About 6 years ago I decided I wanted to have my own internet business and from that moment I started working on my first online project. Today, after working for years in various web projects, I want to share 10 tips that I have learned about how to make online marketing that actually works.
Each of these keys has applied in the projects related to digital communities, eCommerce, web applications, personal branding and digital strategy.
I hope these keys will be useful to boost your business. We encourage you to apply!
Making Online Marketing for your Business
1. Know your customers
The most important point in any strategy for Internet marketing knows who we are heading. Know your customers and understand their motivations, fears, needs, problems, desires and expectations. The more you know your customers, key information will have to prepare effective strategies that will allow captivate.
I always recommend an exercise companies is to talk to current and potential customers to identify those elements that are important to them with regard to the products and services offered. Here are some questions that your customers can:
Current customers:
- Why did you decide to buy from us and not the competition?
- What is the most valued characteristic of our product or service?
- If someone asked a recommendation about our product, would you say?
- What are the benefits to buy our product or service?
Potential customers:
- Why they are not yet our customers? (This is a question we must realize ourselves to ourselves)
- Why did you decide to buy from the competition?
- What are you looking for the product or service in our industry?
- Which of the characteristics of our product or service you would be willing to pay?
- What benefits that our product offers is the one you want?
At the end of this year we will have background information to know which elements must focus our value proposition and design more effective advertising pieces.
You may also like to read another article on HeyGom: 5 Investments that every business owner should do
2. Delivery valuable information
It is true that the ultimate goal of marketing is to boost sales of a company, but this does not mean that all our strategies should have a commercial approach.
I always suggest companies to develop strategies with 4 different approaches:
- Education: The goal of these strategies is to teach consumers why they should choose our product, what are the benefits that our product offers, what makes us different from the competition, how best to use our product and dispel myths that may exist with respect our product.
- Branding: The aim of this strategy is to generate brand awareness and make the customer think of us when you need a product or service in our industry.
- Engagement: While branding is how users remember your brand engagement is how much users love your brand. The goal of these strategies is to create and strengthen emotional connections with customers.
- Sales: The goal of these strategies is to drive sales directly, and we must use calls to action and strong words with the consumer make purchasing decisions. The 3 types of strategies mentioned above help us to build trust, arouse emotions and educate the client; then, if you have done your homework well, the market will be much more receptive to strategies on a commercial basis.
When a company combines the different types of strategies, manages consumers capture real value in the messages they are sending and avoid being perceived as just one more company that is desperate to sell and flooded the social networking spam and commercial messages screaming and they scare away potential customers.
“Selling is not begging, selling is not to force, is not fooled … Sell Selling is awakening emotions, desires and feelings.”
3. Less is more
The modern consumer does not like wasting time. Whatever the channel of your choice (social networks, YouTube, blog, etc), always optimizes your message so that the customer feel that every second spent interacting with it, really worth it. Marketing must be strong, subtle and direct.
Being single is really complicated. Many companies hold too much communication protocols and end up sending messages that are boring and irrelevant to the market.
On the Internet you have 5 seconds to capture the attention of a user, so any piece of advertising you use should have an element of attraction that can be digested in those 5 seconds. Once you have the user’s attention, you have 10 seconds to seduce him with a phrase that evokes emotions and desires. Finally, if you have captured the attention of the user and has managed to seduce him, the final step is to influence it with a call to action simple, direct and forceful.
Avoid posting full graphic pieces of information that you do not need. You take entice, seduce and influence it, and since then he ask you handle all the information you may require to make a decision to purchase.
4. The worst strategy is to rely on a single strategy
Internet is an environment full of uncertainty. All the time something is changing in the web. Google changes its algorithms, Facebook changes its design, Twitter adds new tools, new platforms appear, etc.
No matter what question your business, if you depend entirely on one tool or strategy, you are in constant danger.
In February 2011 Google decided to launch “Panda”, an update to its algorithm that aimed to punish those websites who managed to position itself in the top search engine results using negative SEO practices. After this update, thousands of businesses that depended entirely on their positioning in Google, saw their incomes significantly and had to close.
There are four pillars of online marketing must work to build a strong and systematic strategy for your business:
- SEO: There are 2 ways to get high on search engine results place: SEO and SEM. The goal of SEO is to get our business, naturally, high on search results by location and engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! And, moreover, the SEM is paid to appear in the top results of search engines through keywords that interest us.
