While marketing a business online is certainly a challenge, a good amount of research and developing your skillset will really help you come ahead of the competition. Although most online business owners have a basic knowledge of online marketing, it usually is not enough. As such, it is recommended that all online business owners bone up on their digital marketing skills, and gain a broad competency in various marketing channels such as social media marketing, SEO, email marketing, and PPC. With that in mind, here’s how you can use these digital marketing skills to come up with a great marketing strategy for your online business.
Focus on Your Customers
Before developing a marketing strategy for your online business, you need to make sure that your marketing goals align with what your customers are looking for. To do so, you’ll need to do some demographic research into your customers. For example, if you run an electronics ecommerce store, you’ll need to look at demographic information on Google Analytics and see where your customers are coming from to your electronics ecommerce store. You may be surprised to find that the traffic you are getting is not from where you were expecting.
Once you determine where this traffic is coming, and if the traffic itself is legitimate or not, you need to do some more demographic research to know where to target your marketing strategy to. This includes finding out where the demographics who are visiting your website are hanging out online, and also what keywords they are searching. If you find keywords that you think will convert highly within this particular demographic, then you need to make sure to focus your marketing efforts around these, particularly when it comes to SEO and PPC.
Don’t Be Afraid to Spend on Digital Ads
While social media ads and Google ads are certainly not overlooked aspects of digital marketing, they are often done incorrectly. Targeting, whether from a demographic point of view, or from a keyword point of view, is extremely important when it comes to digital ads. In fact, poorly targeting digital ads can lead to you totally wasting your marketing budget and failing in your marketing strategy. As such, you need to learn how to properly target ads on social media and on Google. You may want to consider taking some courses to learn how to do so. If you find that the process is a bit opaque to you, you should think about hiring a digital marketing agency that focuses on managing and targeting digital ad spend.
If you know the demographics or the keywords that you want to be targeting with these online ads, then a digital marketing agency can help you best optimize these and run an effective marketing strategy around them. Often, you can find digital marketing agencies who will simply take a percentage of the revenue generated from your digital ad spend, instead of charging a flat fee. This helps them to make more money, but also lowers your upfront cost in hiring them, allowing you to focus on the actual operations of your business instead of the digital marketing. Furthermore, this arrangement often satisfies nascent digital agencies who are just getting their feet wet in digital ads, and will allow you to learn from them as you grow your business.
