In the never-ending quest to find the fountain of youth, many people are now choosing to trade their days for dollars. And what better way to describe online marketing than as a day job where you can do as much as you want as long as you’re willing to put in the work.
If you’ve ever tried online marketing, you know it’s not an easy feat. Creating compelling content that will draw in potential customers can be tricky. Generating traffic to your site can be even more difficult. And once you have that traffic, it’s up to you to convert it into paying subscribers or customers.
So how can you get started with online marketing? Let’s dive into five steps that will help you develop your strategy, choose your niche, and find your feet in the industry.
Step 1: Create a Plan
Before you can dive into a marketing strategy, you need to sit down and plan out exactly what you’re going to do. Begin by making a list of all the skills and experience you have. Then, you can prioritize what you want to focus on.
Do you have a background in digital marketing? Do you have a strong Facebook presence already? Have you been conducting online marketing workshops for other businesses?
A good place to start is with content. If you create enough compelling content that draws in potential customers, you’ll be able to attract other digital marketers, bloggers, and content creators to help you build your audience.
Step 2: Choose a Niche
Once you have a good foundation of content, you can begin to choose a niche market. It’s important to find a segment of the population that you can target with your content. For example, if you’re a fitness blog, you may want to choose a female audience to target. Or if you’re a travel blog, you may want to create content that’s geared toward male audiences.
The idea is to find a segment of the population that you can target with your content and begin to build a community around that content.
Step 3: Find Your Market
After you’ve chosen your niche, you need to begin to search for your market. This is the group of individuals you’re going to try to convince to buy your product or service. And to ensure you choose the right people, you want to find three things:
- Awareness
- Interest
- Action
Awareness. If your goal is to generate leads, sales, and subscribers, you need to make sure that your target audience knows who you are, what you offer, and most importantly, how they can get what you have to offer.
- To increase your awareness, you can utilize various digital marketing tactics such as SEO, content marketing, and affiliate marketing.
- Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular online marketing strategies because it’s a win-win. You get paid when someone clicks a link or buys a product that’s promoted on your website.
- Content marketing is when you create interesting, engaging content to attract potential customers. The more you post, the more people will notice you.
- SEO (search engine optimization) helps businesses get their products or services found on Google. It involves using specific key words in your content to match those found in an online search.
Interest. Once you have your awareness, you can begin to educate yourself on your target audience’s interests. You do this by either watching user behavior, looking at social media accounts, or using software to gain insights into what interests your audience.
Action. When you have interest, you can develop a plan to take action. This typically involves choosing one of the following:
- Direct sales (also known as marketing to the masses)
- Upselling (also known as marketing to the elites)
- Cross-selling (also known as marketing to the masses)
- Downselling (also known as marketing to the elites)
- Retargeting (see also: Remarketing)
You can also use the information you’ve collected to develop a buyer persona, which will assist you in choosing the right approach for your next step.
Step 4: Identify Your Target Audience
After you’ve chosen your niche, you need to begin to identify your target audience. You can do this using a combination of tools such as:
- Analytics (for example: Google Analytics or Bing Analytics)
- Demographics (for example: Google Analytics’ Demographics or Facebook’s Demographics)
- Behavioral tracking (for example: Google Analytics’ Behavior or Facebook’s Instant Insights)
- Interaction testing (for example: Google Analytics’ A/B testing or Facebook’s A/B testing)
- Incoming search terms (for example: Google Analytics’ Keywords or Facebook’s Keywords)
- Referring domains (for example: Google Analytics’ Referring Domains or Facebook’s Referring Domains)
These five steps will help you find your feet in the online marketing industry. As you begin to create content for your audience, you can take advantage of the various tactics mentioned above to build your business.