11 Best Online Marketing Strategies
Last updated: September 27 2024
If you are not marketing your company in the online space, you are leaving huge opportunities on the table. With that being said, online marketing can seem overwhelming and complicated to a lot of people. Even the most determined entrepreneur can be discouraged from adopting an online marketing strategy as a result of this if they don’t know where to get started.
If you’re struggling with online marketing too, you’ve come to the right place! In this article, I’ll break down online marketing into its most fundamental strategies and simplify them so you can have an easier time making them part of your business plan. These are all the “timeless” strategies that worked and will certainly continue to work in the future, and you won’t need to waste your time learning about fad marketing hacks.
Let’s jump right into the details!
What is online marketing?
Online marketing is the practice of spreading the word about a company’s products or services to its potential customers via the Internet. Email, social media, display ads, search engine optimization, Google AdWords, and other strategies are referred to as online marketing.
The goal of online marketing is to interact with potential customers where they spend their time online. The rising use of the Internet for business and personal purposes has resulted in the development of new platforms for advertising and marketing engagement, such as Google, Facebook, or Linkedin.
There are several advantages and disadvantages to online marketing, which mainly employs digital mediums to attract, interact, and acquire customers. Traditional marketing, which has typically included mediums such as print, billboard, television, and radio ads, and is different from online marketing.
Prior to the rise of online marketing platforms, the cost of marketing products or services offline was often prohibitively costly to small businesses. Offline marketing is also not suitable for controlled testing since there’s no data that can be collected.
Today, anyone with an eCommerce business (as well as most brick-and-mortar businesses) can engage in online marketing at little to no cost by designing a website and developing consumer acquisition strategies. Online marketing provides them with data to optimize the quality and effectiveness of their promotions.
What are the advantages of online marketing?
Customers are increasingly moving to online platforms to make purchases. As a result, online marketing is more critical than ever. According to reports, customers are turning to online sources of information and social media for product and price research before making final buying decisions. So with that new reality of consumer behavior, what advantages can online marketing give your business?
Online marketing is less costly than offline marketing
Marketing products in a physical retail store is far more costly than marketing them online. The continuing costs of property maintenance and leasing are no longer needed in the light of online marketing.
Furthermore, you do not need to stock your shelves and windows with products, and as a result, you can keep inventory costs low by ordering stock in response to demand rather than anticipated demand.
Online Marketing makes convenient store hours possible
Without having to think about overtime pay or opening hours, online marketing allows you to keep your business open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Customers will also find it extremely convenient to shop for your services and goods on their own time via the Internet. They can visit your eCommerce store and place an order whenever it is convenient for them.
Online Marketing makes customized advertising possible
Online marketing allows you to personalize deals for your customers by creating a profile of their tastes and purchasing history. By monitoring the product details and web pages that potential buyers visit, you can make targeted deals that are relevant to their interests.
In addition, data from monitoring webpage visits can be used to manage up-selling promotions to help you maximize the value of customer purchases.
Online Marketing provides a way to build meaningful relationships
The Internet is a vital platform for developing relationships with your customers and boosting customer retention.
When a customer places an order from your online store, you can start a relationship with them by sending a follow-up email to say thanks and confirm the transaction. You can maintain the relationship and add a personal touch by emailing your customers on a regular basis with exclusive deals that are personalized to them. This way, you can foster a sense of community on your website by asking these consumers to post product reviews for the products they purchased.
Online Marketing enables you to reach more people
With online marketing, you can conquer any geographic barrier. You can sell goods in any part of the country or even abroad without setting up local stores. This greatly broadens your target market, and you can even have an export company without first establishing a network of distributors in various countries.
11 Best online marketing strategies to follow
You can see by now that a well-crafted online marketing strategy can open up an entirely new world of opportunities for your business. You may be tempted to dive right in. However, it is important that you develop a strategy and organize all of your online marketing activities. Otherwise, you would most certainly confuse customers.
And, these days, the average web-savvy customer can spot a disorganized online presence from a mile away. In this section, I’ll share with you the best online marketing strategies that you can adopt to grow your business!
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of increasing your website’s ranking on search engines so that you get more traffic from people looking for the type of products or services you provide.
Your site’s technological framework and your ongoing content growth plan account for a significant portion of your organic search place ranking. So, if you’re still producing new content regularly, SEO isn’t much more of an expense – and it’s well worth it if only to ensure your site is indexed correctly.
Read more: An A-Z Ecommerce SEO Guide
Search Engine Marketing
If you’re unfamiliar with search engine marketing, you’ll most likely see it abbreviated as SEM. It’s a form of online marketing in which you use paid ads to raise your ranking on Search Engine Results Pages SERPs.
You may need the assistance of an expert in this field, preferably one who has worked with Google Advertising and search/display ads. In the case of Google Advertising, you should first educate yourself on how it works.
What you’ll love the most is how Google makes its Google Ads simple to use by focusing on customization. You can choose between graphic display advertising, YouTube video ads, text-based search ads, and in-app mobile ads.
All of this will be determined by your business style and the specific customers you need to meet. Google makes it much simpler by providing localized ad capabilities as well as superior metrics for tracking how well the ads perform.
Content Marketing
As a connective string to SEO, content marketing is an important part of attracting a targeted audience.
What is critical about content marketing is that you make your content meaningful, relevant, and educational for it to be worth consuming. It would be best to concentrate on producing content that can address pain points while staying evergreen in today’s world.
