Much of marketing today consists of and revolves around online marketing. It is what large, flourishing companies have been using and have mastered in order to get where they are today. However, not all marketers have tapped into this area of marketing efficiently and are losing the benefits without even realizing it. It’s a constantly evolving arena which moves at the speed of light. To keep up, marketers need to possess a certain sense of wisdom and understanding of the online marketing world.
Online marketing often tends to get overwhelming because of the sheer number of possibilities it offers, such as emailing, social media advertising, pop-out ads, or blogging. To get you through it with flying colors, we have assembled a few tools and tips to keep your marketing techniques sharp and effective.
Make a plan:
Planning is of the utmost importance when it comes to marketing. One cannot just go blindly into online marketing without a concrete plan to start. Figure out your customers and their tastes and preferences, and then decide upon the best game plan for approaching them.
Innovative taglines:
Ellie Williams in her article ‘What is a Marketing Tagline,’ writes, “A marketing tag line is a short catchphrase used by a business or brand to summarize its mission and the products or services it offers.” (Source: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/marketing-tag-line-52533.html)
Creating a witty and attractive tagline is among the first steps to marketing generally. Business should use these taglines when doing online marketing as well. A tagline should be something which is memorable initially, remains memorable after time, and imparts positive feelings about the brand. It should leave potential customers with something to ponder. MasterCard’s tagline, “There are some things money can’t buy – for everything else, there’s MasterCard,” is an excellent example of a witty and creative tagline.
Improve your emailing style:
Often marketers think that email marketing is obsolete and no longer useful. If you think so, think again. Almost everyone today has an email account and uses it regularly on a day to day basis. According to Pew Research, 92% of online adults use email and Chosen’s research reported that 57% of email subscribers spend 10-60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week.
(Source: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2014/09/email-marketing-statistics/)
Email communication existed long before the social media came into existence and is still a key source to communicate. As the Radicati Group writes, there are 3 times more email accounts than Twitter and Facebook accounts combined.
However, among so many emails, customers tend to ignore what they think are spam messages and unimportant emails. It’s up to the marketer to make the emails they send to the customers fascinating and captivating enough that the customer feels compelled to open it and read through. To make it so, the subject line should be the strongest hook to pull the customer in.
Moreover, one should improve on the salutation style when emailing the customer. A formal salutation like Dear Mr. Brown is likely not to draw much of a response from the customers, as opposed to something more personalized and unique like Hi, Friend or Greetings, Earthlings.
Do not forget to publish a monthly newsletter and send it to customers via email. Use it as a chance to connect with your customers, share your success with them and update them to the new products you are introducing. While you are at it, send out a questionnaire for feedback on the service.
Now that you have improved your emailing style, make sure that your client list is updated to consist of the existing customers and potentially the new ones. By asking customers to sign up for your email alerts you have potentially gained some loyalty, but to sustain that loyalty the subject matter needs to be interesting. To achieve this, create a message with the upcoming deals or new arrivals, make it interesting by adding a picture or two of your product, and send them all the same email!
Update your website:
Countless businesses frequently neglect to update their websites. A website is the customer’s go-to medium whenever they want to read about or contact the company. Because it’s such a trafficked medium, it’s necessary to update it and keep it presentable and orderly. Following are a few steps which might guide you through the creation of the best website design for your online marketing.
Ease of accessibility: Your website should be extremely user-friendly without any complex programming. As one of the best SEO company Toronto produced, not all users are adept with internet, so it is important that you make it as easy for your customers as possible. Clear cut navigation is also of paramount importance; obvious division of categories on your site will help users find the information they’re looking for.
Attractive home page: The home page of your site should be stuffed with as many key words as possible, embodying as many qualities of the said company as they can. This will allow potential customers to learn who you are right from the beginning.
Update the online details: Verifying that the phone number and email address on your web page is up to date and accurate is also imperative. Not only the contact information but also the company hours and the current products of the company need to be updated on a regular basis. Many customers prefer doing research online and then making their way to your outlets.
Optimize the web page for mobile application: The current era of increased use of smart phones necessitates people accessing most of the sites from their cell phones rather than through the use of an old fashioned desktop. As a result, a company should make certain that their website is efficient enough to work on mobiles. Research shows that 57 percent of mobile users will abandon your website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load – 30 percent will abandon a purchase transaction if the shopping cart isn’t optimized for mobile devices. (Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-mills/5-reasons-you-absolutely-_b_5122485.html). Thus, it is fundamental that today’s businesses have a website with supportive software for the mobile users loaded with all the new updates in order to be successful.
