What is online marketing?

Online marketing, also known as digital marketing or internet marketing, encompasses the many ways to promote products, services, and brands via the internet. Digital marketing can help you engage with audiences online and educate shoppers about your products and services, with the goals of driving sales and building brand loyalty. 

Paid vs. organic online marketing: What’s the difference?

With paid marketing, marketers pay to put ads in front of their target audience. Examples of paid marketing include social media ads, search engine ads (like the sponsored results at the top of Google search results), and video ads on platforms like YouTube. 

Organic marketing aims to build visibility without paying for ad placement. It relies on content like blog posts optimized to rank organically in search results, social posts designed to build community, and email newsletters that customers and site visitors opt in to receive.

Benefits of online marketing

Traditional marketing techniques aim to reach shoppers via television, print, and radio ads, among other tactics. Traditional ads can have a broad reach and a tangible presence for prospective customers. Digital marketing, by comparison, has the following advantages: 

Measurability

Digital marketing allows you to track people’s interactions with your business: how they find you, shop, and engage. This helps you understand the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns and how best to reach your target audience. 

Key online marketing metrics include:

• Conversion rate. The percentage of people who took an action (i.e., signing up for your newsletter, making a purchase) after seeing your ad. Dynamic Yield puts the average global ecommerce conversion rate at 2.7%.

• Return on ad spend (ROAS). Measures your revenue compared to what you spent on making and distributing an ad. According to Ryze AI, the average ROAS benchmarks for 2026 show ecommerce at four times return on Google ad spending, and 2.8 times for Meta.

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is the average cost of acquiring a new customer, which is your total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers acquired.

Targeting capabilities

Online advertising enables accurate, specific targeting by creating digital target audiences based on demographic data like age, gender, location, income, and interests. Tools like Meta Ads Manager, TikTok Ads Manager, and Shopify Audiences allow you to target your ads based on user behavior. Shopify Audiences, for example, helps you build audience segments around your advertising goals.

Experimentation

Since you can track the results on individual campaigns, digital marketing channels, ads, and content types, digital marketing allows you to test and experiment to see what’s performing well. For example, you can A/B test variations in email subject line copy, or experiment with different types of social media content to see what gets the most engagement. 

Experimenting with creative assets and audiences unlocked success for Sock Candy. On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Founder Mary Gui says she worked with a Meta Ads expert to run experiments, testing 10 different audiences with 100 combinations of ads. The learnings from that allowed the brand to build the infrastructure for the rest of their ads.

Types of online marketing strategies

• Social media marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Search engine marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Affiliate marketing
• Video marketing
• Email marketing
• SMS marketing

Explore how these types of online marketing strategies differ and complement each other:

Social media marketing 

Depending on your budget, you might focus on organic social media marketing, paid social ads, or both. 

A paid social strategy prioritizes speed and targeting. You pay for content to reach specific audiences on a social media platform for a set period of time. Because social ads aim to convert social users into customers, it isn’t unusual for them to have a direct, sales-oriented message. 

An organic social marketing strategy prioritizes building an engaged following over time through authentic content followers want to share and save. If you find a post does particularly well with your audience, experiment with promoting it to see if it converts new customers.

The hydration brand Waterboy, for example, found success by going all in on organic TikTok content. A video comparing their product to Pedialyte went viral, amassing more than 1.5 million views. On Shopify Masters, cofounder Mike Xhaxho said this grew their account from 7,000 to 25,000 followers and resulted in an SMS list of about 20,000 people.

Meanwhile, Scout Brisson, CEO of De Soi, turned to LinkedIn when she realized she hated making TikTok content. 

“Another founder friend of mine had told me how impactful LinkedIn had been for her business,” she says on Shopify Masters. 

Writing thoughtful posts about her entrepreneurial journey led to press and buyer interest. 

“I was surprised by how immediately it was really impactful for the whole business,” Scout says. 

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is the strategy of partnering with influencers to build brand awareness and boost sales. This usually happens on social media platforms but also on an influencer’s newsletter, podcast, or website. Networking tools like Shopify Collabs can help you find suitable creators. 

From there, you can pay them to create sponsored content. Alternatively, you can use a strategy like seeding, which involves sending free products to content creators in the hope of getting their authentic endorsement. 

Fragrance brand Dossier, for example, turned to influencers and creators to support video content the business couldn’t make itself. “It’s hard enough to sell perfume online,” Founder Sergio Tache says on Shopify Masters. “Without video support, it becomes even more difficult.” The brand focused on creators on TikTok and YouTube to increase awareness of their perfume. 

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a paid strategy for increasing traffic to your website through search engines. SEM involves using an online advertising program such as Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads). Marketers set the type of keywords they’d like to target and often pay on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis.

Formats for SEM ads include:

• Shopping ads. These are sponsored ads with product images, product names, prices, and reviews on the search engine results page (SERP) that show up before organic search results. 

• Search ads. These are primarily text-based ads with headlines, descriptions, and links to your website; they also appear in SERPs as sponsored results. 

Search engine optimization 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is similar to SEM in that keywords play a role, but SEO is about earning higher organic rankings rather than paying for placement in search results. This organic strategy involves crafting content, like blog posts or product pages, to satisfy relevant search queries. Technical SEO complements that content with structural metadata and link-building work. 

Free tools like Google Search Console allow you to see how your website ranks, research which queries drive traffic to your page, and measure your site’s overall performance. Paid keyword research tools, like Semrush, help you understand how difficult or feasible it will be to rank for specific keywords, among other more advanced insights. 

JJ Follano, cofounder of Zero Waste Store, credits the success of his online store to keyword research and optimized content. 

