How can I market TO small e-commerce business owners?

Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum and hoping someone can provide guidance on how I can market to people who do--well--what you guys do... run your businesses online. I work for a web/software company who operates an API which can verify U.S. military status, and we're thinking a good target customer would be business owners who want to offer a military discount.

I've Googled around quite a bit - and tried varying PPC programs without much ROI. Do you have any ideas on what kind of keywords to target? What's a respectable alternative to PPC... maybe hiring some web scrapers to generate a few thousand "contact us" emails of active online stores?

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

 

Have you done any offline marketing and networking activities?

A few years back we specifically set out to target small, but established bricks & mortar businesses that were venturing online. We picked up most customers through a few business networking groups (business networking breakfasts, lunches, seminars....etc), and the rest through cold calling. We did also get a few leads from linkedin ads. Google proved expensive and time consuming, with very little to show for.

 

There are a number of ecommerce platforms out there that allow companies to create premium addons/plugins for their software. BigCommerce and WooCommerce are just two that quickly come to mind. I would look into creating a plugin for a couple of the big sites. Those sites will list your plugins for you so when someone using that site will be shown your plugin without having to spend money on PPC.