In the era of digital technology, Online Marketing is an indispensable activity for any business. As long as your competitors are implementing digital marketing strategies, you will be left behind at any time if you don’t have the right plan. In this article, let’s learn how to build an effective Online Marketing strategy with Kounselly!
Remember to make sure that your goals are specific, achievable, and measurable. Example: We want to increase the application rate through running Facebook ads to 15% from the current 10% in the next three months.
To choose the right marketing channel, you should consider various factors such as your business’s current capabilities and finances. Moreover, you should also think about which of these techniques your target audience will find relevant, interesting, and helpful.
By using these above measurement methods, you can evaluate and optimize your Online Marketing strategy to achieve the best result.
1. What is Online Marketing?
Online Marketing is a method of marketing through online communication channels such as websites, social networks, email, online advertising, video marketing, etc. The purpose of Online Marketing is to attract, interact and convert prospects (i.e. potential customers) into leads and then real customers, thereby increasing sales and profits for businesses. Online Marketing is also known as Digital Marketing or Internet Marketing.2. Why is Online Marketing important for businesses?
Online Marketing plays an important role in business for the following reasons:2.1. Online Marketing helps businesses attract a large number of potential customers
The Internet has become the most popular means of communication with billions of users worldwide. Therefore, when using online channels, businesses can reach potential customers easily and quickly. As a result, this helps businesses attract more customers than using traditional advertising methods such as magazines, newspapers, radio, and television.2.2. Increase efficiency and save advertising costs
Compared to traditional forms of advertising, online marketing helps businesses save tremendous costs. Through communication channels such as websites, social networks, email, online advertising, video marketing, etc., businesses can reach potential customers easily and quickly.2.3. Conversion rate optimization
Online marketing allows businesses to create targeted marketing content and attract potential customers from a wide range of sources. This helps optimize the conversion of potential customers into real customers, thereby increasing sales and profits for the business.2.4. Feedback and analyze performance Tool
Market and business performance analysis and feedback tools like Google Analytics, and Facebook Insights can help businesses better understand their customers, their needs, and how to interact with online advertising campaigns. From there, businesses will make appropriate plans to adapt to the market, thereby improving business efficiency.3. 7 Steps to Build an Effective Online Marketing Strategy?
3.1. Determine the target
To be able to build an effective Online Marketing strategy, you must first establish a clear goal that is appropriate for your strategies. Here are some examples:- Increase brand awareness
- Increase engagement on social media channels
- Increase email subscribers and open rates
- Increase visitors to your landing pages
3.2. Define buyer personas
A customer profile is a detailed description of your ideal customer based on demographics, interests, age, where you can connect with them, and more. Building a customer profile will help you understand who you are trying to reach, where they are, and what needs to be satisfied.3.3. Market research
When doing market research, you must identify competitors, trends, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in your industry. Specifically, you have to answer the following questions:- Who are your direct and indirect competitors?
- What can you learn from your competitors?
- What is your USP? What makes your product stand out from the competition?
3.4. Identify Online Marketing Channels
Depending on your Marketing goals, you have to choose and coordinate different marketing channels based on your customer persona. Goals can be achieved through various methods, such as:- Website: This is the face of the business where information about companies and products is introduced and updated. Moreover, it can also help convert visitors into leads.
- Email Marketing: This channel is suitable when you want to nurture your leads and retain your existing customers.
- Social Media: Marketing on Social Media can drive brand awareness, advertise your products, and direct buyers to your sales pages.
- PPC advertising can help you bring conversion rates in a short time
- SEO (search engine optimization): SEO can help you increase website traffic by optimizing your website to get high rankings on search engines.
- SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEM makes it easy for customers to find you through keywords on search engines, thereby increasing visits and converting potential customers.
- Affiliate marketing is an effective way to grow your customer base quickly.
3.5. Building an Online Marketing Strategy
After you have researched and gathered the necessary information, it is time for you to make a plan to realize them. Here is an example for you: Example: Let’s say you are a small handicrafts company that has an offline store. However, after the Covid-19 period, you realized it’s necessary to step up online orders. Your initial goal is to raise brand awareness and expand the customer base to different provinces. Here are some strategies you can try:- Build a sales website with optimal UX/UI for users
- Create weekly Facebook and Instagram posts to highlight new products.
- Send monthly emails to existing customers to give away special promotions.
- Create 2 videos/week on TikTok about content about brands, products, and customers.
3.6. Content Marketing
In Online Marketing, there is often a saying that “Content is king”. Indeed, content is the foundation of any marketing campaign. You should combine your channels and build a content route that complements each other. Here are some common types of content:- Video: This form of content marketing is very popular in recent years because of its high conversion rate.
- Social media: By using social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc, helps promote and provide information about products and brands to customers.
- Blogs: This is a section of the website where the business provides knowledge and information to readers.
- Ebook: E-books are often made in PDFs which contain a large amount of information about a topic. In order to receive the E-book, people may provide an email or sign up with you.
- Infographics: Infographics help create your content in a concise, easy, and accurate way.
- Email: This method allows you to convey your message to customers proactively to cover the maximum audience.
3.7. Conduct and evaluate
This is the most exciting part of any online marketing process, but the conduct is not the end of your marketing activities or campaigns. A key element in implementing a successful online marketing strategy is evaluating its effectiveness and making adjustments as needed.4. How to measure the effectiveness of your Online Marketing strategy?
Measuring the effectiveness of your Online Marketing strategy is an important step to check whether your strategy is achieving its goals, thereby making the necessary adjustments to increase effectiveness. Here are some methods of measuring performance in Online Marketing:- Google Analytics: This is a free tool that provides data on traffic, user behavior, and interactions with your website. Google Analytics provides parameters such as bounce rate, average time on page, number of visits, and traffic sources so you can evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, landing pages, etc.
- Conversion Rate: Conversion Rate is the number of new customers or successful sales to the total number of customers reached or visited. By using tools like Google Analytics or other measurement tools, you can measure and track your conversion rate to see if your strategy is working.
- Social Media Analytics: Social networking platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter,… provide you with effective measurement tools such as the number of interactions, the interaction rate, the number of visits, views, etc so you can evaluate the effectiveness of your social media campaign.
- Email Marketing Analytics: Email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc can provide you with data on email open rates, link click rates, and unsubscribe rates so you can measure the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns.
- A/B Testing: A/B Testing is a method of comparing two different versions of the same campaign to find the one that is more effective. You can A/B test on landing pages, email marketing, social media ads, etc.