How to Market an Online Business in 2026

Marketing an online business means building a digital marketing strategy to promote your brand online, leveraging digital channels like organic search, social media, and email to increase brand awareness, attract potential customers, build trust, and increase sales.

For a small business owner juggling many responsibilities, deciding where to focus your marketing strategies can be challenging. In LocaliQ’s 2025 Small Business Marketing Trends Report, 57% of businesses with fewer than 10 employees said they spend just 1 to 10 hours per week on marketing.

Here are eight practical strategies for making the most of your marketing efforts, along with examples of how successful founders have used them to help their brands grow.

How to market an online business

• Build an audience before you launch
• Capture organic search traffic with SEO
• Engage your audience through organic social
• Broaden your reach with influencers
• Capture attention with content marketing
• Target audiences with paid social
• Reach high-intent shoppers with paid search
• Connect with customers directly with email marketing

The right mix of strategies depends on your audience, goals, and budget. The examples below show how successful small business owners have put these tactics into practice:

Build an audience before you launch

According to Stanford University’s LaunchPad accelerator program, early-stage founders often make the mistake of launching first and then trying to find a target audience. Instead, start building an audience before your products go on sale.

Social media can help you generate interest and build a community ahead of your launch. On Shopify Masters, Actively Black Founder Lanny Smith describes using social media marketing long before his digital storefront was transactional. By launch day, the apparel brand had about 10,000 Instagram followers, 10,000 email subscribers, and 3,000 SMS subscribers—and generated $55,000 in first-day sales. “We built the audience first and then built product that super served that audience,” Lanny says.

The hydration brand Waterboy took a similar approach, using social media to build and validate an audience before launching the business online. Cofounder Mike Xhaxho says on Shopify Masters that he first created a Shopify landing page to capture email addresses and phone numbers from people who discovered the brand through social media. He then began posting TikTok videos in early 2021, several months before Waterboy launched. 

One viral video helped grow the brand’s TikTok following to about 25,000 and its SMS list to between 18,000 and 20,000. When Waterboy tested interest with a presale, it sold the equivalent of its entire first production run in one hour.

Capture organic search traffic with SEO

Short for “search engine optimization,” SEO is the practice of optimizing your website so search engines like Google can understand its content and rank it in organic, or unpaid, search results. A page that ranks well in search results can continue attracting organic traffic for months or even years after you publish it. 

Shopify SEO tools can help improve your store’s search visibility. You can optimize elements such as page titles, meta descriptions, headings, image alt text, and page content; all of these elements help search engines understand your pages (like blog posts and product pages) and match them with relevant searches. You can also strengthen your site’s authority by earning referral links (called backlinks) from other reputable websites.

Engage your audience through organic social

Organic social refers to content you post on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, X, or YouTube without paying to promote it. Because social media posts are free to publish, organic social can be an accessible online marketing channel for early-stage founders with more time than money. Content such as short-form videos can help introduce your brand to new audiences while giving potential customers a chance to get to know the people behind it. 

On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, LatchLight Founder Julie Carty describes turning to founder-led social content as she learned how to market her wearable light for nighttime baby feedings directly to consumers. “I’ve learned that I essentially need to be the face of the brand,” she says. “So I’ve had to break out of my comfort zone and share videos about me and my life and my kids, getting the consumer to know me as a mom and a founder.” 

Julie found that sharing her own experiences could offer something paid influencer content couldn’t: a direct, personal connection between her and potential customers.

Shopify social media marketing features can help you share product pages and blog posts directly to social media, giving followers a direct path back to your online store. Additionally, Shopify’s AI assistant, Shopify Sidekick, can help you create social media content for your products, enabling you to maintain an active organic presence even when time is limited. 

Broaden your reach with influencers

Partnering with influencers can help introduce your brand to audiences they’ve already built on social media. Influencer marketing can range from paid brand partnerships to organic mentions. Product gifting offers another option for brands with limited marketing budgets. You can send free products to creators in the hope that they’ll try them and choose to share them with their audiences.

