Most of us are very familiar with offline marketing. We get out the yellow notepads, put up yard signs, and plaster our faces on television commercials. While these are all still effective ways to attract potential customers to your products or services, we also have online marketing. With the click of a button, we can target the right audience, reach those people, and convert them into paying customers.

So if you’re searching for ways to market your business, you’re probably wondering, how can I do both offline and online marketing? Let’s take a look.

Create A Marketing Plan

You can start by creating a marketing plan. A marketing plan will help you organize your thoughts and guide your actions. To create a marketing plan, you will need to consider the following:

• The objectives of your marketing strategy
• The objectives of your marketing plan
• How will you measure the success of your plan
• What are your short-term and long-term goals
• The type of customers you want to attract
• The type of customers you need to attract
• The marketing and sales channels you will use
• The marketing and sales costs you are willing to incur
• The type of content you will use
• The type of content you will create
• The social media platforms you will use
• The digital marketing tools you will use

Once you have your plan in place, you can move to the next stage and start to implement your strategy. Don’t be afraid to be creative and come up with new ideas as you go along. If you find that certain tactics aren’t working, you can change your approach and try something new. Remember, experimentation is key to finding the most effective ways to market.

Create Keyword Research And Determining What To Target

After you have your plan in place and you know what you’re going to do, start your keyword research. The first step is to decide what you’re going to target. Once you’ve decided, create a list of keywords and short-hand phrases that you feel are closely associated with your chosen products or services. You can also add to this list any words or phrases that you feel may be relevant to your target audience.

For example, if you are an automobile dealer looking to market your cars online, you might target keywords such as car buying, car sale, new automobile, etc. Once you have your list of keywords, you can move on to the next step.

Determining The Competitiveness Of Your Keywords

The next step in your keyword analysis is to figure out how competitive the keywords you have chosen are. You can do this by entering your chosen keywords into a free tool like Google Keyword Planner. With Google Keyword Planner, you can type in your keywords and compare their popularity and competitiveness.

For example, if you are entering the keywords “automotive” and “new” into the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll see a graph that looks like this:

As you can see from the screenshot above, entering “automotive” and “new” into the Google Keyword Planner shows us that there are a lot of competitors for these keywords. If your keywords are highly competitive, you may need to choose different keywords or find a different way to market your product or service. The competitiveness of your keywords will depend on the following factors:

• The number of search engines that will index your website (more on this later)
• The monthly search volume for your chosen keywords
• The location of your website (country, state, or provincial area)
• The number of people searching for your chosen keywords
• The cost of acquiring a new customer via paid advertising (PPC, pay-per-click)
• The conversion rate of your paid advertisements (PPC, pay-per-click)
• The average sale price for your chosen products or services
• The demand for your products or services in your chosen market

Choose The Right Geographic Location

Once you have your list of keywords and you know how competitive they are, it’s time to choose the right geographic location. Your geographic location will determine the audience that you target. There are a lot of different places you can choose from but you should narrow your choices down to the closest major city to you.

Why? Because it takes time to attract customers to your business. According to HubSpot Blogs, it takes an average of six months to a year to grow a business that provides a compelling value to a specific audience. So, if you want to get your product or service into the hands of as many people as possible, it makes sense to start locally. You can then expand your business to other major cities as your customer base grows.

Grow A Following On Social Media

Another way to attract potential customers to your business is to gain reputation on social media. When someone hears about your business, product, or service, but doesn’t know enough about you to connect the dots between your brand and their experience, you have a problem. Your job is to make them aware of who you are and what you offer through social media.

To start, you can build a Twitter account for your business. Be sure to use the right hashtags and keep the information brief and to the point. As you build your presence on Twitter, connect with other account holders in your industry and engage with them. This will help you find like-minded people who can become your followers and help you figureheads in your industry to follow you.

If you want to gain more traction and grow your account, you can use a tool like Hootsuite to connect your Twitter and Instagram accounts. With Hootsuite, you can schedule content to be released across all of your social media accounts at a set time. This will keep your regular followers updated about new products and services without having to worry about being constantly bombarded with irrelevant content.

Get Found On The Search Engines

The final step in your keyword analysis is to get found on the search engines.

To do this, you need to ensure that your website can be found by as many people as possible through a free tool like Google’s Free Search Engine Optimization Tool. With this tool, you can enter your website’s URL and get a preview of how the search engines will treat your site.

If you’re curious, you can try out this tool by simply entering a website you own into the SEOTool and clicking the “Get Optimized” button at the top.

This will take you to a page that looks like this:

As you can see from the screenshot above, this is the results of using the free Google SEOTool to optimize my own site. You’ll notice that the tool has found three pages associated with my site, as well as some internal links that have been built up over time. You should also see some suggestions for keywords and a few ideas for how to structure my content.

Depending on how competitive your chosen keywords are, you may see a lot of results or very few results. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see a lot of results. Just because your site isn’t visible to the naked eye doesn’t mean that you won’t get found by potential customers searching for your products or services online.

Now that you’re equipped with the basics of offline marketing, let’s examine how you can take your marketing dollars and multiply them online. This is where digital marketing and social media come in.