Effective online marketing is absolutely vital to ensure the success of a product or service: it increases visibility, drives sales, and, when done correctly, can be a powerful brand-building tool. But what are the tricks of the trade when it comes to digital marketing? Use the dos and don’ts below to make sure you get it right every time.
Know Your Audience
Before you write a word of content marketing or even start thinking about SEO, you need to know your audience inside out: you have to understand exactly the market your product or service is geared towards, what makes them tick, and where they’re to be found. Your marketing may be world-class, but if it’s not finding the audience it’s aimed at then it’s unlikely to be successful.
So get to know your target market inside out. Focus groups, online analytical tools, effective market research, and a look at your competition can serve you well in this. You need to know the general demographic of your audience; the sort of websites they visit, the physical shops they frequent, and – crucially – the elements that make your products or service tailor-made for them. This information should be at the forefront of your mind as you create and implement your online marketing strategy and as you maintain it going forward.
Take Care Of The Basics
Once you’re ready to begin writing some text for your business’s social media, for example, or a newsletter, you’re going to need to ensure that all your copy is grammatically accurate and totally error-free. Website text riddled with errors or email campaigns that aren’t worded optimally can do significant damage to how your potential clients view your business. So take extra care with everything you write.
With this in mind, you may want to instruct a professional copy or content writer to put together your web page and marketing text for you. Suppose budgetary restrictions mean this isn’t an option at the moment. In that case, you could consider using an affordable writing and grammar tool that will check the grammar and spelling contained in all your documents and copy.
Read this post for further services and features offered by the latest writing tools: many offer a range of packages to suit the needs of different types of business and some even incorporate translation tools. Several programs also feature a plagiarism checker and thesaurus and many will work in tandem with multiple devices and across a wide variety of browsers.
Social Media Is Your Friend
This is a big ‘do’ when it comes to what you need to make sure you’re incorporating effectively into your online marketing plan. The power of social media is vast; levy it to your advantage by being focused and directed in your use of this mighty advertising and promotional tool.
Before getting started, think carefully about a social media marketing strategy and how you will link this into the other elements of your marketing to make for a coherent campaign. This consistency can be vital in building your brand. Be sure to use the same colors, font, and motifs on your social media page that you use elsewhere to boost recognition potential further.
Social media marketing thrives on freshness; to see the greatest return, you will need to add new content on a regular basis; post, too, online client reviews or links to relevant information that your specific users may find useful. Focus on high-value content to get people to like and follow your page and to build up an online, engaged audience.
Analytical tools can be used to interrogate your social media accounts to assess the effectiveness of your presence in this arena and give you vital information on followers’ demographics and relevant conversion rates.
Harness SEO
Getting SEO to work for you will make a huge difference to the success of your online marketing campaign. The basic principle of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is to make it easier for people to find you -even if they’re not specifically looking for you.
SEO can be embedded, through the use of keywords and meta tags and descriptions, into any online material. Tools are available that enable users to generate the words and phrases most used in specific online searches; for example, if your business delivers pet supplies, you may find that some of the most common searches relevant to your service include ‘organic pet food delivery’ and ‘cost of fish tank delivery.’
This will then enable you to embed these phrases effectively into your online content so that searches featuring these phrases will be more likely to list your business pages in the generated results.
This is an example of fundamental SEO: you may want to consider signing up for a course to learn more about how to use this tool – including more advanced techniques – to reap the full benefits that it can offer.
Don’t Spam
Okay, now we’ve run through a few things you definitely should be doing in terms of your online marketing; we need to mention a few things you need to avoid. Firstly: spam. It can be very tempting, especially if you’ve built up a healthy-looking mailing list, to start firing out advertising emails every five minutes.
Resist. Bombarding clients and potential customers with marketing missives or direct messages on social media can be the quickest way to start seeing a big drop off in your mailing list as your hard-won contacts unsubscribe. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t send out regular emails; just refrain from daily messages. And always keep in mind the principle of high value: think about the content of your emails in terms of how to keep them from being immediately junked by the recipient.
Don’t Overdo The SEO
As we’ve covered above, SEO can be a formidable tool in your online marketing arsenal; but be careful not to do it. Overuse of keywords or phrases can have your intended audience bailing out of your article or post early. Avoid keyword stuffing and link stuffing at all costs: your content should read well, engage readers and be high quality; ultimately, this will work in your favor more than having your keyword appear ten times in every paragraph.
Don’t Neglect The Visuals
The best copy in the world may pass your potential customers by if it’s in the form of huge blocks of text without any images or videos to break it up; this is the sort of marketing that people often dismiss as unread as it just looks such…hard work. Be sure to break up your content with plenty of visual components to make it look more appealing and easier on the eye. This will most likely result in increased engagement and keeping your reader’s attention for the entirety of your post or article.
The Takeaway
Online marketing is no longer an optional element of a business’ promotional campaign: it is, quite possibly, the most important component of your overall marketing strategy. Make it work for your business as hard as you do by ensuring top-quality copy that is precision tailored to your target audience, using social media to its full advantage, and keeping in mind at all times the importance of providing fresh, high-value consumable content.
