You’ve decided to go the digital route to market your product or service, and you’ve invested in web design and hosting. Now what? 10 marketing tips to help you succeed online.
1. Target the right audience
The first and most crucial step to effective marketing is to pinpoint your ideal buyer and create content that they want and need. Knowing your target audience will help you craft messaging that will resonate with them. Begin by asking yourself questions about your ideal buyer:
- What are their needs and desires?
- What problems are they experiencing that you can solve?
- What opportunities do they see in your product or service?
- What motivates them to act now?
- What benefits will they get from using your product or service?
- What makes your product or service special?
- What do you deem to be the main competitor’s strengths and weaknesses?
- How many other competitive brands and products exist in the marketplace?
- What are your unique selling points (USPs)?
- How does your product or service differ from the competition?
- What do you deem to be the primary benefit of your product or service?
- How long do you plan on being in business?
Once you have a clear vision of who your ideal buyer is, you can develop content that will resonate with them and, in turn, grow your business. Remember: you are marketing to people who have a problem that your product or service can solve. If you can develop content that relates to a problem that they are experiencing and provide them with a solution that relates to their needs, you will have an opportunity to connect with them and grow your business.
2. Be consistent
According to the experts at digital marketing agency Blue Horizon, users will become immune to advertising if they experience it too frequently or see it too heavily. To avoid this, you must be consistent with your marketing efforts.
Blue Horizon states, “Users are less likely to be convinced by a massive campaign that pops up once or twice. Instead, they prefer to be engaged with content that they come back for time and time again. Consistency is the key to establishing trust and reliability in a digital marketer’s mind and on the internet as a whole.”
3. Measure the effectiveness of your campaigns
To ensure you’re investing in the right platforms and the right types of content, you must measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Most online stores provide their customers with analytics tools that can help them determine the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. Learn to use these tools and measure the results of your campaigns to determine which ones work and which ones fail.
For example, if you’re running a paid ad campaign on a platform like Google AdWords and you notice that 100 people clicked on your ad and 20 people made a purchase, you can conclude that your ad campaign was worth it.
4. Be versatile
Marketing in today’s digital world is very different than it was just a few years ago. Back in the day, a marketer would primarily focus on creating advertising and marketing material that would reach a specific audience. These days, marketing material needs to be platform and device agnostic.
In other words, if you’re planning on running an ad campaign on Google AdWords, you’ll need to have ads that work on mobile devices, as well as desktop computers. If you don’t have a responsive web design template, it can be difficult to ensure that your ads look the same on all devices (e.g., desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile phones).
5. Use keywords
To ensure your content reaches the right audience, you must use keywords in your content.
Through keyword research, you discover which words and phrases people are using to search for information about your product or service. Once you have this data, you can incorporate these keywords into your content to increase the likelihood of your material being discovered.
6. Attract, engage, and remember people
To ensure people want to keep coming back for more, you must keep them interested in your product or service. To achieve this, you can use various marketing tactics, including the following:
- Attract: Using a combination of words and visuals, you can entice people to learn more about your product or service.
- Engage: Once people have become interested in your product or service, you can engage with them to increase the likelihood of them taking action (e.g., making a purchase, signing up for a trial, etc.).
- Remember: This point goes hand-in-hand with the previous one. To keep people returning for more, you must ensure that they remember your product or service. One effective way of doing this is through cross-selling and upselling. If someone lands on your website from an online store, and they’re not yet aware of your product or service, you can convince them to purchase it. This entails providing them with valuable information about your product or service, as well as presenting them with alternatives. Cross-selling allows you to increase revenue and minimize loss.
- Curate Content: Content curation is the process of capturing and organizing content that is already available online into cohesive posts or pieces. It’s a really useful tool for digital marketers whose target audience is comprised of busy, online shoppers who want to consume high-quality content quickly.
- Join communities: Communities allow you to connect with people who have shared interests and/or activities. Joining a community will provide you with an opportunity to engage with people who are interested in the same topics as you are. For example, if you’re into fashion, you can join the Fashion Community and engage with people who are also, in the process of discovering and sharing fashion-related news and content.
- Create themed websites: Using a tool like WordPress, you can create multiple websites that can act as sub-brands or even entire brands. With these websites, you can experiment with different styles and layouts and see which ones work best for your content.
- Make your content easily share-able: Using a tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social, you can easily share content to your various social media accounts. If someone lands on your site and decides to’share’ something, you can be sure that they’ll do so, across their social media platforms.
The main takeaway from this is that to be effective, your marketing efforts must be versatile, measurable, and have the ability to be shared.
To help you be more productive, we’ve curated a list of the top 10 tools that can make your job as a marketer easier. If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that can help you automate tasks, streamline processes, and gain a better understanding of your audience, try HubSpot today.