About This Column
This monthly column on Online Business Canada is intended to inspire action. You know digital transformation is critical to growing your business, but there are so many moving parts and so much to learn! It’s easier to navigate if someone points you in the right direction so you can take the first steps. You don’t have to master anything right now, you only need to move forward and learn as you go.
If one growth tip doesn’t work for your business, pick another one and try that. If you do that over the course of a year, you may be surprised at how much your business has grown and how clear your path is to further growth. A custom strategy will naturally emerge from your efforts, all from trying something new every month.
Content for this column will vary from month to month. We’ll cover what’s trending, motivation, tools, diversification, funding, actionable Canadian data, expert quotes, and how & where to grow your business online over the following month. New posts will be announced in our newsletter, so sign up to ensure you don’t miss a single month of growth.
Grow Your Canadian Small Business Online in July
July finds us in the throws of Summer, when our ideal customer starts exhibiting all kinds of strange behaviour. Take a fresh look at your customer avatar to determine how their behaviour changes in the Summer. It can inspire new ideas, innovative products, and result in a more profitable season.
The following bite-size tips reveal fast ways to grow your Canadian small business online this month.
[DISCLOSURE: We may receive compensation for links to products on this website.]
TIP 1: Gift Growth
Millions of people shop online and a good portion of what they buy are gifts. You’ll be much more successful with online sales if you provide content that targets each gift-buying stage and touchpoint the consumer moves through, based firmly on what you know about your ideal customer.
To gain a larger market share of consumers who search online for gifts, create content that helps them make an informed choice about a product they may know little about. Pick up another customer by providing information designed for the recipient. This is something that your larger competitors often fail miserably at, resulting in a serious competitive advantage.
The 5 Stages of the Gift-Buyer’s Journey
- Awareness: A consumer realizes she has to buy a gift and starts looking for ideas.
- Consideration: The shopper narrows it down to the best options.
- Decision: The consumer decides to buy your product and reviews your policies.
- Satisfaction: After making a purchase, the focus shifts to the gift recipient. This is the stage where you can gain two customers from one purchase. The buyer will be a coveted repeat customer and the recipient can become a new customer (or a repeat customer if she has previously shopped from your store). Make sure they find useful content that will help them value your product and buy more.
- Use and Advocacy: Nurture the relationships between your business and the buyer and the gift recipient. A positive experience with your business requires continued support and ongoing value. The gift buyer can become an advocate based on their part of the experience. The recipient can become an advocate for the product itself. Both can result in many more customers coming your way with little additional effort on your part.
This strategy can be applied to any holiday or occasion that typically involves giving gifts. Occasions like weddings can be targeted during Summer months.
Note: Top quality content is critical to the success of this strategy. AI can’t produce this caliber of writing. If you don’t have a writer on staff, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn it’s quite affordable to contract out. For example, Canadian Digital Media offers professional content creation by Canadian writers, as well as free content for syndication.
Learn more in Gift-Buyer’s Journey: Content Strategy Doubles Sales (Infographic).
TIP 2: How Retailers Grow with Drop Shipping
Ecommerce, like all retail, struggles with product selection and the dreaded stagnant inventory. Drop shipping allows you to test product popularity without stocking the item. When you land on a hot selling product, you can then order in larger quantities and enjoy better wholesale prices. Learn more about drop shipping in Wholesale Drop Shipping for Online Sellers.
Additionally, you can use dropshipping tools to help you make better choices the first time. Sell the Trend has a suite of dropshipping tools that users say are picking an impressive number winning products. IE: Canadian entrepreneurs behind HotDiggidyDog generated $36,000 in six weeks by drop shipping a product they found with Sell the Trend’s A.I. analytics & trend-spotting tools.
TIP 3: Grow with ‘Next Generation’ Loyalty Programs
Etail Canada published a report with survey results revealing Next-Generation Customer Loyalty Strategies. One interesting revelation is most companies believe they’re offering the latest and greatest loyalty tech & strategies. In reality, they aren’t keeping up, especially in ecommerce.
“Most of the respondents [72%] believe their current approaches to customer loyalty can be considered ‘next generation’. However, many are still not leveraging all the technologies and tactics they could in their efforts to drive higher purchase frequency and differentiate themselves from competitors. Some retail and ecommerce organizations are facing challenges in adapting existing workflows to new technologies [51%]. Others are struggling to personalize the customer experience at scale [42%].”
When it comes to online business, it’s absolutely critical that you and your staff keep up with advances in retail tech. If not, you are almost certainly growing more slowly than you could. For example, AI-driven delivery options and logistics are evolving rapidly. The technology that wasn’t available or affordable yesterday, just might be available today.
TIP 4: Affiliate Marketing Strategies for Growth
More and more companies are supplementing their income with affiliate sponsors, while other online businesses are built entirely around affiliate marketing. Following are a few expert tips from Impact to grow affiliate revenue.
- Audience insights fuel affiliate success: Listen closely to your audience’s questions & behaviors so you can respond with valuable content.
- Advanced strategies drive better performance: From smart seasonal timing to tiered product recommendations, refining your tactics leads to higher clicks, conversions, and ROI.
- Tailor your affiliate content to each platform to reach more people.
- Strong affiliate relationships create higher earning potential.
- Streamlined workflows scale your impact: Affiliate marketing tools simplify content planning, link tracking, and reporting.
There are also insider ways to increase conversions, such as cobranding, which combines your brand with the affiliate merchant brand to create a more trustworthy landing page. Learn more in Co-Branded Affiliate Landing Pages – A Guide to Dual-Branded Conversion Assets.
TIP 5: July Content
Grow your traffic, grow your business! Timely content can differentiate your business while generating traffic that converts.
Note: We post a list of holidays & observances (monthly, weekly and daily) for marketers in the Online Business Canada Facebook group. There’s a lot of them! You’re bound to find some that are a perfect fit for you business.
Following are just a few July holidays & observances with promotion potential:
- Independent Retailer Month
- Grilling Month
- Picnic Month
- Outdoor Month
- Self Care Month
- Lost Pet Prevention Month
- Roadside Traffic Safety Awareness Month
- Anti Boredom Month
July content themes and slants can include summer, recreation, landscaping, heat safety, travel, and time with family. July 1st is Canada Day, and there are two provincial holidays in July, Nunavut Day on July 9th and Orangemen’s Day on July 13th in Newfoundland. Americans will celebrate Independence Day on the 4th of July.
TIP 6: Business Books Worth Reading
Here we share quick quotes from business books we’re reading to help your knowledge grow with your business, and your business grow with your knowledge.
“Content is an asset, a gift that keeps on giving. It pays dividends above and beyond all the benefits we have covered when we repurpose it for every type of digital marketing container in our arsenal. In order to grow, we don’t need to be creating more content from scratch—we simply need to repurpose more of it in more formats.” ~ Digital Threads: The Small Business and Entrepreneur Playbook for Digital First Marketing, by Neal Schaffer.
Incremental Change
Changes spread out over the year will combine into powerful results. When growth based on technology overwhelms us, we can make small changes to continue growing and develop further as we feel our way through it.
How will you grow your online business in July? Please share your ideas or questions in the comments below, or join us in the Online Business Canada Facebook group.
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Last Updated on June 30, 2026 by Melody McKinnon, Online Business & Marketing Manager
