We've been discussing how to choose a domain name for your future e-commerce store, analyze competitors` strategies during the previous episode. We've also revealed the main pros and cons of using website builders (remember, yeah?).

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, you should have a direct line to them — email communications, content marketing, or social media. You can communicate for “free” (except the budget spent on tools).
- You can use smart remarketing tactics from CRMs like HubSpot to send highly customized emails to shoppers that have abandoned carts. If a customer has logged in, send them customized emails with pictures of the items they were interested in and customize the emails.
- You can also get them back with remarketing. Facebook, Google, and a few others give you the opportunity to track the actions of your sites’ visitors in order to optimize the way you market to them.
- Connect via social media. Grabbing a user's attention begins with something they're interested in, not something you want them to do. By demonstrating your topical expertise, interested users then have a reason to visit your website and see what you have to offer.

Your second audience should be able to discover the products you have that meet their needs. This can involve search SEO, content creation (like blogging), and search engine marketing. 
The main idea is to bring traffic to your site providing helpful info that positions your brand as an authoritative voice in your vertical:
- Create power posts (massive articles that are full of useful information on a particular topic that relates to your industry). 
- Publish these power posts as unique pages on your website and they’ll start driving traffic as Google recognizes their value and sends searchers your way. 
- Create guides that show off how your products are used in real-world applications. Make sure to keep it visually interesting and focus on creating highly valuable content. 
- Try out Google Ads. 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.

To reach out to the third audience (people who would want the product that you offer if they knew about it), you’ll need to think in terms of brand awareness. Are you offering a fix for a problem they don’t know about yet?
- You can use influencer marketing as one of the ways of being promoted to the new audience. Influencer campaigns help present your products in front of a potential audience by a trusted person (advisor, blogger, vlogger, etc). But make sure to work with influencers whose brand and audience are in line with your products!
- Participate in online events and discussions. As online communication and events surge, there may be opportunities to increase brand awareness with target communities.

So, we've covered the major online store promotion options. Apart from them, you can certainly sell your product through Instagram, Facebook, or Amazon, but it's a bit of a different story and is better studied separately.