Getting your website in front of the right audience is the most important thing you can do for your business. By understanding where your target audience lives and working backwards from there, tailored marketing solutions can be designed and developed.
When it comes to digital marketing, there are only a few key players you need to know - Google, Facebook, and to a lesser extent Microsoft. Google has the SEO, YouTube and PPC marketing side hands down. Facebook has its own platform as well as Instagram. Microsoft has Bing which is a smaller search engine as well as LinkedIn.
Finding a digital marketing agency that understands both the marketing side and the web development side is extremely difficult as they are two different disciplines. We recommend you start with a paid search agency as they generally offer the best ROI for a starting ecommerce business.
Depending on your own level of knowledge with driving an ecommerce business, there are various platforms to suit. If you are a complete beginner, Shopify is your best bet. There are hundreds of beginner tutorials and the backend interface is fairly straightforward and easy to use.
For more complicated and larger sites, you might want to upgrade to a platform such as Magento which offers a lot more sophisticated features and commerce driven plugins such as Salesforce.
Each platform has its pros and cons, and developing a custom template and plugins for each one is simple and straightforward.
Differentiating yourself from the rest of the internet is more important than ever. You don't want customers to be put off by a templated site that they've seen a million times, but at the same time, you don't want your design to be so far fetched that users don't know how to use it. Striking a balance in between these two extremes is the key design outcome.
Other areas of web design also include mobile friendly versions of your site. So many people now make purchases on their phone rather than on a desktop, and your site needs to provide the ability for a user to do just that.