If you think that online marketing is simple, you are grossly misinformed. It is one of the most complex entities around, largely thanks to the fact that there are so many different forms and techniques involved in online marketing strategies. Two strategies can sit side-by-side and be entirely different from one another. In turn, you also have highly successful online strategies and ones that are less so.
Those of you reading this could fall into the latter category as your online marketing strategy is not as impressive as you want it to be. You can't understand why - after all, you have followed some of the basics:
You've created a website
You're working on SEO
You're using social media marketing
What more could you possibly need to make your strategy a success?
Well, here's what's probably missing from your current strategy:
Branding is everything when you develop an online marketing strategy. You need to keep sending out the same messages so people can identify and recognize your brand. Brand inconsistency means that you're sending out mixed messages and people are having a hard time working out if this is your brand or another one with the same name.
Brand consistency begins with a clear aim; what do you want your brand image to be. From here, you start building everything around it, including logos, fonts, colors, and your content. The color scheme or your WordPress website needs to match your social media profiles, and so on. Building brand consistency makes it easier for people to notice you, establishing your brand on the online scene.
When designing your strategy, you probably looked at your customers in terms of their demographic groups. What age are they? What gender do they identify as? Simple questions like this help you understand a basic customer profile that tells you who your marketing materials must be aimed at. As a result, this influences everything that you do.
However, your online marketing strategy is missing something crucial that goes along with this; buyer personas. This goes beyond simple demographics and helps you know the type of buyers that are likely to be purchasing from you. Instead of looking at just age and gender, look at their job, their family life, their buying habits, etc. It lets you create a more detailed customer profile, so you understand more about who you are marketing to. From here, you can tweak your campaigns to better align with the buyer personas, leading to maximum conversions.
Far too many online strategies are focused on marketing to new customers. Businesses get caught in the loop of finding new customers over and over again. You want more people to know about your business, which is great, but you also need to think about the people that already know you exist.
Put it this way, nobody is more likely to purchase something from you than a previous customer. They have already bought from you before, so they know they can trust you and that your products/services are worthwhile. Remarketing is the act of promoting things specifically to people that have already made purchases. You can do this through email campaigns or online ads that remind them you exist. Email marketing is great for remarketing as you can send exclusive offers and deals to existing customers, encouraging them to come back for more. Don't just focus on new customers, retarget your old ones!
A benchmark is basically a level that you set to determine if something is good or not. With an online marketing strategy, your benchmarks will tell you how successful you have been. A lot of businesses forget to set benchmarks, meaning you have no real way of measuring what success looks like.
Consequently, you should start implementing benchmarks as goals for you to aim for. You can review your performance and see if you hit the benchmark or not. It is then easier for you to keep your strategy on track and recognize when things are not going well. Be warned, this is quite complicated, and it's not as simple as just plucking a number out of the sky and saying oh our campaign is a success if we get 100 sales. There's a great article by CMS-Connected that breaks benchmarks down, helping you understand how to set them.
So, if your online marketing strategy feels like it isn't performing as well as it should, it is probably missing at least one of the things above. In a really bad scenario, you're missing everything! The great thing about marketing strategies is that you can alter them and improve them. It's not the end of the world, just be sure you add the missing pieces to your puzzle!
