Top Internet Marketing Strategies That Work

13ail as their number one successful form of digital marketing. While 40% say that social media, search engine optimization (SEO), a website and blog are the most effective forms of marketing they use.

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7204-internet-marketing-strategies.html

What Really Works? Email, Social Media, Web Content…?

There are many components to an online marketing campaign including email, web content creation, and direct contact with social media, just to name a few. Businesses report that some of these efforts are easier to pull off successfully than others.

Email marketing has remained one of the leading online marketing tools in terms of success. In part because of how easy it is to conduct a great email campaign. According to the numbers, only 11% of businesses say that email marketing is too difficult to utilize.

While social media seems easy enough, after all it’s what people do for ‘fun’; it’s actually one of the trickiest things for businesses to tackle. Nearly 50% of businesses consider social media the most difficult marketing tool to successfully conduct. Other areas that businesses identified as difficult to execute include content creation and SEO tactics.

7 Proven Strategies For Online Marketing

1. First Thing First, Always Create A Detailed Strategy

The first step to any marketing campaign is researching and creating a near foul-proof strategy. Your strategy needs to include a game plan, a set of achievable goals, and alternate plans if something goes wrong with game plan A. It’s important to be very realistic during this process, you don’t want to pull a plan out of thin air and hope it might work, because chances are it won’t. In return, you’ll only waste time and money.

Instead, use your resources wisely the first time around to make a plan that really works. You might need to bring in some experts, hire a consultant, or turn over the project to a marketing agency.

2. Connect With Customers On Social Media In 3 Ways

93% of marketers utilize social media in order to promote their business and connect with their target audience. Not all of those that use social media are successful in their efforts; it’s not just about creating a profile and running with it. There are proven techniques you can use on social media to derive better results.  For instance, if you reach out to your biggest fans and offer them free merchandise or a couple of nice comments, chances are they are going to promote you through word of mouth, and online posts.

Another way you can benefit from social media is improved customer service. With so much competition out there you really have to wow people over with great customer service if you expect them to return. If your costumers know that they can reach out to you via social media and have any issues resolved or questions quickly answered, this is a score in your court.

Thirdly, social media offers you a place to put your ads, directed at just the right people, your target audience. If you scroll down the page on Instagram or Facebook you are sure to see a couple of ads directed right at you. The things you have recently been shopping for reappear on your webpage. They say most people have to see something more than once before they buy it, and what better way to get people back to their unordered shopping cart?

This type of ad personalization is only possible thanks to the growing knowledge in regards to technology, and it is so beneficial to your business. You can be one of those ads that reappear on social media at just the right time, before just the right person.

3. Use Your Competitors To Your Advantage

What has your competition been up to lately online? How often do they post new blogs? How often do they post new content on social media? Finding out what your competition is doing grants you the opportunity to make sure you are covering your entire basis.

4. Make Sure All Content Is Mobile-Friendly

Considering 87% of Internet-connected devices sold in 2017 are predicted to be tablets and smartphones, a responsive website is VERY important. Less and less people are using computers, meaning if you don’t have responsive content you will continue to lose more and more hits each year.

5. Use Social Media To Promote Your Blog Content

Share your blog content on social media. The more shares your content receives, the more hits your webpage earns, which equals a win-win for you. Another less digital way to get your blog buzzing is to make hard copies of your best blog articles and share them in the form of a newsletter that people can read when they visit your in store locations. This is especially a good idea if your place of business has a waiting room where people are actively seeking reading materials to keep them busy.  Incorporate technology into the mix by adding a scan-able barcode that directs to your online webpage.

6. Ad Retargeting Works

Psychological research has identified that when someone sees the same ad over and over they become familiar with it and even start to warm up to it. Only 2% of ads actually generate a profitable click through on the first try, it takes a few times of seeing the same ad before people tend to click and take action. When we see something we recognize we are more likely to pick that option, even if we really don’t know much about it at all.

7. Create Contests

Contests and fun games are a great way to get your customers interacting with your brand online. Offering free stuff gets all kinds of people listening, who doesn’t like to win free things?!

The Best Technique For Your Online Marketing Campaign: Practice Makes Perfect

It’s not just what you do but how you do it. You can offer a top-notch prize, but if the competition itself doesn’t make sense, or if it doesn’t reach your target audience, it will all be for nothing. The more people you have on board to help generate good ideas and results, the better. Perhaps you have tried some of the techniques described in this blog and have not seen the results you expected, leaving you wondering, where did I go wrong?

It takes time, special tools and experience to create a great marketing campaign. According to the same Ascend2 study referenced earlier, over 70% of businesses see consistent improvements from current online marketing strategies, while only 4% see their efforts returning less than ideal results over time.  The biggest problem people face is poor marketing techniques and not enough funds to improve efforts.

Unless you have an expensive team of web developers, content writers, and digital marketers it’s not going to be easy to get your campaign off the ground. A huge issue with online marketing is a lack of training. Hiring an agency to handle your digital marketing is one way to improve results, this same agency may also help train your employees to successfully take over the marketing themselves.