Marketing has never been more diverse and has never managed to reach so many people at once. We have more marketing channels open to us than we care to choose from and we also have all the tools necessary to capture prospects and customers. We have everything we need to execute some highly targeted marketing campaigns but it doesn’t come cheap.
Traditional marketing has a means of reaching the mainstream audience with radio recordings, television commercials, magazines and other forms of print material. While online marketing makes our marketing efforts increasingly more interactive, with social media and other platforms. We’re now able to engage in a two-way conversation with our potential customers, and simply ask them the main question: „What do you want?”
Online marketing is not only more engaging for a target audience but it is also a lot more cost effective than any other form of marketing. Producing commercials and printing marketing materials can be really costly and might not even get you the results you’re looking for. But with online marketing you can achieve a lot more and measure your results much more accurately.
While the actual steps and guidelines for executing highly successful marketing campaigns would be able to fill an encyclopedia, so we’ll outline the most important parts of it. These basic principles underpin most of the online marketing campaigns out there. They are the foundations from which you can build yourself a strong online presence. So, without further ado, let’s get down to it!
1. Make Sure Your Website Looks Like Your Audience Expects It To
There are plenty of successful companies with awesome websites out there. Something in their websites design attracts people and makes them seem trustworthy enough to do business with them. You shouldn’t rip them off straight, but they can provide some solid directions for you to follow. Don’t spend too much time conceptualizing how your website should look like, just look at what other companies in your industry have done. Create a familiar design that you know will appeal to your target audience. It doesn’t has to be anything fancy, nor does it has to be perfect. The main thing is to study what kind of view your target audience prefers. Your website’s only job is to share information and appeal to your market’s taste.
2. Never Stop With Just a Company Website
Plenty of companies stop their marketing efforts once they have crated their website. They think that it’s all they have to invest into their online presence. Will that website just magically attract visitors by standing there in itself? Nope.
There’s a lot more to it than that. But I’ll share the first things you should do, right now.
3. Build a Company Blog
You might think it’s easy, but keeping your company site updated with content every week or every day is a pain in the butt. It takes time and energy to produce content that’s worthy of your readers and you have to do it consistently in order to succeed. Still, blogging is one of the best ways to get yourself some attention. It provides an opportunity to give your users some non-sales content that you can show off on social media and let others use it as a part of their marketing strategy as well. Going out and telling everyone to buy your stuff, isn’t going to work, but a blog can boost your marketing efforts in many ways.
You can even convert some of your readers into leads by adding calls to action to the end of your post. But the most important thing to keep in mind when running a blog is to keep its content unique and useful to your audience. It’s primary goal to help the readers learn something new from reading your blog or at least entertain them. This way, you can attract more organic traffic from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.
The more content you produce and the more consistently you do it, the more people will come to see it. Once you have enough traffic, you can use it in various ways. You can link your blog to your author bio, take them to your sales funnel and convert them into buyers.
If you’re actually writing good content than you can also do guest blogging, which will definitely grow your audience even more. Writing content for other blogs is a great way for attracting backlinks to your site and growing it further. You’ll also get traffic from other sites, growing your popularity even more.
By blogging, and producing great content, you can exponentially grow your exposure, no matter what kind of company you run. If you don’t have enough time to write all of the posts yourself, have one of your employees write too, or better yet, hire yourself a content writer.
4. Leverage Social Media and Facebook Advertising
You can probably create sales pitches, but can you be social and helpful? Most of internet marketing isn’t about showing off your product and trying to sell it. It’s about helping people solve problems. Give more than what you seek to get. That’s the best way to cultivate relationships on social media platforms.
Social media is free to use and is a great marketing tool, but it can consume a lot of time. If you do it right, it can prove to be an awesome inbound marketing strategy. Social media can seem a bit overwhelming in the beginning but it’s the place where most industry leaders engage the most. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest and Instagram are all platforms where you should establish a presence. If you have a blog, than it’s the perfect opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. You can start sharing original content and connecting with others. Engage in discussions and drive as much interaction with your audience as possible. Your most important goal is to be relevant and helpful to your audience.
If you want to invest a few bucks into paid advertisements, than it can prove to be incredibly useful. Facebook is one of the greatest tools your business can use to get your page in front of potential buyers. It’s especially good for small businesses because Americans spend every 7th minute of their life with scrolling on social media. It’s the perfect place for content discovery and for businesses to build relationships with their fans by sharing relevant content with them. You can gather feedback and know what your customers are looking for, what they would like to see next and so on.
Make helping people your primary goal. Pushing your products can drain you and annoy prospective customers. This can be incredibly uncomfortable, not to mention that it’s counterproductive as well. Some of the best entrepreneurs focus their efforts on understanding how and where people need help. In fact, most of them build their business around solving a particular problem. So what problem are you looking to solve? If you have the answer, go out and help people solve it!
5. Always Seek to Refine Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Create a solid social media marketing plan if you haven’t done it already. But even after you’ve got a plan, it’s important that you keep coming back to it to ensure that it still meets your business and marketing goals.
Social media trends are always shifting and there’s always something new to learn, so be sure that you adopt to it.
6. Use Video Marketing As Well
History has seen millions of TV commercials and people haven’t stopped producing them since we invented the television. But times are changing, and making internet videos and online commercials seem like a much more prosperous investment. Creating videos is a great way to spend those valuable marketing dollars. About 70% of people would much rather consume information through a video, than they would by reading.
By creating a marketing presence on YouTube, more of your business gets in front of potential customers who are constantly digesting video content. And once again, you have some valuable content you can share with others and get more attention. More people are visiting YouTube every day and a lot of companies make their own videos or sponsor popular YouTube channels that make their promotions for them. Either way, investing into video production and video advertising is a smart thing to do!
7. Use Free Business Directories
Local business directories are completely free to use and they allow you to put your company’s website in front of people who are looking for your services. Most directories provide extensive lists of companies that are offering services that a searcher is looking for. Business directories are great places to submit your company information and place your site in front of interested eyes.
8. Use Email Marketing and Email Reminders
Ever heard the phrase „the money is in the list”? That’s because email marketing is the most direct way to reach out to perspective customers. Email marketing in itself isn’t enough for a marketing campaign, but if you integrate it into a campaign, it will boost its success by a great deal. You can get more email addresses by running a Facebook contest, giving away eBooks and by any other means that will get more subscribers for your email list. The point is to get as many engaged customers as possible and keep them updated with information and maybe even new products.
9. Conduct Webinars or Do Vlogging
One of the most straight forward ways of engaging with your target audience is doing it face-to-face. Webinars are a great way to build up your list, generate more leads and just to engage with people. It’s a much more genuine and honest way of communication, which is why it has such a powerful effect. It’s also a better way to keep the attention of potential clients. The most important thing to do is to make your webinar as content rich as possible. Make sure that it’s relevant and it offers real value to its viewers.
It should be organized by someone who has experience in your field and experience in running a webinar or holding classes.
Conclusion
Once you know who you’re marketing for, these simple things will help you find those people and engage with them. A good rule of the thumb to follow is to give them twice as more value than you’re looking to get from them. Give them value, good content, useful information and help them whatever way you can. Then ask them to join your mailing list, subscribe to your service or check out your products. The main goal is to establish a good relationship with your audience, so go out there and do it!