With the growth of the internet, everyone has the ability to market their product or service to the entire world. However, not everyone knows what are the best strategies to use to reach out to as many potential customers as possible.
While it’s important to gain as much quality traffic as you can, it’s also important to determine how to attract the right audience.
In this article, we will discuss the various options available to marketers when it comes to marketing their products online. We’ll cover topics such as organic marketing, paid marketing, social media, and much more!
Online Marketing: Defined
According to Merriam-Webster, ‘online marketing’ is “the marketing and advertising of products and services, especially products and services offered on the Internet, done mainly to increase profit”. Essentially, online marketing involves getting people to learn about your product or service, and then selling them something.
Marketing strategies have changed dramatically as a result of the internet. It is now possible to target the right audience, reach them with the perfect message, and then gain their trust to earn their business. With that in mind, let’s examine the various options available to marketers.
Organic vs. Paid Marketing
The first and most important thing to consider when creating an online marketing strategy is determining if you should focus on organic vs. paid marketing. Put simply, organic marketing is when you use ‘free’ methods to gain exposure for your product or service. When someone engages with your content, either via social media or someone clicking on a link, they are considered to be ‘organic’ visitors.
Paid marketing is when you spend money to bring in new customers. You could pay to have a popular blog post written about your product or service, or you could pay for adverts on social media platforms. For example, you could pay to have ads for your online store placed on Instagram.
Organic marketing is always going to be free, and it’s always going to attract customers. However, paid marketing can be very effective, and it’s something to consider if you’re not getting the results you’re looking for from your organic marketing efforts.
Find Your Niche
One of the best places to find leads to grow your business is within your niche. What’s a niche? It’s a short form of “neuroscience” which stands for “neuro linguistic programming”. In a nutshell, a niche is a “small market or section of the market for a product or service that has a fairly limited appeal”. When you find your niche, you’ve essentially found your audience. Once you’ve found it, it’s up to you to decide whether or not you should continue searching for more customers, or begin expanding your reach to other niches.
For example, let’s say that you are a pet store owner who specializes in buying and selling exotic animals. If you see that a lot of your visits come from repeat customers who are searching for dog supplies, you may decide to start offering some of those products in addition to your exotic animal store items.
Alternatively, you could decide that since you already have a fairly large audience, you may as well market products that are related to your niche. In that case, you may decide to begin selling pet accessories, or even begin incorporating more of your niche’s products into your marketing efforts.
The Importance Of Keyword Research
Keyword research is extremely important when it comes to digital marketing, and it’s something that you should be doing daily. When you have a specific product or service that you’re marketing, you’ll want to enter your keywords into the appropriate search engine, and then examine the results. It’s important to focus on entering relevant keywords, as well as creating short-form and long-form content to attract the right audience. When it comes to gaining organic traffic, you want to make sure that the content that you’re creating is both relevant and contains the right keywords.
For example, if you’re trying to market a software program that helps businesses manage their online stores, but you haven’t found the right audience yet, you may want to enter the following keywords into your search engine:
- ecommerce
- business
- marketing
- SEO
- free
- tool
- software
If you see that your site is appearing frequently in the search results, you may want to consider focusing on generating more content for your target audience. Alternatively, you may decide to try reaching out to other marketplaces by publishing your software’s details on social media platforms.
Social Media Marketing
If you haven’t guessed yet, we’re big fans of social media platforms here at BrightEdge. We believe that social media has the ability to connect businesses with their customers, and it’s a place where marketers can have interactive conversations with potential customers, gain feedback, and monitor the performance of their campaigns.
Marketing on social media platforms is extremely easy to do. Simply create content, and then engage with your audience via likes, shares, and comments. You can also set up automated posts to be published at regular intervals.
Websites like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook allow for incredibly easy blogging, and it’s the perfect place for marketers to gain traction.
Creating compelling content is easy, as there are already hundreds of millions of blogs, articles, and videos on the internet. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, and it’s a great opportunity to reach an audience that might not have heard of you.
Email Marketing
While social media marketing is a quick and easy way to gain exposure, it’s not the only place that you should be promoting your product or service. Email marketing is something that was made for exactly this purpose. You can use email to contact your past, current, and possible future customers. You can inform them of news about your company, reveal special offers and discounts, or just encourage them to take a look at your product or service.
There are many email marketing services, such as MailChimp and HubSpot, which allow you to create emails, schedule them to be sent out, and even track the open rate and click-through rate of each individual email.
Email marketing is still very important, and it’s a form of marketing that you should be doing daily. Just remember that not everyone is as receptive to email marketing as you might think. In 2018, only 43% of American adults reported to the American Institute of Stress that they regularly get email marketing messages, and less than half of those were interested in receiving such messages.
Content Marketing
If you’ve been around the internet at all in the last few years, you’ll have undoubtedly heard of content marketing. Essentially, content marketing is when you create content to attract, engage, and inspire people to act on your behalf. When people engage with your content, whether that’s through social media or email, you gain credibility and trust, and then can begin developing a relationship with the potential customer. As they get to know you, you earn their trust and respect, which makes them more receptive to your ideas and offerings. Finally, you can begin to develop a dialogue about a particular product, service, or idea, and create more content around what you’ve discussed together. In that way, your content can become more like a conversation, rather than an advertisement.
The content that you produce doesn’t necessarily have to be big and bold. It can be as easy as sharing a blog post about a new product that you’ve discovered, or it can be as complex as a complete marketing plan that involves several different platforms and multiple articles. What’s important is that you are consistently producing content for your target audience, whether that’s a group of individuals or a specific group (eg. a certain age group, gender, or socioeconomic group).
In today’s digital marketing landscape, there are various methods that you can use to attract and retain customers. One of the best things that you can do for your business is to learn the ins and outs of marketing on various platforms. As you get started, don’t be afraid to try a few different methods, and if one doesn’t seem to be working, you can always switch gears and try something new.