While the world of marketing and advertising has changed significantly in the past few years, the fundamentals of marketing remain the same. The purpose of this blog post is to outline some of the most essential tips for running an online marketing campaign for a business – no matter what channel you decide to use.

Focus On The Basics

It’s important to keep things simple when developing an online marketing strategy, especially if you’re just getting started. By focusing on the basics such as search engine optimization (SEO) and PPC (pay-per-click), you’ll be able to produce results much more quickly than trying to do everything at once.

The best way to approach SEO is by focusing on quality content that answers questions and offers solutions to those searching for information. Pro-active SEO is an important part of any marketing campaign, but it doesn’t have to be complex. Begin by looking at the most basic metrics such as traffic and engagement, and then move onto more complex areas like SEO performance and ranking.

Make Sure You Study Competitors

One of the most important things a business can do to effectively market itself online is to study competitors. You can learn a lot from competitors’ websites by looking at the code, structure, and content on their sites – all of which affect how people interact with your product or service. This type of analysis will also make it much easier to come up with unique ideas for your own website.

For example, if you study competitors’ websites and notice that most of them use the same or similar content and copywriting strategies, you can develop your own strategy to stand out from the crowd. You might decide to use a unique selling point or offer a solution to a problem that none of your competitors are addressing.

Use The Right Keywords

When optimizing your website for search engines, you must be careful about choosing the right keywords. When someone searches for a product or service that you offer, your website will appear in the search results. You want these results to be populated with customers who are looking for your product or service – not your competitors’.

To get started, enter the product or service that you sell into the Google Search box and then use the autosuggest to find words and phrases that people are using to find information about your product or service.

From here, you can use the re-word feature to find variations of your keywords (such as SEO, search engine optimization, seo, search optimisation, or SEO friendly) and then add them to your headline, body copy, and metadata (the text that appears below the headline on a Search results page).

Avoid Cloaking

Shown below is an example of Google’s “no-cloak” policy applied to a search for the term “buy women’s clothes”. As you can see, without a no-cloak policy, Google will strip off the clickable ads (which appear in the form of a red arrow) in its Search engine results.

While you might not always want to avoid the ads altogether when marketing online – especially if you’re selling a product that people might be more likely to click on (such as affiliate marketing or product reviews) – you should still keep your eye on things like cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. If you don’t want to end up like the guy in the above example, keep no-cloaking.

Create Social Proof

In addition to focusing on marketing and SEO, you also need to make sure that your social media channels provide ‘social proof’ that your product or service is worth buying. The best way to do this is by making use of testimonials and reviews from real customers who have tried out your product or service – preferably with positive feedback. Videos of successful customers using your product or service are also effective ways to boost your social proof.

The above example is from an organic search on Google for the term “social media marketers”. As you can see, the organic results don’t include any paid results. This is because the top three results are from verified users who have stated that they use the product in question. While it’s not always possible to find product reviews for your own product (or service), you can use keywords like “social media marketing” to find blogs, forums, and other places that people are talking about – and sharing – their experiences with your product.

Measure, Measure, Measure!

Just because you’ve launched an online marketing campaign doesn’t mean that you can stop measuring. After your initial burst of activity, you’ll need to set a regular schedule for reviewing and analyzing how well your efforts are paying off. This might mean checking the number of orders and conversions for a certain product, researching new keywords and analyzing their performance, checking the number of people who’ve interacted with your social media channels, and more.

The advantage of this approach is that you won’t be limited to just a few key performance indicators. Instead, you can track a wide range of data – from SEO to social media to e-commerce – from one place. This makes your analysis much easier, as you don’t have to toggle back and forth between several different tabs on your computer to compare and contrast the results of various initiatives.

Depending on your resources and goals, you might decide to track the following metrics:

• SEO, including keywords, landing page SEO, and backlink analysis
• Social media metrics: number of followers, engagement, and ROI (return on investment)
• Web traffic and conversions (for e-commerce sites)
• Yield (of leads, click-throughs, and purchases).
• Content analysis: bounce rate, time-on-page, and analysis of how well your content converts (for e-commerce sites)

In addition to metrics, you’ll also need to consider gathering ‘big picture’ data such as the following:

• Level of engagement: number of comments, shares, and likes vs. your target audience
• Brand awareness: how aware are people are of your brand and what it stands for
• Lifetime value of a customer: how much is this person worth going forward?
• Reach: total number of people who’ve heard of your company and products
• Subjective measurements: how would you rate your experience with a particular product or service?

Once you have all of this data, you can use it to identify key problems and gaps in your online marketing strategy. Then, you can develop a plan of action to address these issues.