The world of marketing on the internet is a vast place, and one that is always evolving. While the platforms and technology surrounding these various marketing efforts may be diverse, the methods and strategies used to promote these products and services are similar in many cases.

Attract

Whether you are advertising on a blog site or on social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram, attracting potential customers is always a key consideration. When it comes to promoting your business or product online, there are various techniques and strategies that you can use to draw in the traffic that you so desperately need.

One of the most effective (and free) ways of attracting potential customers is by means of the so-called PPC (Pay per Click) strategy. This is a type of marketing that involves paying for each time someone clicks on your website or a specific link to your site from another source. The benefit of this approach is that you can target specific phrases and keywords that are highly relevant to your business. Since you are paying for each click, the cost of acquiring a potential customer is quite low. This is also one of the more traditional methods of online marketing and has been around for a while. While there are drawbacks to this strategy, it is still one of the most popular and most effective means of attracting traffic to a site. You can use services such as Google Adwords to get started with this type of marketing.

Approach

Once you have attracted potential customers to your site, the next step is to convert these same individuals into paying customers. This is a process that involves getting the person to take some kind of action after clicking on your ad or visiting your website. The most common example of this would be to enter their email address in order to receive special offers or to download a guide or whitepaper that will help them understand or use your product or service. Depending on the industry and type of product that you are promoting, this step can vary from simply convincing them to visit your site to getting them to take action and sign up for a free trial or one of your newsletters.

The approach that you take will depend on many factors, including your target audience, product, industry, and so on. If possible, you should try to follow the methods and approaches that are effective and proven in the field.

Act

Once you have convinced a potential customer to take action, the last step is to measure the result of your marketing efforts and evaluate whether or not they were successful in bringing in the traffic and business that you hoped for. This is a bit more difficult than just attracting and converting website visitors into paying customers, but it is also one of the most important steps to determine the true impact and effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

There are several key metrics that you should look out for and keep track of, including:

• Number of conversions (actions that you wish to see after visiting your site)
• Revenue gained from this initiative (how much money are you making from this source)
• Cost per conversion (how much does it cost you to generate a conversion – in other words, how much does each lead or each email address cost you)
• Conversion rate (how many people are taking action after visiting your site – often expressed as a percentage)
• Average orders per conversion or sale (this is the average order amount from users of your product or service)
• Time to close (how long it took you to get from visitor to a completed sale or lead)
• Churned rate (this is the amount of people who visited your site, but who then left without taking any kind of action)
• Bounce rate (the percentage of people who came to your site, but who then left without taking any kind of action)
• Search engine optimization (how well your site is performing in search results)

The higher your bounce rate and the lower your search engine optimization, the more you should be concerned. Why? Well, the search engines want to present the best user experience to their users when they search for keywords or phrases related to your business. The worse your bounce rate and the lower your search engine optimization, the more you are pushing people away from your site and off the grid.

Adapt

In this step, you will want to make changes to your strategy and tactics based on what you learned in the previous step. For example, if you saw that your bounce rate was quite high, but your search engine optimization was still good, you may decide to lower your prices to attract more customers. Or, if your search engine optimization is low but your conversion rate is excellent, you may want to experiment with some different types of ads or offer deeper discounts to encourage people to act.

In order to make sure that you are always running effective and efficient marketing campaigns, you need to take some time every month to review and evaluate the previous month’s results. You can use platforms such as Google Analytics to track all the metrics and data regarding your various marketing efforts. With this information at your fingertips, you will be able to determine the true impact and success of your marketing strategy without any doubts or uncertainties.