Julie explains how she used this approach at the Prego Expo to spread the word about LatchLight. “There were tons of mommy influencers there, and a lot of them we gifted LatchLights to, and they’ve been sharing it organically,” she says on Shopify Masters. “I just woke up to a post today from a mom who legitimately used it last night.”

Another way to work with influencers is through affiliate marketing. You can give an influencer a unique link or discount code that tracks purchases generated by their promotion. When someone makes a purchase through that link or code, the influencer receives a percentage of the sale. Shopify Collabs can help you connect with creators, manage affiliate relationships, and track sales generated by your collaborations.

Capture attention with content marketing

Customers have no shortage of brands competing for their attention, and reaching them through paid ads can get expensive. “The best product doesn’t win because attention is so expensive,” Sean Frank, CEO of the accessory brand Ridge, says on Shopify Masters. “You have to get there and find customers, and you’re fighting through all that noise.”

Sean recommends investing in content that can generate attention organically, even as paid ads remain part of the marketing mix. “I think it has to be content first,” he says. “The reason why I have a podcast is because if you just get on there and write stuff or film videos, there’s free impressions to be had.”

For founders with limited resources, that can mean becoming their own storytellers. Sean suggests spending as much as four hours a day filming short-form videos. “How do you stand up between people who have a billion-dollar marketing budget and people who are beating you on price? It’s storytelling,” he says. “That’s what wins that middle market we’re competing in.”

AI content creation tools, such as Hootsuite for managing social media content, Jasper AI for creating marketing copy, and Descript for editing video and audio, can make producing that content more manageable.

Target audiences with paid social

Paid social advertising lets brands pay to put their content in front of specific audiences on social media platforms. Unlike organic social, paid social allows you to target potential customers based on factors such as demographics, interests, and behaviors. Although it requires an advertising budget, it can help you reach a targeted audience at scale.

Paid social played a major role in the early growth of apparel brand True Classic. On Shopify Masters, Cofounder Ryan Bartlett said about $2,000 of the company’s initial $3,000 investment went toward Facebook ads. The company started by spending about $50 per day and increased the budget as the ads generated profitable returns. 

For early-stage brands, Ryan recommends focusing paid-social creative on the problems a product solves. True Classic’s early ads emphasized three: fit, comfort, and the high prices of other premium shirts. “Early on, it should be all direct response ads, solving problems,” he says. As the company grew, it expanded into comedic and brand-focused advertising, but direct-response ads continued to make up most of its advertising mix.

Eligible Shopify Plus stores can use Shopify Audiences to generate audience lists for ad campaigns on platforms like Meta, Pinterest, Snapchat, and TikTok.

Reach high-intent shoppers with paid search

Paid search advertising lets you pay to place ads in search results when people search for relevant products, services, or solutions. Unlike paid social, which can introduce your brand to people based on their interests or characteristics, paid search can help you reach potential customers who are already looking for something related to what you sell.

Elle Liu, founder of the bedding brand Eucalypso, initially relied on free marketing channels to attract customers while bootstrapping the business. As the company grew, however, she began investing in paid search and paid social to reach more customers. 

“Very early, we had to start scaling our paid search and our paid social ads,” Elle says on Shopify Masters. “And that was a huge way for us to grow the business.” She describes the broader strategy as “surround sound marketing”—reaching customers across multiple channels, including when they search on Google.

Connect with customers directly with email marketing

Email marketing gives you a direct way to communicate with customers without relying on algorithms to reach them each time. Building an email list can help you bring customers back to your store, promote new products, and develop longer-term relationships with your audience. 

For the skincare brand Three Ships, email and SMS generate roughly 30% to 35% of total revenue. “Email is huge,” Cofounder Laura Thompson says on Shopify Masters. “At any opportunity you should be collecting emails, trying to get people to stay on the email list.” At the time of the interview, Three Ships had about 150,000 engaged subscribers. 

Laura says some of the brand’s most effective emails are long-form founder notes rather than highly produced creative. Three Ships uses these messages to communicate major changes, explain price increases, and introduce campaigns with personal significance to its founders. “It’s an underrated piece of creative that brands should be moving into,” Laura says.

Shopify Messaging simplifies email marketing by letting you send branded emails and SMS marketing messages directly from your Shopify admin.