Online Marketing Foundations: How to Create a Successful Online Marketing Strategy

If you’re looking to grow your business and need some marketing advice, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll cover the foundations of an effective online marketing strategy that can help you build trust with your audience, attract new customers, and make extra cash.

The Different Forms Of Marketing

Marketing is a broad term that can mean different things to different people. However, in general, marketing can be defined as the activity of communicating information about a product to potential customers so that they choose to purchase that product.

For some, marketing is purely an online activity. However, marketing can also include things like televised ads, billboards, magazine spreads, and radio promotions. The list is endless as far as the different forms of marketing are concerned.

Why An Online Marketing Strategy Is Better

With so many different forms of marketing, it can be hard to find one that works best for your business. You’ll often hear businesses say that they need to “go digital” to be able to reach the majority of their customers. While this may be true to an extent, you should still focus on traditional marketing methods as well.

In today’s world, people often have different priorities. While some prefer to invest their time and energy into their businesses, others want to invest in travel, entertainment, and new equipment. Depending on your product and customer base, you may decide that a digital marketing campaign is the best way to go.

An important point to make is that you should not pick a specific form of marketing and stick with it. Rather, you should look at what works best for your business overall and try to improve upon it. It is always better to have a mix of both online and offline marketing strategies.

Key Elements Of An Effective Online Marketing Strategy

To build an effective online marketing strategy, you need to have a clear idea of what you are looking for and what you need to achieve. It is a good idea to lay down some ground rules before you start, so you don’t end up with a random profile that does not work for your business.

Here are the key elements that you need to include in your plan:

1. Business objectives

The first step is to set your business objectives. It is important to note that you cannot set extremely high or low targets; instead, you should aim for the middle ground. This way, you will be able to reach your goals and will not be disappointed.

For example, if your company’s objective is to expand into new areas, you may decide to use online marketing to identify and target potential customers in those new areas. You may want to run a competition on social media to encourage your existing customers to share their recipes or to promote your business. Your business objectives should have a clear connection to the rest of your online marketing plan and should be measurable.

2. Key performance indicators (KPIs)

You can use a number of metrics to measure the success of your digital marketing strategy. One of the most popular metrics is:

  • Unique visitors (also called traffic)
  • Pageviews
  • Conversions (i.e. click-throughs)
  • Prospects (i.e. leads)
  • Sales (i.e. revenue)
  • ROI (i.e. return on investment)

The advantage of using KPIs is that you can easily track the results of your campaign. You can say, for example, that you want to see an increase in unique visitors by 10% in the next 30 days. By measuring these numbers against a benchmark, you can easily see how you are doing compared to the rest of the industry. If you want to compare your performance over time, you can use the benchmark to compare your results against.

3. Audience analysis

When you are developing your plan, you should try to establish the target audience for your blog, website, or social media platform. Remember: you are not writing this plan to appeal to everybody. Your target audience should match your niche, and they should be interested in your area of expertise. Once you have your audience, you can develop content that they will value and enjoy. You should also establish the target customers’ persona’s and purchase journey. This will help you identify what they want and need. Developing a persona is quite easy; all you need is a pen and paper. Just write down how you envision the persona to behave and respond to your offers. Don’t worry if your persona does not fit perfectly into the mold; it is better to be unique than to fit a pattern. That is what makes your persona special.

4. Content strategy

The content strategy defines the content that your business will produce and distribute. Essentially, a content strategy outlines the goals and objectives of your content plan. Different types of content will be used to achieve these goals and objectives. The content plan should be developed considering the following points:

  • Audience analysis
  • Viral capability
  • Cost-effectiveness
  • Reach
  • Competitiveness
  • Language and culture
  • User experience
  • Logos, Icons, and Templates

To kick off the content strategy phase, you can use the following starter pack:

  • Audience analysis
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Content plan
  • Cost-effective pitching
  • Competitive analysis
  • Decision-making document

The Different Types Of Content That Can Be Used To Grow Your Business

Once you have set your business objectives and developed a benchmark for measuring success, you can decide what content to create. There are seven types of content that you can use to grow your business.

These seven types of content will be used to achieve various goals and objectives set forth in your business plan. When developing your content strategy, you should look at what has worked previously for your business and decide what will be needed in the future. Below, we will discuss each type of content and how your business can benefit from creating it.

1. Blog posts

One of the most popular forms of content on the web today is the blog post. A blog post is just what it says it is: a post to a blog. The content typically includes engaging industry-related information tailored to a specific segment of the population. It can be used to build trust, gain credibility, establish thought leadership, and promote organic growth.

There are several reasons why you should consider using blog posts to grow your business. First, they are easy to create and require little to no investment. As a result, you can produce a high volume of content quickly.

You can also use a blog to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. If you can successfully write high-quality blog posts on a regular basis, it will be easy for you to build up a strong digital footprint. That is important considering that digital marketing is becoming a dominant form of marketing.

Blogs are relatively cheap to maintain. You will need a blog platform and, depending on the amount of traffic you receive, you might need to hire a writer to help you produce content for your blog. However, the cost of these things is negligible compared to the investment you make in having a blog. The key performance indicators for a blog are:

  • Unique visitors
  • Pageviews
  • Conversions (i.e. click-throughs)
  • Prospects (i.e. leads)
  • Sales (i.e. revenue)

2. White papers

White papers are similar to blog posts in that they are quick and easy to create. However, white papers are generally longer and more in-depth than blog posts. They are usually published as part of a business’ annual report or as an ebook for download. White papers can be used to provide valuable information to existing customers as well as to attract new ones.

The main reason why you should consider using white papers to grow your business is that they are more likely to be shared. If you can get a popular white paper on your industry’s topic, you can expect to see a spike in web traffic as people seek out this authoritative information.