Are you in the process of developing an internet marketing strategy for your brand? It is not hard to start a marketing campaign for your business online. However, you will not succeed unless you implement the right strategy.
Internet marketing will help you whether you completely operate online or have a brick and motor business. This guide will help you to use online marketing to grow your brand.
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is the promotion that your business does online. It is the direct opposite of offline marketing. Most consumers are shopping for products online and hence you will not survive in the modern business environment without internet marketing.
With modern technological developments, you should implement the right digital marketing strategies to stand out. Digital marketing has so much and you have to make sure that you are doing the right thing.
How Internet Marketing Works:
Like the other marketing initiatives, internet marketing aims at capturing and holding the attention of people. The objective is to make sure that your target audience knows you, likes you and trusts your brand.
It is the best way to turn your prospects into consumers of your products or services. Unlike offline marketing, everything happens in the virtual world and not the real world.
You will be encouraging people to visit your website instead of your brick and motor location. Some of these visitors will go away while others will make a purchase. The only challenge is that you will not talk to these people as they browse.
Therefore, you should look for the best way of communicating with the people who visit your website. Apart from making a purchase, you should add visitors on your email list for continuous communication. Therefore, internet marketing is a comprehensive process that requires a lot of time and effort.
Why Internet Marketing is Effective:
Internet marketing is highly effective for a few reasons. First, it is cheaper than the traditional forms of advertisement. It is also easy to get your target audience online and communicate with them individually.
Besides, it is easy to use permission marketing and inbound marketing. You can use it to run the whole business without a physical location and generate revenue. It is easy to scale digital marketing with minimal complications.
The tactics and strategies of digital marketing keep on changing. Therefore, it is a steep learning curve that will never come to an end. Technology moves very fast, and non-techy marketers find it hard to keep up.
Despite some of these challenges, digital marketing is a new frontier that presents endless opportunities for your brand. The modern business environment is highly competitive, and you will find it hard to survive without internet marketing.
Setting Up Your Website:
Establishing your website is the hub for any internet marketing strategy. You cannot start online marketing without a website. All transactions take place here, including buying your products and services.
The orientation of your site should be to generate traffic and conversion. The mistake that most beginners make is that they build a brochure website. You don’t want an irrelevant webpage that you will abandon after some time.
The value will come from getting targeted and high-quality traffic that you can convert to buyers and leads. You need an open-box platform that will scale. Use a high-quality hosting company to develop a mobile-friendly site and install an SSL security certificate.
Online Internet Marketing Tactics and Strategies:
In this section, we will be looking at the specifics of a perfect digital marketing strategy. The strategies will make sure that your efforts are not in vain.
1. Content Marketing:
Content marketing is a great way to drive traffic to any modern website. You will capture the attention of your audience by creating useful, entertaining, and compelling content. Therefore, you should strive towards becoming a prolific content writer.
Content marketing is highly effective, scales adds value, and only requires an investment of your time. All you need to do is figure out the type of content that will work well for your brand. The content should capture the attention of your target audience and convert them into sales and leads.
Read more: How Content Marketing Strategies can Transform a Brand Completely
Here are some of the strategies that will help you with content marketing;
i) Search Engine Optimization and Blogging:
Blogging refers to the act of publishing online articles. SEO is the act of getting the pages and articles of your website rank in the search engine. The primary objective of SEO is getting many people to come across your website.
Therefore, you need to write and publish articles that engage your audience in several ways. When your target audience searches the topics that you are writing about, they should find your articles. If these people get a lot of value in your article, they will want to hear more from you or even buy your products or services.
However, writing articles is not as easy as you think. Know the requirements of your audience and write content that will grab their attention. SEO comes in handy at this point in internet marketing.
Your audience will be using the search engine to find your content. Therefore, what you are publishing should come up when people carry out relevant searches. Remember, there are several competing contents and established websites that are competing to get the attention of the readers.
Even though SEO and blogging is hard work, the payoff is worth it when your content ranks. All you need to do is to play your SEO and blogging game right. It will earn you thousands of targeted visitors every month at no cost.
Read more: How To Build A Successful SEO Strategy For Your Brand
ii) Podcasting:
Podcasting is like hosting your radio show. You need to pre-record your content and publish it to reliable directories like iTunes. Millions of visitors subscribe to their favorite podcasts and listen to them. People can listen to your podcast content all over the world.
If you publish a new episode on the podcast, the directory will update it and send to your subscribers automatically. Make sure that the topic you are podcasting on will engage your target audience. Publish your episodes and promote the show if you want to build a consistent subscriber show.
Use the influence, authority, and call to action to convert your podcast listeners to buyers and leads. It is one of the best ways to maximize the benefits you get from internet marketing.
iii) YouTube:
The largest video platform on the internet is YouTube. It is also a secondary search engine for millions of users. You can create a YouTube channel, publish your videos, and build an audience of subscribers.
