A successful internet marketing strategy is one that effectively enhances each online marketing component to its fullest potential. In this digital age, a comprehensive online marketing strategy is what will help you reach increasing numbers of potential clients. When re-evaluating your strategy, focus on these eight key components that can help fuel business growth and take your business to the next level.
1. Website Design
As the face of your company, your website design needs to be professional, clean, and easy for all visitors to navigate. When designing your website, focus on:
- Including calls to action on many pages so viewers are continually thinking about what your company can do for them.
- Optimizing the site on all browsers, including those on smart phones. The percentage of people who surf the web on smart phones and tablets is growing. Recent survey shows that 25 percent of mobile Web users never or infrequently use the desktop to search the web.
- Incorporating relevant keywords naturally to help your search rankings.
2. Blog
Statistically, companies that blog get 55% more visitors to their websites than companies that don’t blog. Therefore, your website should include an integrated blog, which helps you provide customers with useful, relevant information. When creating a blog, ensure that it is:
- Easy for readers to subscribe through RSS and email.
- Easy to share through social media.
- Easy to interact with you by commenting on posts.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) involves strategies and techniques used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results of search engines (e.g. Google and Yahoo). It helps to ensure that a site is easily accessible to a search engine and increases the chances that the website will be found by people.
Every day, people are looking for your products/services on the internet, proper optimization of your website will make them find you, otherwise it may be your competitor they will find.
Many potential customers start at the search engines when they need what you sell. To be found, you must use search engine optimization techniques to help your website, blog, and social media accounts rank high in the search engines. Follow these steps in your marketing strategy:
- Make sure each page of your website is optimized for the search engines.
- Research specific keywords that people most commonly search for in your industry.
- Use these keywords on your website and through social media.
- Include long-tail keywords specific to your market, which are one of the keys to ranking well on search engines.
4. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
This is a very effective means of getting relevant and targeted visitors to your website consistently. It is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites in which advertisers (website owners) pay only when their advert is clicked; meaning you only pay for the visitors you received.
Another advantage of this is that you can advertise directly on websites of your choice. You can also set your budget; i.e. determine how much you are willing to spend on your campaign. This ultimately enables the advertiser to have a wide coverage and spread for his adverts by advertising in several websites without spending more.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising has quickly become one of the foremost methods of advertisement for online marketing. PPC gives you the ability to market your company directly to customers while they are searching online. PPC advertising is a great method of advertising your company to a very targeted market.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating with existing or potential customers. It helps to keep customers and prospects coming back and build strong customer relationship. It is the easy, effective and affordable way to keep your visitors coming back and can be used to keep your customers up to date about your products and services.
Email marketing entails building a list of targeted individuals and sending personalized emails to them. However, it has to be done in a professional way for it to be effective.
In my opinion, every business or organization ought to have an email marketing campaign.
Because you can’t always keep your website on people’s minds, email marketing is a great way to stay in front of your customers. Pay attention to:
- Creating a quality design for your email template so it ties in with the look and feel of your website, completing a comprehensive marketing strategy.
- Providing useful, relevant information through email on a regular basis to help you convert potentials into customers.
6. Social Media Marketing
With millions of users worldwide and in Nigeria, Facebook has become a global platform for communication. This has also provided great opportunities for business owners to reach potential customers and strengthen relationship with existing ones.
Facebook also has an advertising model that can be directly targeted to intended category of people which can bring relevant visitors to your website.
Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and Google+ are not just for individuals. They have several major advantages for businesses:
- Provide an opportunity to create a community around your company through interaction with the people who are interested in you.
- Help you remain on people’s radars by posting status updates, media, blog posts, and information about your company regularly.
- Allow you to reach exponential numbers of people at a very minimal cost because of the viral nature of these networks.
7. Effective Salescopy
Create winning salescopy that converts the maximum number of visitors by establishing your credibility, relating to your customers, selling with benefits, and building the perceived value of your products
8. Analytics
Measuring the results and trends of your website, blog, email campaigns, search engine ranking, ppc advertising, salescopy conversion and social media reach plays a crucial role in any online marketing strategy. The most important metrics to measure include:
- Website: Site visitors, page views, pages per visit, average time on the site, bounce rate, top landing and exit pages, top content, leads & conversions.
- Blog: Subscribers, views / visitors, conversions, comments, clicks, rank, inbound links, social media shares.
- SEO: Page rank, number of indexed pages, number of inbound links, number of keywords sending traffic to your site, long-tail keyword rank & opportunities.
- Email Marketing: Number sent, bounces, spam reports, opt-outs, opens, clicks, forwards.
- Social Media: Number of likes, followers, connections, etc., growth, engagement, momentum, results.
Just before you leave this page, can you let me know other key components in your strategy I did not mention here?
