When you’re starting a new business or considering changing careers, the idea of becoming an “online marketer” can seem daunting. After all, isn’t internet marketing a thing of the past?

While there are many career options within the field of digital marketing, one of the most in-demand roles is that of an online marketer. That’s because with the increasing popularity of online shopping and social media, marketers have had to adapt their strategies to fit the evolving landscape. The role of an online marketer is pretty much the same as it was 5 or 10 years ago; however, with the changing face of the internet and consumer preferences, the strategies are constantly evolving. For that reason, it’s essential that you learn how to be a successful online marketer.

The Basics Of Online Marketing

Depending on your specific area of interest, you might consider focusing on digital marketing or online marketing. While there is some difference in practice, the two are synonymous. When speaking with a digital marketing expert, they will often use the terms interchangeably. Even the dictionary definition of the word “marketing” reflects this blurring of lines: it now means “the action of marketing or advertising goods or services”.

This is important because even though you might not work in an online marketing agency, many of the roles within one are instrumental in the practice of digital marketing. For instance, a successful digital marketer needs to have excellent copywriting skills. In addition, they might have developed analytics tools to track the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns. Finally, a good understanding of SEO, conversion optimisation, and retargeting is crucial for ensuring that a website is both visible and relevant to a target audience. In effect, without a good understanding of these areas, a website’s content cannot help but appear chaotic and unorganised.

To be a successful digital marketer, then, you will need to have a good base in copywriting and analytics. From there, you can develop your specialized skillset in SEO, conversion optimisation, or retargeting. When creating a plan to market a product or service online, you will most likely begin with keyword research. With that, you can identify relevant keywords and phrases and determine the number of times those phrases are used within the copy of a given website. This will then form the basis of your targeted content strategy, helping to establish what you should be writing about and when.

The Basics Of Online Marketing

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important steps in the development of any digital marketing campaign. Without it, you are effectively starting from scratch in terms of the relevance and strength of your keywords. That means you are wasting a lot of time and effort trying to optimise generic content for search engines. In general, the better your keywords, the better your content and the higher your chances of appearing organically in search results.

When performing keyword research, you must always bear in mind that the purpose is to find keywords that will attract and engage an audience. For instance, if you are trying to promote an online clothing store, you might want to look for terms such as “mens long sleeve shirts”, “men’s black shirt”, or “wilson cooleridge men’s shirt”. To avoid appearing like a spammer, make sure that you are including words that are “highly relevant” to your target audience. When you are developing content to promote a particular product or service, make sure that your chosen keywords and phrases are included within the copy. Doing so will increase the chances of a given piece of content being found when a user searches for relevant keywords.

Conversion Optimisation

Once you have established the broad strokes of your content strategy, you can turn your attention to the details of marketing execution, namely conversion optimzation. During this phase of the process, you will be looking to leverage advanced analytics tools to determine the most effective methods of encouraging a given audience to take a specific action. In the case of a clothing store, you might want to examine conversions on your website in order to determine the most effective way to encourage people to make a purchase. In general, you are trying to achieve as high a conversion ratio as possible without resorting to gimmicks or spammy behaviour. What this means in practice is that you want to find a way to cut out all the clutter from the online shopping experience and provide your visitors with only the most relevant and engaging content. To that end, you might look into implementing a content strategy that is heavily focused on providing valuable and helpful information rather than just selling a product.

For an SEO marketer, conversion optimisation is all about boosting the relevancy and visibility of a web page or blog article. To that end, you might want to focus on things such as keyword density, internal linking, and backlinks, all of which can be measured within the Analytics tool.

Retargeting

While most would consider the above steps crucial to the process of gaining relevant traffic, what happens after they’ve landed on your website remains just as important. Even once a person has engaged with your content, the goal is still to get them to take a specific action. In the case of online marketing, that action might be to make a purchase, visit a certain webpage, or fill out a form. In order to achieve that end, you will be looking to retargeting.

This is another critical phase of the online marketing process because it allows you to continue the effort of gaining relevant traffic while also providing people with a way to learn more about your product or service. Essentially, retargeting is all about engaging with potential customers in a way that is both relevant and useful to them. To that end, you might want to consider implementing a strategy that is heavily focused on providing valuable information rather than just selling a product.

As you learn the art of online marketing, you will gain a better understanding of SEO, conversion optimzation, and retargeting, terms that will become second nature to you.