The starting point is to create a free branded YouTube Channel. From here, publish high-quality videos that will engage your target audience. Like podcasting, use your influence, authority, and call to action to convert the viewers into sales and leads.
Read more: How to Grow Your YouTube Channel
iv) Webinars:
A webinar is a pre-recorded or live online presentation. Most of them are slide-based, but this is not always the case. You will need a webinar software, microphone, and webcam to develop one.
Direct pitches on webinars have a high level of success rate. All you need to do is determine the strategy that will work best for your target audience. It all depends on what you are selling. The best webinar players will always receive stunning results.
v) Email Marketing:
Email marketing ranks top when it comes to driving online sales. This strategy has an inbuilt ability to nurturing your sales over time. It will help you to stay in close communication with your prospects over an extended period.
The first step is to create an account with a reliable email service provider. From here, you can build an email list of your target audience. Email segmentation will make sure that you are reaching out to the right set of audience.
Email marketing is highly effective in driving customer retention. It is one of the best digital marketing techniques for modern brands.
2. Organic Social Media Marketing:
Social media goes beyond the practice of content marketing. The audience demographics of social media is different and needs a unique set of strategies. Know the platforms where your audience hangs out and establish your presence there.
Being useful and entertaining will capture the attention of your audience and help in building authority. Unlike blogging, the challenge with social media is that the content trends for a short period. Besides, social media comes with several restrictions because you don’t own the platform.
The most popular social media platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, among others. You need to choose the ones that are relevant to your industry. Understand the demographics of your target audience before you use social media for marketing your products or services.
Engaging your customers is the secret of success when dealing with social media marketing. Like their comments and answer all their questions. It will tell your audience that you have an interest in them.
Besides, you should encourage your followers to share your posts on their social media profile. You will have a high level of success when your content goes viral. Social media is one of the most effective internet marketing platforms.
3. Paid Online Advertisement:
Paid online advertising is one of the traditional online marketing techniques. Social media marketing and content marketing allow you to earn organic content over time. On the contrary, paid online advertising will enable you to but traffic. The good thing is that you can convert this traffic into leads.
Some of the techniques that fall under this category include PPC advertisement, social media advertising, re-targeting advertising, podcast sponsorship, and influencer marketing. It is good to do some research on what each of these strategies encompasses.
You have to identify where your audience hangs and pay to get in front of them. The secret is creating a relevant offer for generating brand awareness, leads, and sales.
4. Joint Venturing:
You can start a relationship with influencers and micro-influencers in your niche without paying them. When you build these relationships, you will open the door for joint venturing. The process entails co-promoting or co-creating a piece of content or product.
You will be borrowing the audience of another person to create sales and grow your own. There is no need to grow an audience from scratch when you can borrow from other websites. Joint venturing is a fast way to grow and scale.
If you have an audience of 60,000, you can gain a lot by partnering with a person who has 100,000 followers. You will achieve a following you would have never reached. Top players may not want to partner with you if you have a small audience.
You can grow steadily by starting with people whose audience size is close to yours. Affiliate marketing is a sub-category of joint venturing. It entails allowing another person to promote your product and you give them a percentage of your sales.
Contest marketing is the other sub-category of joint venturing. In this case, you will run an online contest to get leads and exposure. It is more productive to recruit JV partners and influencers to run the competition on your behalf.
You can give away your product or that of your competitors during the contest. If your contest succeeds, other brands can join hence giving you more exposure. The contests can help you grow your email list, build a social following, and collect podcast reviews and ratings.
The campaign will help you to get reviews or followers within a short period. It is among the most effective internet marketing strategies that you need to implement.
5. Mobile App Marketing:
Mobile App marketing is the last internet marketing strategy in this guide. It is among the leading trends in internet marketing this year. Create an App in your niche, and people will find them in their searches.
If the App is entertaining and useful, users will talk about it, and that word will spread. You can use podcasts and blogs for advertising your App. Mobile Apps can help you generate a lot of revenue.
The primary challenge with mobile App development is that it is an expensive endeavor. Besides, it is hard to find high-quality developers that you can trust. However, significant challenges often result in big profits.
Check the available Apps in your industry and do a lot of market research. It will help you to get an idea of what is useful to your audience. Besides, be on top of the game when hiring a development team.
Online Marketing Tools:
The market has a long list of internet marketing tools. You need to choose one depending on the platforms that you are using to promote your brand. Each tool has its pros and cons, and you should strive at getting the best.
Look at the various options, features, and price points before making a decision. You can also get valuable insights from the people who have been using these tools about their pros and cons.
Conclusion:
You stand to benefit in several ways when you create an internet marketing strategy for your brand. It is good to get something that will work best for your target audience. Do your homework well to make sure that you are implementing the right strategy.
Have any comments or questions on internet marketing? Share your views here to get valuable insights.
General FAQ
The post The Ultimate Guide to Internet Marketing appeared first on Viacon.