Online Marketing Strategies Every Entrepreneur Needs
1. INVEST IN WEB DESIGN
We don’t often think about web design as a marketing tactic, but it influences the amount of time and attention a user will spend on your page, and what they will do while they are there. User experience is also becoming a bigger and bigger factor in search engine rankings, so it can affect your top and bottom dollar. Your website is the center of all your digital marketing efforts, so if your page is not clean, easy to read, and interesting, it won’t matter how much time you put into strategy development you’re still going to lose customers. It also needs to create a clear path of action for your potential customer so they know exactly what you want them to do when visiting your site. If you don’t have the design skills to do it yourself, then it’s worth hiring someone to create a website that is modern, attention-grabbing, and mobile friendly…and gets people to take action.
2. CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing takes a variety of forms, and depending on how you form your strategy it could accomplish a number of different goals. For example, you could use white papers, ebooks and other long-form content to attract downloads, signups and conversions, or you could use an on-site blog to attract more inbound traffic to your site.
You could even use content as a form of help and troubleshooting, or some combination of these applications. Content marketing is incredibly versatile and useful, and, if it’s valuable, your customers will expect you to have at least some of it in place for them.
Source: entrepreneur.com
3. BLOGGING
Having an industry blog and company newsletter can be very helpful in connecting with current and potential customers.
According to WordPress , every month, more than 409 million people read over 23.7 billion blog posts on its platform.
That’s a lot of content, so you’re going to need a quality blog to draw attention to your site.
Hiring a content mill to fill pages with overstuffed keywords that provide no value to readers won’t do any good.
Blogs are the 5th most trusted online resource according to recent research, so your content needs to show people that they can trust your business.
Creating a blog should be an option within your website, but if it’s not, a separate blog hosted on WordPress or Blogspot can prove just as useful.
Just be sure your contact information is readily available, and your blog connects people easily to your website and primary marketing channels.
If you’re wondering how long it takes to write a quality blog post, nearly half of bloggers say they spend 1-3 hours on each post.
A blog is the foundation of a few other tactics we will discuss later in this list, so get started today.
Source: disruptiveadvertising.com
SEO is the process of making your site more visible in search engines, so you get more traffic from people searching for the products or services you offer. Much of your organic search position ranking comes from the technical structure of your site and your ongoing content development strategy.
So, SEO is not much more of an investment if you’re already creating new content regularly — and it’s well worth that extra investment if for no other reason than to make sure your site is properly indexed.
Source: entrepreneur.com
5. SOCIAL MEDIA
Maintaining a presence on social media platforms can help your company connect with current and potential customers, making it a must-use online marketing strategy.
You can use social media to engage users, provide them with helpful information about your business, and develop relationships that encourage them to purchase. If anyone has questions about your business, they can contact you directly on social media, and you can help them take the next steps with your company.
Source: webfx.com
5. EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing allows you to connect with people right in their inboxes. And it can earn you an incredible ROI in fact, you have the potential to earn $44 for every $1 you spend on Email marketing. Several services offer easy-to-use templates that you can easily customize to fit the needs of your business, and more email marketing services are popping up every day. You can also segment your email lists and personalize your emails based on a user’s behavior on your site.
For example, if someone downloads a guide about SEO, or your product catalog, or a coupon you can follow up with additional resources and helpful information to help them learn more about your services.
Email is a great way to keep in contact with current and potential customers and provide them with updates so they can stay in the know about your business.
Source: webfx.com
COMBINING EVERYTHING – DECIDE HOW YOUR MARKETING IS GOING TO MAKE MONEY
Once you’re clear on your business and marketing goals, who your customer is, the marketing channel that you’re going to use and how you’re going to use it, you then need to decide how you’re going to make money.
That’s a blunt way of defining how you’re going to take someone from searching around the internet, turn them into your customer and then eventually into proponents of your brand.
One of the best ways to achieve the above, is by bring everything together and creating a conversion funnel.
Having a conversion funnel is helpful, because it directs your inbound marketing efforts. It gives you a bird’s eye view of how your marketing machine is going to work.
It’s very easy to overcomplicate conversion funnels, but, essentially you’re looking to do the following.
You can learn more about marketing funnels in our article here:
Make people aware of you -> Build trust and authority –> Make an offer You can make people aware of you, by using the any of the marketing channels that we’ve discussed.
You can build trust and authority by using content, an autoresponder sequence, a webinar, a phone call – these would be your tactics.
Note: Similar to what we mentioned earlier, if you want to really build trust and authority, then you may need to combine marketing channels.
Now, this might sound contradictory, but stick with me for a moment.
As I mentioned, you should start with only one marketing channel that exposes people to the stages in which you build trust and authority.
You shouldn’t try to make people aware of you in different ways. So, in the beginning, don’t run YouTube Ads and Facebook Ads, in order to promote a piece of content – just pick one.
As an example, you might use PPC advertising as the channel that builds awareness, to expose someone to your content marketing that gets them on your email list and eventually sends them to a webinar that makes an offer.
As I mentioned before, once you’re generating a decent income from using one marketing channel to build awareness, you can then move on to other channels to achieve the same goal.
If you’ve really tried hard to make a certain tactic work, but you’re not achieving anything, then you’re free to move on to another one.
That’s the whole point of tactics.
That applies to the marketing channel that you’re using or the way that you’re presenting people with an offer.
Before you make a change, however, make sure that you’ve done everything in your power to understand how to get the best results from a specific tactic.
That includes studying your competitors, but also reading case studies that document how that tactic was successfully used by others.
Source: neilpatel.com
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