Marketing a startup or growing a business is no mean feat. It can be daunting trying to figure out where to start and what to do. A strategy that is successful for one business does not necessarily work for another. As a business owner or manager, it is imperative that you determine what works for your business.
There are a number of online marketing strategies that you can use for your business. In this article, we look at some tips that can help you get started:
Set The Right Goals
As with any worthwhile endeavor, you should begin with the end in mind when formulating your web marketing strategy. The goals set for strategies vary from one business to another. Examples of marketing goals include increased repeat sales, strengthening brand awareness, and growing your online presence, among other marketing goals.
Once you have a specific and measurable endgame in mind, you need to break down your overall goal into smaller objectives over the medium and short-term. These smaller goals will serve as milestones that will help you monitor your progress and motivate you and your team every time you achieve them.
Optimize Your Website
Nowadays, just having a website is not enough. It needs to be search engine optimized, so that it is likely to feature in the first page of the results when users search for your product or service on Google and other major search engines such as Yahoo! and Bing. Furthermore, top-quality web design gives visitors to your site a memorable user experience that increases the likelihood of them buying your product or service, sharing your site with others, and coming back later.
Promote Across Multiple Platforms
Optimize the use of your resources by diversifying your web marketing efforts across several channels. As you do this, however, make sure that you integrate the marketing campaigns in the various platforms into one powerful web marketing system. Platforms on which you can market your products or services include email, social media, video and podcasts. As a bonus, integrate your whole web marketing campaign with your offline marketing efforts.
Pace Yourself
Between social media marketing, email marketing and video marketing, among other forms of web marketing, it is easy to stretch yourself too thin. When embarking on your online marketing strategy, it is important to tread carefully and measure the effectiveness of your actions to ensure that you are getting a good return on the time and money that you invest. If you cannot come up with all of the content on your own, consider the idea to buy content online, as it will help you out greatly.
Serve Your Audience Powerful Content
Anticipating the needs of your audience and giving them helpful content is one of the tenets of powerful web marketing. This is because in the event that they run into a problem related to your products or services, your website will be their first port of call for finding a solution.
Primarily, there are four types of content you can offer to your audience. They include:
- Interesting
- Accessing content today is far easier than it was a few years ago. As a result, people are reading articles, watching YouTube videos, and listening to podcasts at an unprecedented rate.
- With so much content available to them, catching their attention is becoming increasingly difficult. Therefore, you need to adopt strategies that will differentiate your content from that of other individuals and businesses.
- The only way to do this is by making your content highly engaging and easy to consume. Successful online marketers have done this by making their content omnisensorial (e.g. the audience can read the article or watch a video with highlights).
- Inspirational. People understand reality through stories. Delivering your content in the form of an inspirational story is a powerful way of grabbing and holding on to their attention.
- Educational. You want your customers to see you as a trusted advisor. Posting tips and hacks for things related to your industry is a good way to do this.
- Promotional. Needless to say, you need to mention your business at some point. Find a subtle way to segue into a call to action that steers your readers, listeners or viewers to your landing page.
Conclusion
If you are new to web marketing, it can seem intimidating and you might be wondering where to start because of the numerous options available. The key is not to take on too much at the beginning. Begin with one or two digital marketing platforms and pace yourself. With time, your web marketing campaign with gain traction and you can then incorporate additional platforms.
