Monday, October 6, 2014

Turning Businesses into Online Hits: 5 Steps to Creating Effective and Affordable Online Marketing Plans

When it comes to online marketing, businesses have just two choices. They can either plan for increased sales by creating an organized Internet marketing campaign, or they can keep following their established status quo and hope that it will suffice while online opportunities pass them by.

Why Businesses Need Online Marketing Campaigns
An organized and effective online marketing campaign is not hard to put together. Neither is it necessarily cost prohibitive, as many businesses utilize inexpensive Internet marketing every day. When approached correctly, a good Internet marketing strategy can bring in online traffic and, as a result, online sales much quicker than even social media marketing and search engine optimization efforts.

Putting an Online Marketing Campaign Together
All it takes is a good understanding of the business’s target audience and a bit of extra research. With these, any business can plan and implement an effective online marketing campaign. For those dedicated businesses in a hurry, these campaigns can even be created and implemented in the space of a single day.

5 Steps to a master Internet marketing plan that can swiftly boost sales success.


Step 1: Know the Customer Audience

Hopefully, unless your business is still brand new, you already have a clear definition of your target customer. If so, feel free to skip this step. If not, make figuring out your target customer your key priority, as doing so is every bit as important as naming your business or deciding on a product to sell.

To get a better handle on your targeted, model customer, ask yourself the following questions:

   What is the perfect customer’s net income?
   What type of job does the perfect customer have?
   Is the perfect customer male or female, or does it even matter?
   Does purchase occur often, occasionally, or just one time?
   Is the purchase made service as a gift or for the customer’s own use?
   How much time does the perfect customer spend online every day?

Step 2: Choose Effective Marketing Locations
Location is key to many aspects in business, and online business is no different. You’ll want your message to be seen across multiple websites without looking like pervasive spam. Which sites you choose should be based on your targeted customer profile, as you want to pick places where you can be most sure that your preferred audience will see your campaign.

Other factors that come into play when choosing a website marketing venue include the following:

          Search engine placement
          Average traffic
          Quality and content of current ads
          Quality and quantity of external linking
          Number of competitors present
          How relevant current ads are to the business and its purpose

Step 3: Budget Realistically
You can’t create an effective budget for an online marketing campaign until you have a better grasp of what you’re going to do and how much the plan is expected to cost. Once you’ve got a tentative plan in place, go through it and prioritize your ad choices in terms of which are expected to bring in the best results within your budget. You can always go back and scale up campaigns once ads start pulling in more sales results.

Step 4: Create the Content for the Ads
When creating the ads themselves, remember that you’re not selling a service or a product. You’re selling a benefit to customers. This means that you want your content to reach out to the customers and resonate with them and their wants and needs. In other words, don’t talk about how great your product is; talk about how great their life can be with it. Also, narrow the scope if you offer a wide variety of products and services. Casting too wide of advertising is ineffective. Focus on those products or services that provide the highest appeal to customers in order to draw them in.

Step 5: Monitor the Results
While the above steps are critical to creating an effective online marketing campaign, continued tracking is critical to keeping it effective and allow you to scale and optimize your continued efforts. Be sure to pay attention to your online campaign stats and react to successes accordingly. This will let you know when it’s time to increase campaign efforts or when it’s time to refocus existing efforts elsewhere.




No comments:

Post a Comment