In this digital age, businesses of all sizes can successfully operate online. The key is in understanding the basics of online marketing. With just a few clicks of a mouse, you can be on your way to creating marketing material that will propel your business to new heights.

Here are the steps to help you get started:

Step one: Build a strategy

Before you begin, it’s important to lay down the foundation for your online marketing strategy. What are your goals? What is the nature of your product? Who is your target audience? These questions should all be answered before you create any content.

By taking the time to devise a sound strategy, you will be able to create a more cohesive campaign that will reach your customers where they are rather than trying to force a campaign on your audience that you may have created without their input.

Step two: Identify your audience

Once you’ve got your strategy in place, you can turn to the fun part—creating content for your potential audiences. But first, you need to identify who those audiences are.

When it comes to marketing, oftentimes businesses get so absorbed in their efforts to generate leads that they forget to consider who might actually buy their products or services. The truth is, your customers aren’t always who you think they are. You need to approach marketing with a more balanced mindset and consider your target audiences’ needs, wants, and behaviors.

According to HubSpot Blogs research, 66% of customers research products or services before buying. Another 26% of customers rely on word-of-mouth communications from friends and family to learn about products. Only 12% of customers say they rely solely on advertisements or the packaging of products to learn about brands.

To grow and prosper in today’s ever-changing digital world, you must develop and maintain a comprehensive marketing strategy. But to do that, you must first understand your customer base and create marketing material that appeals to them. The key is to become a brand that women trust, and in turn, their friends, family, and other social connections will also trust when deciding what products to purchase. Your brand voice, style, and approach should all be consistent and easily recognizable so that when a woman sees, hears, or touches your brand, she instantly thinks of you.

There are four steps to properly identifying your audience:

Step three: Create personas

Nailing down your target audience can be difficult. There are so many different types of individuals out there with different opinions, beliefs, and behaviors. To combat this, you need to create personas. A persona is a person or group we can identify with, such as a particular age range, sex, or education level. It can also represent a category of people, such as early adapters or new users. By creating personas, you will be able to tailor your content to appeal to specific audiences and consequently, grow your business.

Step four: Test potential content

Once you’ve got your strategy in place and your basic content created, it’s time to test your material. You can do this several ways, such as with a landing page or a survey. The goal is to see how your content performs and whether or not it converts to a sale.

Creating an effective landing page or survey takes some preparation, so make sure you’ve got the following in place prior to launching your content creation effort: