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Important Online Marketing Strategies

Quick Notes - Business Networking:
  • Online marketing is a key part of a successful sales strategy.
  • Important online marketing strategies consist of: website, email campaigns, online communities, or hiring a marketing consultant/ manager.

Online marketing is the way in which you advertise, sell, and manage your web site on the Internet. The Internet is a bastion of businesses all looking to establish relationships with users from all over the world. Online marketing can supplement any successful sales plan and is classified as an advanced selling technique. Offline marketing includes relationship building whereas online marketing includes relationship building and link building. Online success is rooted in the ability to attract a lot of traffic to your web site. Further, it is in the ability to attract a lot of unique users (that is the amount of people visiting your site minus the amount of times the same person visited your web site), and provide high ranking search results.

Important Online Marketing Tips and Techniques

Successful sales strategy revolves around planning and implementing a successful online marketing plan. This article will explain some of the ways in which you can drive traffic to your web site, improve sales, and market your brand in the virtual world.

Creating a Website

It all starts with a web site. Your web site is the home of your business and must be developed with care and with a plan. If you cannot design and develop your own web site, it is highly advisable to hire someone to do this for you. Pick a professional who has a portfolio full of successful and nicely designed business sites. In addition to their designing skills, find someone who is compliant with good search engine optimization techniques. Your designer’s ability to properly address your search engine optimization needs will dictate itself clearly in high search engine rankings. Essentially, you will be seen by users searching for your content before they see your competitors. This gives you a comparative advantage.

Email Marketing Campaign

Once you’ve established your web site and it’s running on its own, you will want to dive into the wonderful world of email marketing. This does not mean it is OK to start mass e-mailing random people around the world with your product information. This is typically referred to as SPAM and most modern email filtering systems will throw that kind of e-mail out of their system before it reaches its destination (not to mention you will probably be placed in a network of blacklists). Successful email marketing campaigns require basic sales skills, and basic selling skills, combined with effective written communication. You need to be able to create an email message that is quick and to the point, but sparks interest in your reader to visit your web site and potentially purchase your product. Avoid lying to your audience at all costs. Your reputability and integrity are paramount to your success online. As part of your email campaign, you may want to offer a special discount or additional added incentive to increase the likelihood that your audience will visit your web site and purchase from you. This can spiral out to even more lucrative sales campaigns; including contests, giveaways, freebies, and affiliate programs. All of their purposes are to drive traffic to your web site. Traffic is key. The more traffic you generate, the more sales conversions you will ultimately generate. Affiliate programs are examples of sales strategies that are highly profitable. They essentially encourage other people to sell your products or services for a portion of your sales margin. You are still maintaining a profit, without doing any of the paper work to convert that sale. Volume is far better than individual sales margins, so you will find affiliate programs work wonders for your bottom line. The next few suggestions don’t directly affect your bottom line, but will affect the community you create around your web site.

Community Development

Community development is the process of empowering your users or customers to feel a sense of entitlement, thus giving them reason to stay loyal to your business and advertise for you. An easy way to drive interest and information about your services is to issue press releases. This is an easy way to stand out from your competitors, and an easy way to advertise your products through formal information. Creating a company blog is also something new companies do online in order to stimulate a community. They issue ‘insider’ information about new products, new sales, or issue discount codes strictly through their blog to encourage people to subscribe. Similarly, business owners will frequently publish articles in magazines, forums, or other online editorial columns. Usually authors will have a contact section and this can be valuable in attracting reputability as a business owner.

Hiring a Marketing Manager or Consultant

The final and probably most useful means to ensure your online marketing strategies are working as expected or established properly, is to hire a marketing manager or consultant. They will make an unbiased assessment of your business, critically analyze and project outcomes of your campaigns. They will then give you sound feedback and suggestions on increasing your foot print in your target market. Too frequently business owners think inside the box and forget that others’ opinions may be important in the building or thought process. Utilize outside consultancy as best as you can to catapult you into success.
At the end of the day, remember that online marketing can be fun and enriching for your business. Get creative! Just because a means to advertise your business is not listed in this article does not mean it will work for your market. You won’t hurt your business by attempting creative online sales strategies.