Five Steps for On-Line Marketing Success

Five Steps for On-Line Marketing Success

As online marketing continues to consume a larger portion of company’s efforts and budgets, small businesses often wonder how they can best implement these activities into their marketing mix. The online marketing landscape continues to present significant challenges:

• There are many platforms and options to consider, including advertising, social media, email marketing to name a few.
• Small businesses have limited resources and time to devote to marketing.
• It’s difficult for businesspeople to stay on top of the technical details and dynamic nature of these platforms.

At the same time, there are well known marketing best practices that can guide online activities as well. Marketing campaigns should employ consistent branding and messaging. Since prospects need to see your name and message many times before doing business, frequent exposure to your message is critical. In addition, in order to maintain control while being consistent and frequent, an explicit marketing strategy is required.

What follows is our strategy for clients that provides a framework for your activities. These can be executed internally or with the help of an outside vendor. This plan incorporates key characteristics, including:

1. Being repeatable
2. Being measurable
3. Being efficient

 5 Step Online Marketing Plan:

1. Setup

Make sure you have a current, modern and responsive website. Your website should be able to provide ongoing analytic reports. Setting up your Google business account will provide analytics code that can be incorporated into your website. Set up your blog page, preferably on your website. With the knowledge of your customers and prospects, set up the appropriate social media pages. Use consistent branding (logo) on all platforms.

2. Post

Select informative and relevant topics for blog posts. Create a post (article) of approximately 500 to 1,000 words. Consider quoting and linking to industry articles or blogs to help support your topic. Use links to other pages on your website to incorporate relevant products or services. Use a call to action to have customers contact you or take advantage of an offer. Consistently post blogs 2 or 3 times per month.

3. Promote

Promote your blog article on your social media page. Use short blurbs about the article with a link to the blog article page. The objective is to drive users back to the blog and engage them on your website.

If you have an email list available, promote your current blog articles in an email campaign. This will reach users who may not use social media on a regular basis. Include social media links in your email template.

All this activity will help grow your list and your followers.

4. Engage

Cross promote your blog articles on complementary blogs, forums and communities. This will help engage new audiences. Retweet related content from others. Respond to comments on your blog or social media as well as liking/following other complementary social media pages and comment on those.

5. Report

View reports on analytics, on your social media pages and from your email campaigns. Consider tracking the key metrics on a monthly basis to be aware of trends. Based on results, begin to adjust the efforts based on what the reports are showing. Be aware of variables such as seasonal changes, different topics, changes in the day of the week or time of the day. Capitalize when possible on current news and events to help capture audience interest.

This  approach provides several benefits, including:

• Your activity will be frequent and consistent. We recommend giving the program at least 6 months before making conclusions about how it is working.
• The available measurements, whether from your website or on the various social media and email platforms, will help you refine your content and activity.
• By repurposing blog content in social media and email campaigns, the effort in content creation will be more efficient and fuel activity on all platforms that you are engage on.

eBusiness Technology has provided website and marketing services for over 20 years. If you would like to discuss improvements in your website presence and in online marketing activities, please contact us today.