With the wide range of marketing options available online, it can be difficult to know where to start. The good thing is that you don’t have to! We’ve put together a guide to help you choose the right type of marketing for your business, based on your goals, budgets and target audience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you’ve ever shopped for a product online, you’ll know that the majority of the products you see are listed along side popular keywords. These keywords appear at the top of the search results, and when a user clicks on one of these results, they’re taken to a place that’s tailored to match their interest. Keywords are extremely important in SEO, and ensuring that you include them in your content is one of the most important things you can do to grow your website.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is all about improving your organic rankings on search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. For this to happen, you need to focus on creating content that is both relevant and includes the right keywords. You can learn more about SEO in general, and how to get started optimizing your website, here.

The main thing to note about SEO is that it can take a bit of time to see results. You’re not going to find instant gratification from this type of marketing. However, if you put in the time and effort to learn about SEO and how to use it effectively, you’ll be able to see significant growth in your website’s organic traffic, and this will prove to be invaluable in growing your business.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

If you’ve ever used social media platforms like Twitter or Instagram, then you’ll know that they’re a goldmine for marketers. Not only can we post about our products and gain valuable brand exposure, but we can also engage with potential customers and even drive them to purchase our products. Not bad for a form of marketing that costs nothing!

SMM (Social Media Marketing) is all about gaining brand exposure and interaction on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For this type of marketing, you’ll typically need to pay to have your blog posts promoted on social media, and then you can use a tool like Hootsuite to engage with your audience.

SMM is a pretty broad term, and it can mean different things to different people. For instance, do you want to use social media to gain brand awareness, or are you looking to use it to gain sales? Are your sales the purpose, or do you just want to use the platform to grow your audience?

It’s a common misconception that you need to have a large audience to effectively use social media. That’s certainly something to have, but you don’t necessarily have to have thousands of followers to make social media work for you. The key is to utilize platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to gain exposure and engagement for your brand or website. You’ll be able to find plenty of useful information and resources, to help you get started with SMM, here.

Email Marketing

Ah, the mighty email! One of the most popular and effective forms of marketing out there. If you’ve ever bought something online that was offered via email, you’ll know that getting an email with a sales pitch can be pretty irritating, right?

Fortunately, we can use technology to our advantage and get away from those irritating emails. In this case, we’ve teamed up with ActiveCampaign, one of the industry’s leading software companies, to help us build a better understanding of how to use email marketing to grow our business.

Email marketing is all about getting someone’s attention via email, and then persuading them to take action, something that you can accomplish with an effective email campaign. You can use a tool like MailChimp to effortlessly create and send out email campaigns, and with A/B testing, you can get an idea of how different parts of your email pitch are performing, to guide your strategy.

A lot of businesses underestimate the power of email marketing. They think that because it’s an old format, and the world is moving away from it, that it doesn’t work anymore. However, while other forms of media might not be around in the same form that we know, email marketing is as effective as it ever was, and it’s still one of the most popular forms of communication among consumers. So, if you want to grow your business, you should consider experimenting with email marketing.

Website Marketing

Website marketing, as the name would suggest, is all about marketing your website. Nowadays, many businesses don’t bother with websites, thinking that they don’t work. However, according to HubSpot Blogs’ research, 42% of businesses that have a website actively engage in marketing activities, while only 16% of businesses without a website engage in activities related to marketing. So, in other words, for every 100 businesses, there are about 80 businesses that have websites, but only 60 that have an active, involved marketing team. Why is website marketing so important?

Well, for one, it’s free! You don’t have to pay for website hosting or software like WordPress. You can literally build a website, and start marketing it immediately, for free. Just like that. You no longer have to be limited by budget or timeline. You can put together a marketing plan, and then just push the button to have your website live. There’s also a wide range of free tools and resources available online, that can help you get started building a website, and marketing it effectively. If you want to see how the WordPress community itself helps businesses, you can check out the WordPress.org Marketing Suite, which gives you access to a range of free SEO tools.

From designing the perfect landing page, to using software to monitor and analyze traffic, and optimizing your on-site content, to identifying and targeting the right audience, and then engaging with them, using various platforms, social media, and emails; knowing which form of online marketing to tackle first can be a bit overwhelming. That’s why we’ve decided to organize this article, to help you figure out what kind of online marketing strategies can work best for your business, based on your goals and the industry you’re in.