Using shortcuts or black-hat SEO tactics to get to the top of search engines would not succeed because Google won’t let it be tricked. As many people like to say, “content is king.” Mobile content, influencer marketing, native ads, and marketing automation are all important components of successful content marketing.
Consider mobile content carefully, as smartphones now account for 50% of all global devices. This will have an impact on digital ads and how influencers support the brand. Automation tools deliver content to prospects’ mobile devices at precisely the right times.
Read more: How to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy
Remarketing
Another important aspect of digital marketing is remarketing your prospects with more content if they did not respond to your ads the first time. This is accomplished by tracking these visitors through cookies and generating new advertising on related sites.
The information you collect from your website users provides you with useful data that allows you to tailor your advertising to their specific pain points. Remarketing allows you to remain more involved with customers, raises brand recognition, and boosts conversions.
Responsive Web Design
Reaching customers via mobile is now more or less the standard, and this will continue into the next decade. Making your website mobile-responsive is one of the most important aspects of online marketing.
Responsive web design is the only way to make this work effectively. You can make your website automatically adapt to all mobile screens by using responsive programming. This will suggest a range of formats, including tablets and increased use of smartwatches.
Although you may need to partner with a web designer to make this work, you will also need an SEO expert’s services for another aspect of RWD. AMP (or Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a new open-source code that helps speed up the loading of mobile web pages. Google prioritizes websites that use this, so take it seriously. It’s particularly useful if you have a publishing platform or regularly post content to your website.
Read more: 31 Website Marketing Strategies & Ideas to Learn
Email Marketing
You may have used email marketing before, but how successful was it in meeting your intended goals at the right times?
Email marketing is a great tool for acquiring more leads than any other marketing form. If you’re overspending on other forms of online marketing, email marketing is one of the most cost-effective options that you should pay attention to.
It is also one of the most integrated marketing strategies since it can be combined with other strategies.
When you have persuasive content, email marketing will help you shorten your sales cycles.
Read more:
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the approach of creating content to promote a brand and product on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
To increase conversions and brand recognition, your content should be customized to the particular platform on which it is shared.
Social network platforms allow marketers to use a variety of tactics and techniques to promote content and encourage people to interact with it.
Many social networks allow users to provide comprehensive geographical, demographic, and personal information, enabling marketers to tailor their messages to what users are most likely to respond to.
Companies should ensure that they concentrate their attention on the audience they want to reach using social media ads because audiences can be better segmented than conventional marketing platforms.
Read more: Social Media Marketing Guide for Every Business
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a vital component of many online marketing strategies. Learning more about it, in general, should become a top priority as it becomes a priority for companies.
With 91 percent of successful companies now reporting that automation is very important to their success, you can get a sense of what marketing is like now and in the future.
Marketing automation helps you in finding potential customers while also automating the process of cultivating those leads to sales-readiness. It automates actions you need to do to carry prospects to the point where they are ready to make a purchase. With marketing automation, you can remove needed but tedious, repetitive tasks from your to-do list and focus more on pressing issues that require your attention and energy.
Influencer Marketing
Have you considered how you can launch a digital marketing strategy without spending a fortune? While email marketing and inbound strategies will help you save money, influencers can do the same.
Think again if you believe that recruiting influencers to market your brand online is all about hiring celebrities. Being a social media influencer does not always require being a celebrity. It may simply be someone with a large number of followers and a track record of successfully marketing products.
Brand loyalty is a treasure for most companies, and one way to boost brand loyalty is to be genuine and trustworthy. This is where influencer marketing can help. Influencer marketing capitalizes on the credibility, and personality of individuals who have developed their own follower base in a specific niche with a specific target audience.
According to Twitter, 49 percent of customers seek buying advice on social media, so having the support of influencers for your brand is well worth including in your marketing campaign.
Read more: Influencer Marketing: How To Win Customers
Video Marketing
Over the last decade, we have evolved into a more visual society, drawn to imagery in digital realms. A lot of this comes in different ways, but there is no doubt that video has risen to the top. We’ve reached a turning point where more content users choose video than some other visual medium.
According to recent figures, 87 percent of all online advertisers now use video content of some kind. Most of this is due to huge audiences on platforms like YouTube. Regardless, where you post videos isn’t going to matter if the content isn’t convincing.
Recently, customized videos, or at least those that specifically answer the pain points of targeted audiences, have become the trend. Behind-the-scenes tours of your company or testimonials to demonstrate the human side of your brand is examples of effective video marketing.
This entails focusing on one big theme in video marketing: storytelling. When you can tell a convincing story about your brand and show that you can solve consumers’ pain points, you have a winning formula.
Since video consumption is on the rise, using videos for your online marketing is one of the best ways to gain customer trust and drive revenue.
Landing Page Optimization
Last but not least, landing pages are where your online traffic that comes from every strategy mentioned above lands on your website, and that’s where they spend (just a few minutes of their time) on what you have to offer.
If you don’t have a well-optimized landing page that presents every your customers need to make a buying decision, all the efforts you have spent on other forms of marketing will go down the drain.
So before you spend any money and effort on creating content, ranking on search engines, or making marketing videos, make sure that you have all of your landing pages optimized so that when customers come in, they’re hooked and can’t refuse your offer.
Final words
That’s it! I hope that this article has provided you with valuable information about online marketing and what strategies you can use to grow your online business. Please feel free to leave comments below for a further discussion on this topic.