Social Media:
Social media is a spectacular medium to reach and engage with a seemingly unlimited clientele. Social media is the catch-all term used for many websites which include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. It essentially covers a range of social sites that marketers use to strengthen their customer base.
Even though a lot of attention is lavished upon social media marketing, not all businesses have used it effectively. They tend to get lost on their motto and deviate from their strategy. To generate a full blown impact of online marketing, one should learn to observe the behavior of their target audience and then focus on a powerful strategy.
Keep it short and simple: Users of social media are not likely to feel inclined to read lengthy content. Thus it’s necessary for the marketer to be aware of this and therefore keep their message short and easy for people to read. For instance, a marketing campaign on Twitter would require a brief and to the point statement because of the limited word allowance of 140 characters.
Read the trends: Many social media websites have introduced trends to their site. Taking advantage of this by devising a marketing approach can almost absolutely get you to succeed. Whether it is celebrity controversy or some worldwide sports competition taking place, anything could be used to market your product in a prolific way. Thus make sure your marketing team is adept at reading the trends and exploiting them to their potential.
Contests and games: Running a contest on any social media website like Facebook or Twitter is likely to be impactful. A trivia question related to your business in exchange of a surprise is how you can engage the people having followed or liked your page. For instance, Dove arranged a “Real Beauty Should be Shared” contest where they asked their followers why they think that their friend portrays beauty. The winners of the contest were to become the next faces of Dove.
Lighten up: Humor is the key. Lighten up and give your followers a reason to smile. Posting something humorous or sarcastic pertinent to some current trend or uploading a funny picture and relating these things to your business or product are definitely options for you if you are utilizing social media to promote your business. Taco Bell is known to post light hearted tweets on Twitter, making them approachable to their followers. Tweets like ‘The quickest way to my heart is through the Taco Bell drive-thru’ and ‘You’re the taco to my bell’ are some examples of their social media marketing. (Source: https://twitter.com/tacobell/status/634198178288394240, https://twitter.com/tacobell/status/631268926878433280)
Visual effects: Using an image for promotional tweets is a very smart move since a picture is much more likely to gain the attention of people than a regular status update. Pictures don’t tend to get lost among the numerous status updates and content on the social media sites. An ideal picture would contain all the right ingredients to make it attractive and catchy and something that the users are going to scroll up to see again.
Humor the followers: Engaging with celebrities on social media is also an effective way to succeed at online marketing. This is likely to garner the attention of their fans creating a very lively and fun atmosphere.
Post consistently: Marketers should regularly post on social media sites. They should make it a point to make at least one promotional post a day, whether it is just to post a picture of your product or announce an upcoming game or to post a quiz to engage the public and spark their curiosity.
What not to do:
Having covered what a marketer must do in order to ace the online marketing, we will now discuss the things they should steer clear of.
As mentioned in the article above, entering the online marketing world without a clear-cut and wholesome plan is asking for a guaranteed failure. Without evaluating the options available first, your endeavor is going to result in a cluttered mess. Pro Tip: Weigh your options and devise the best available marketing plan accordingly.
Not following up on your marketing strategy is bound to get you in trouble. If you don’t follow up, you are not going to know if the new strategy was successful or not. It is necessary to measure up results so that you know if you need to come up with a new marketing technique or if you should continue with your current strategy. Pro Tip: Follow up. Period.
The purpose of social media marketing is to show how great your company is. When setting up Facebook pages and Instagram accounts, you need to make sure that you don’t let your page get cluttered. People often spam your Facebook pages with unnecessary and irrelevant messages. This results in a mess and hinders marketing. Pro Tip: Clean up your page regularly of spam and malware.
Do not under any circumstance create a clichéd or cheesy slogan. Trying to be clever, marketers often fail to recognize that the slogans they are coming up with tend to be clichéd. Phrases such as ‘we do xyz so you don’t have to’, ‘world class’ and ‘one stop shop’ aren’t likely to gain attention from people. Pro Tip: Be smart, not a smart aleck.
When trying to build a relationship with customers beyond professional, do not let it go to an extreme. Though it’s good to include personalized messages for your customers, appearing overly familiar might tick off the customer. Pro Tip: Maintain a balance.
Online marketing doesn’t have to be rocket science. It is simply asking for originality and creativeness. Marketers do not need to bother themselves with what to say – they merely need to focus on figuring out what the customer needs and saying whatever convinces them to buy the product.
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