“In today’s world of SEO, content is king and blogging is the most important thing,” JJ says on Shopify Masters. “You could use a tool called Semrush, and you could really start pulling keywords and topic ideas of what people are searching for.” 

SEO research helped JJ smoothly rebrand from Earthy Shop to Zero Waste Store. 

“When you rebrand, a lot of brands aren’t redirecting the URLs from the old domain to the new one, and you get a lot of dead links in Google search,” JJ says. “You could potentially lose a lot of the traffic that you’ve gained from your prior branding.” JJ relied on Shopify’s URL redirects feature, which lets store owners map old URLs to new ones to avoid missing out on search traffic.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a strategy in which you incentivize content creators like bloggers, podcasters, and publications to recommend your products in exchange for commissions. Affiliates receive unique tracking links or discount codes, and when a customer uses that link or code to make a purchase, you give the creator a percentage of the sale. 

“Probably 95% of publications that are recommending products are getting a commission on the back end anytime a consumer is purchasing that product,” PR Professional Lauren Kleinman says on Shopify Masters. Lauren recommends businesses join an affiliate network if they’re looking to connect with publishers. Businesses can usually expect to pay a 10% to 20% commission on purchases that a partner’s affiliate link facilitated.

Shopify store owners can also run their own programs, track affiliate sales, and dispense unique codes via an affiliate app.

Video marketing

Video marketing is a subset of content marketing that uses videos instead of text-based content to educate and persuade prospective customers to consider your brand. It can look like short, entertaining vertical videos on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. It can also look like highly produced, long-form features that tell your brand story on YouTube. 

Popular formats for marketing videos include how-to videos, explainer videos, live shopping events, behind-the-scenes video content, unboxings, and customer testimonials. 

For example, the sewing pattern brand Friday Pattern Company has an extensive catalog of YouTube videos that walk viewers through using their patterns, capturing search traffic while educating current and prospective customers. 

Email marketing

Email marketing is the practice of using email to send transactional, promotional, and life cycle messages. It can look like running an email newsletter to nurture your customer relationships, or creating automated email sequences like abandoned cart reminders.

According to Julie Brown, cofounder of the clothing brand Province of Canada, building and using your email list is as much about fostering a community as it is about boosting sales. Province of Canada regularly used their email newsletters to entertain their audience with fun facts about Canada rather than making a sales pitch. 

“People signed up for our mailing list because they genuinely wanted to hear from us,” Julie says on Shopify Masters. “They looked forward to learning something new about Canada each morning. By the time they’re ready to buy, we aren’t strangers pushing products; we’re the brand that’s been showing up in their inbox with value for months or years.”

There are many free and paid email marketing services at your disposal. For example, Shopify Messaging comes integrated with every Shopify store so you can craft automated emails and manage a newsletter within your admin dashboard. 

SMS marketing

SMS marketing is the strategy of communicating with customers via text, whether that means updating them on a delivery time or sharing unique discount codes.

Like email, you can automate SMS messages to go out when a customer places a new order or abandons their shopping cart. Shopify Messaging, the same software tool that supports email marketing, supports SMS messages for Shopify account holders. 

Tips for creating an online marketing strategy

• Define your audience and business goals
• Plan content for each stage of the customer journey
• Be firm with your budget
• Respond to your performance data

Use these tips to start building your own online marketing strategy:

Define your audience and business goals 

Your business goals will guide every other step that makes up your online marketing strategy and help you prioritize which tasks come first. 

Goals should be measurable, so you know if you’re making progress toward them. Common online marketing goals include increasing sales, boosting social media engagement, getting new newsletter subscribers, and improving brand awareness. Start with just a few key objectives to avoid spreading your strategy too thin.

At the same time, create a clear picture of the type of person you’d like to reach. Your ideal customer profile can include demographic, psychographic, and behavioral traits. You should have a clear idea of the pain point your product helps them solve and where they spend the bulk of their time online. 

If you don’t have this customer data already, get it by interviewing your current customers directly or digging into tools like Google Analytics to see who buys the most from your store and where your referral traffic comes from.

Plan content for each stage of the customer journey

Once you understand what your audience is looking for and where they spend their time online, you can build out a content plan that aligns with their interests and what you have to offer. It can be helpful to plan your content around a customer journey, from awareness to building brand loyalty:

1. Awareness. Create engaging content that positions your product as the solution to your audience’s problem. 

2. Consideration. Showcasing social proof like reviews or working with content creators to demo your product helps your audience make a purchase decision. 

3. Retention. Encourage brand advocacy by building a community and celebrating it, like resharing posts you’ve been tagged in or sharing success stories from customers. 

Be firm with your budget

It’s key to estimate what you can reasonably spend on your online marketing efforts and stick to that number. For reference, the 2026 CMO survey reported that the average marketing budget is 9% of revenues and 9.6% of overall budgets. This means if your annual revenue is $500,000, it would be within reason to budget around $45,000 for your marketing expenses. 

As part of the budgeting process, factor in your costs beyond running campaigns on platforms like Meta or Google. You might, for example, hire a freelance graphic designer to help build campaign assets. According to ZipRecruiter, the average freelance graphic designer hourly rate is $34.67 per hour in the US. Additional expenses can include copywriting and software costs.

Take advantage of free tools that come with your ecommerce platform. For example, Shopify plans come with free marketing automation tools you can use to segment audiences and send automated messages. 

Respond to your performance data

Tools like Shopify Analytics allow you to see what’s working and what’s not to keep your budget in check and goals on track. Shopify creates marketing reports that measure conversion rates and attribution, so you can see if something like an Instagram campaign leads to sales. Measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like sales and click-through rates across channels you’ve integrated with your Shopify store.