- Social Media (SMO): The social networks are powerful tools of interaction and communication with endless possibilities to promote and position marks.
- Email Marketing: Email remains one of the conversion and retention tools more powerful than exist on the web, so it’s worth investing in building a customer database and send them valuable information.
- Mobile Marketing: Given that users have specific behaviors when connecting from mobile devices, it is important to have focused strategies to exploit the features and functionality of smartphones and tablets.
You may also like to read another article on HeyGom: 8 qualities of a professional sales
5. Measure, analyze, learn and optimizes
Any strategy you decide to implement in your business, must be accompanied by an objective and tracking metrics. Make marketing is not about how much to invest money in advertising we present proposal and wait by chance have any positive effect on our business.
On the Internet there are plenty of tools to monitor the strategies we implement, so why not take advantage?
“Strategy is: Plan – Run – Measure – Analyze – Learn – Optimize.”
Besides being consistent with the first key, when you measure get important information about your customers that will allow you to prepare better marketing strategies.
Measures! What works, keep doing it. What does not work, quit.
6. Invest
It is true that many of the online marketing tools can be used for free, but there are other very economically that will allow you to achieve better results.
Note that investment is worth it when you are giving valuable information to your users, because there are companies that “invest” in buying followers and end up with accounts that have little interaction and conversion. For, first you have to be. Focus on being a company that creates value and secure the results will come and your investment returns.
7. Consumers want to be heard and hate being ignored
One of the questions I most often made about social media is what to do when we receive a negative comment or criticism?
Many companies choose to simply delete the comment and ignore the person who wrote it, however, Mary Kay Ash, a successful businesswoman in the cosmetic industry, said: “It’s very simple, but makes a big impact. Imagine every person you meet with a neck hanging sign that says: ‘Make me feel important’ “
A user can forgive the delay in delivery or by a defect in the product, but never forgive you ignore it. An indignant and ignored user will ensure that everyone is aware of the bad experience you had with your company.
“A satisfied customer attracts a 2 customers more, but a dissatisfied customer takes away 8”
Moreover, an error is the perfect opportunity to retain a customer. The fact that you take the task to serve your customer’s complaint and give an early, that person will emotionally connect with your company and you referencing a serious and committed company.
8. All social networks are different
A big mistake many companies are to create accounts in each and every one of the social networks that are in its path. My recommendation is always to create a profile for your company only in those social networks to which you are willing to spend time and build you a strategy.
It is common to find social accounts of companies in which no content creation and nobody responds to user feedback.
Each network is different and therefore requires different strategies. Choose the network that best fit your business model and focus your efforts to exploit the features of each.
You may also like to read another article on HeyGom: Why do market research for your business or product could be useless?
9. Marketing must not be divided into online and offline, should be one
The marketing of your company must be integral. Both online and offline, you must promote the same brand values and principles. There is no point to sell yourself on the Internet as an efficient company, so if your offline business is not consistent with the message you’re sending.
It is also interesting to see how companies have implemented strategies offline, have had tremendous impacts on the web. For example, when Coca Cola decided to put on their labels names of people, it achieved a viral effect on social networks. When someone found a bottle with his name, he did not hesitate to take a picture and post it immediately.
In the case of Coca Cola is evidence that the online and offline world is the same, only in different interaction scenarios. When a company does something well on the Internet, its users are responsible for so offline share; and when he does something well offline, users are responsible for spread on the Internet. Then there is “design strategies for the Internet”, but to create strategies that impact people. Eventually the networks are about people, not technology.
10. Social networking numbers but do not try people
This is a powerful concept that you must understand to make effective online marketing. If you want to have many followers, you can easily pay for them … But how effective is buying followers?
Undoubtedly the best thing you can do is build your online communities person to person; one by one. It’ll take longer, but it’s got a user with effort and dedication, a hundred purchased.
When you focus on people, the numbers will be an inevitable result of doing the job well. When you focus on the numbers, you lose sight of the real objectives of marketing. You decide how you focus.
And finally, if I were to give one advice about online marketing, it would be this:
“Correct send the message to the right person, through proper environment and at the right time.”
In a future article I will share specific examples of strategies that I have tried and they work very well on the Internet. Pending!
I have also thought about doing a hangout expanding the topic of online marketing and sharing different tools, and key strategies that use and recommend, but I wonder if they are interested in the subject … What do you think?