Ep. 266 Before You Try to Fix Your Traffic Problem, Start Here

Today we’re talking about traffic, but not in the way most conversations about retail traffic usually go.

This isn’t about a new platform, a new campaign, or a quick fix. It’s about why I decided to focus an entire year on visibility inside Master Shopkeepers, and why, before you try to fix traffic in your own store, there’s something more important you need to understand first. 

Cash flow was the focus for 2025–but traffic kept coming up as the next major struggle. Not for all members, but for many. And not because members aren’t working hard. They work their tails off! This topic shows up because when sales feel slow or unpredictable, traffic becomes the thing you want to fix.

What Store Owners Mean When They Say “Traffic”

When a store owner says they have a traffic problem, what they’re usually reacting to is low sales. Traffic becomes shorthand for a lot of things. 

Fewer transactions, slower days, that uneasy feeling of not knowing what to adjust first. So the instinct is to reach for something tactical. An ad or a feature or a promotion–something concrete that feels like forward movement.

This is where I start to get concerned, because this is also where most shop keepers waste money and energy.

A perfect example of this is a situation from a group member back in 2023, she invested $1.2K in a half-page holiday print ad in a local magazine. The magazine sent a photographer and the photos were worse than what she normally takes herself. 

But there was no real way to track the ad. No code, no clear call to action, and no way to know if it worked beyond the circulation numbers the magazine shared. No customer ever mentioned seeing the ad, and sales that December were actually lower than the year before.

Now ads CAN work, but the issue with THIS ad is there was no clear reason it existed, no way to evaluate it, and no understanding of whether it was even the right move for her store in that moment.

The Pattern I Keep Seeing With Store Owners

I’ve seen this same pattern with direct mail, billboards, social media ads, influencer campaigns, all of it. Not because those strategies are bad, but because store owners often invest in visibility before they understand their own situation well enough to choose the right visibility plan.

It’s not reckless. It’s that we don’t know what we don’t know.

And the opposite happens too. Store owners avoid spending altogether because they’re unsure, and that uncertainty becomes just as expensive–because they aren’t marketing at all and struggling with sales.

That’s the phrase I keep coming back to: visibility without context is expensive. 

It costs money when you spend without clarity, and it costs momentum when you don’t spend at all because you’re unsure.

Where Your Shop’s Traffic Actually Starts 

This is the part that gets skipped. 

Before you try to fix “traffic,” you have to understand your business as it exists right now. Your shop. Your location. Your customer. Your season. Your capacity.

Traffic is not one-size-fits-all. What works for one store, even one in the same town, may not work for another. 

Online traffic and in-store traffic are connected, but they’re not the same job. They attract differently, they behave differently, and they convert differently. 

And if you don’t know which one you actually need to focus on, any tactic you choose is essentially a guess.

Why We’re Spending a Year on Visibility—And What That Year is Designed to Do

After seeing this enough times, I realized the issue wasn’t a lack of marketing ideas. It was a lack of understanding around which visibility problem actually needed attention. 

Inside Master Shopkeepers (my group mastermind for brick and mortar store owners), I kept hearing requests for ads, SEO, influencers, window displays, TikTok, Google Analytics, non-digital marketing, collaborations. All reasonable requests, and full of good energy, too!

But, most of the time, the request itself was just the surface. When business feels slow or unpredictable, it’s natural to reach for a tactic, something concrete and feels like action. But what’s usually happening underneath falls into one of three  situations:

• Not enough people are finding you (at all)
• The right people are finding you, but they’re not coming back often enough
• Plenty of people are showing up, but they’re not buying

Those are very different problems, even though they feel the same when you’re standing behind the counter wondering why sales are soft. That’s what I mean by the visibility gap, and until you know which gap belongs to your store, any tactic you choose can be a guess.

That’s why The Visibility Year isn’t built as 12 months of marketing tactics, it’s built in five parts, each one designed to narrow the guesswork. We start by looking at foot traffic, not to fix everything, but to identify what’s actually limiting visibility in the first place.

The goal at the beginning isn’t action, it’s diagnosis. 

From there, the focus shifts to understanding how your business actually behaves. The things that make your store different. 

Anyhow by the end of the year and most likely sooner, members who participate will have a real plan. Not a vague intention to do more marketing, but a grounded visibility strategy for the following year, based on what actually worked for your store.

Bringing it Back to YOUR Store

Once you understand your visibility gap, the right tactic becomes obvious. 

You stop copying.

You stop guessing.

You stop spending money just to feel productive. 

Traffic stops feeling random, because you know what job you’re asking it to do. 

And that’s why, before you try to fix your traffic problem, this is where you start. This is how visibility becomes something you can plan for, instead of something you chase. 

And it’s exactly what we’re doing inside Master Shopkeepers this year. I joked in MSK that these yearly themes have me so excited, I actually already know the themes of 2027 and 2028 and I can’t wait to share!

Ready to work on your shop’s visibility this year? Apply to join Master Shopkeepers today!