In the world of online marketing, it’s tempting to shift to using every new trend in the hopes of raking in more profit. However, top companies know better. While they do keep an eye on new trends, their success comes from having mastered the basics. They’ve invested time, money, and effort in understanding the fundamentals and are consistent in capitalizing on these core concepts, resulting in having a clear advantage over most of their competition. It’s a fact that to thrive in online marketing, startups in the digital world need to focus on mastering—and utilizing—the essentials.
What, then, are the online marketing fundamentals you need to become an expert in? Read on to find out.
Optimizing Your Site and Content for Online Marketing Success
Regardless of whether you run a brick-and-mortar store or an online shop, you need to understand the value of visibility. Having top-tier products/services is moot if a substantial percentage of your target market doesn’t know your business exists.
So, how do you ensure visibility for your business? For a brick-and-mortar shop, gaining visibility entails choosing the right location (in an area frequented by your target customers). Putting up clear signage, and advertising the business and its location. For purposes of online marketing, gaining visibility entails setting up a website and then optimizing the site for search engines. This means you need to adopt an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and make it the focal point of your online marketing campaign.
If you’re not an SEO expert, don’t fret. We are, after all, discussing the basics here. By the time you’re done reading, you should be well-equipped to get started. Let’s begin with a simple definition of SEO: This is the process of designing your website such that it is easy for search engines to find and index. As a result, your site will likely land at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) when online users search for products, services, or information related or relevant to what your business has to offer. This is how your business becomes more visible to your target market.
Needless to say, there are things you can do outside of your website to ensure that your site stays on top of search results. Here are a few specific tips to help you along:
- Claim your local business listing on Google, Bing, Yelp, and other local directories. This helps get your site at the top of results for local searches.
- Set up social media accounts and be active on social platforms. Post regular updates and engage in meaningful conversations with your followers. This encourages people to talk about your brand to others.
- Create a blog, post regularly on that blog, and respond to your readers’ comments and questions. This helps you build online authority and extend your brand’s reach.
- Make your site search engine-friendly, focusing more on Google’s. Google is still the most popular search engine in the world, so it pays to focus your SEO efforts on understanding and following Google’s guidelines, even as you continue to optimize for other search engines as well.
- Always create and publish high-quality content on your website and blog. Among the biggest factors that affect your search ranking is the quality of content you publish. Relevant, useful, and engaging content is also something people appreciate and is likely to encourage them to share your links on their social media accounts, thereby further extending your brand’s reach and improving visibility.
Ensuring Positive Customer Experience
Your business will never grow unless you can gain the trust and loyalty of your target customers. And, on the Internet, one of the first things you need to do to gain the trust of your target market is to provide them with a positive experience on your digital assets like your website, blog, and social pages. Their experience on all your platforms should be such that they are encouraged not only to keep coming back to your sites but also to share the good news about your brand with others.
Let’s say an online user finds your site on Google’s search results pages. The user decides to click on your link and visit your website. Is that reason enough for you to celebrate? Not necessarily. Remember that traffic does not always convert into sales. Should you stop at ensuring that your site lands at the top of search results and your brand is highly visible on social platforms? Definitely not! The moment you get people onto your website isn’t where the fun ends; it is where the fun begins…
So, how do you provide your audience with the best possible experience on your site? Here are a few tips:
- Make sure everything looks professional, from your brand logo to your web design, to the structure and wording of your content, and even your responses to questions and comments from your social media followers, blog readers, and site visitors. People are more likely to trust your brand when everything they see and read on your web pages is professional-looking.
- Make each visit memorable. There are already so many businesses that look, speak, and act professionally; you have to make sure you stand out. Do some research on the possible personalities of your target customers. What do they usually do when they’re online? What kind of websites do they usually visit? What do they like about those sites? This helps you define your target’s unique selling points and allows you to design your site such that they’ll be sure to keep you in mind the next time they find themselves in need of the kind of product/service/information you provide.
- Make things convenient. Do whatever you can to make every visitor’s journey through your website as uncomplicated as it can be. If a visitor can get from the Home page to his/her chosen product in a single click, that’s great! If you can get the entire shopping process down to three steps or less, then that’s even better. Note that when it’s easy for someone to navigate your site, he/she is likely to consider it a professional and memorable site as well.
Data-driven Marketing
To ensure the success of your online marketing campaign, it has to be driven by data. The process needs to begin with a compilation of every single bit of information you can get about your target customers. You then need to design your products/services, website, SEO strategy, and entire online marketing campaign based on the information you’ve compiled. This helps you ensure that the products/services you offer are attractive to your target market, your website is something they’ll appreciate, your SEO strategy is relevant to them, and your entire marketing campaign communicates effectively with them.
Anchoring your strategies on solid facts helps ensure maximum engagement with your target customers and earn their loyalty. It optimizes the potential for conversion from new site visitors and encourages repeat transactions. The thought of starting out collecting a boatload of data may seem daunting, but there are simple steps you can take to get started.
- Use Google Analytics. It’s free and gives you access to a lot of useful data.
- Set up Google Analytics to track your website.
- Check out the Google Analytics tutorials. Again, these tutorials are free and they will help you understand the various types of data you may analyze via Google Analytics.
- Explore! Don’t be afraid to dig into all the facts you can find about your site visitors.
Conclusion
It is true that you’re going to face a lot of competition when you choose to grow a business online. Going online opens you up to global competition. But that’s no reason for you to balk at chasing your dream of having a successful business. The key is to get the fundamentals right and strive to master them. If you’re able to do this, then you can easily get your first customers to spread the word and practically do the selling for you. And the vast reach of the Internet even opens up excellent opportunities for you to capture new markets!