Effective Online Marketing Strategies for Growing Your Business

So you have a product or service that people want, you created a brand for, and you’re just waiting for the right moment to introduce it to the world and let the sales flow in. But how do you go about doing this? What is the best approach? How do you measure the effectiveness of your efforts?

These are all very valid questions, and to address them, we reached out to five different experts in online marketing and business growth to find out what they would do, and why.

1. Grow your email list

There are many ways to grow your list (and we have you covered on every front with this point), but the most effective and simple method is to focus on providing value and building relationships with your audience. When you do this, the sign-ups tend to come pouring in. Just make sure that you do this consistently and you’ll be able to see growth over time. If you want to learn more, check out this detailed guide on how to grow your email list.

2. Optimize for search

To put it simply, SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of making your web content as relevant and valuable as possible to search engines, like Google or Bing.

When people enter keywords into search engines, your website will appear in the results because it’s been optimized to rank highly for these particular terms. This can help drive traffic to your site and leads to new customers and sales.

SEO is a lot more than just sprinkling keywords throughout your content and hoping for the best. You need to actually perform keyword research, determine the value of each keyword, and then, based on that, determine which keywords you should be focusing on (and avoiding).

To that end, it’s important to note that if you’re new to SEO, starting with a free trial of Backlinko is a great place to go. Backlinko is a tool that can help you find and fix backlinks, or inbound links, to your website. Inbound links are those links that appear on sites like Google or Bing that lead to your content. Backlinks are important because they are a sign that a human has actually visited your site, and in the future, Google may choose to favor sites with a lot of inbound links.

3. Build a community

One of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your site is by building a community. This could be in the form of a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, or even a Reddit community.

When you build a community, you are providing your audience with value. Not only will they be able to ask questions and get support from you or other community members, but you are also making it easy for them to find value and information in your community. When someone values something, they are more inclined to be motivated to get it. In other words, when you create a community for people who want to learn about your product or service, you’re creating customers for life.

You can do this naturally through your own content. For example, if you are an expert on hiking, and you have a blog post about hiking that gets a lot of attention, you can create a Facebook group and share that blog post, inviting your audience to join. Not only will this provide value to your audience, but it also provides value to Facebook, because people are engaged with your content and are more likely to click on ads and spend money online.

4. Become a thought leader

Another way to drive traffic to your site is through content marketing. But not any content will do. You need to create high-quality thought leadership content that is both authoritative and interesting. To do this, you need to be an expert in your field. You also need to have a knack for storytelling and be able to convince people that your way of thinking is the best way of thinking.

To give you an idea of how powerful this can be, HubSpot founder and CEO, Nicole Hunter, created an explainer video about customer care that went viral and was viewed over 2.7 million times.

She did this by taking a subject matter expert (SME) in customer care and using her knowledge to create an explainer video that was both educational and entertaining. As a result of this video, the company’s customer care score increased by 23 points.

5. Measure the results

Don’t forget to measure the results of your efforts! Without good measurements, it’s difficult to know if your strategy is working or, if you’re simply wasting your time.

There are many different metrics that you can use to measure the success of your marketing strategy, but, at a minimum, you need to track the following: