Online Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Online Marketing is a world in itself. Although it has a lot of variables, the focal point remains the customer or the client. The marketing industry has seen drastic changes from the onset of the millennium era. The evolution of Facebook and other social media platforms has broadened, widened, and deepened Online Marketing's scope by leaps and bounds.

Social Media Stats

Some statistics might be helpful to understand the subject in a better way. Let's have a look at them.

Facebook in 2019 had a monthly active user record of a whopping 2.45 billion according to a survey conducted for business and social media apps. Over 1 billion people use Instagram every month.

These figures make Social Media marketing one of the most well-known online marketing strategies in the world. Simply opening a website, posting social media updates, etc. cannot create magic. We need to plan a structure to achieve it. Hence, let's delve into a step-by-step guide to Online Marketing.  

Step 1: Mapping Goals with Tools

Every brand must understand that strategies will never work without setting goals and executing them with proper tools. Thus, one must set appropriate goals according to one’s business and make them measurable too.

We'll define them with some simple examples -

A weak goal mapping: Increase the website traffic in the next 6 months and generate one or two discount schemes.

What do you think is wrong with this goal? Yes, It is mapped but cannot be measured.

A strong goal mapping: Escalate the website conversions by the first half of 2021 by creating two promotional materials. One would be a 30% discount scheme, and the other will be a free marketing book.

Now, this can be easily measured and calculated in monetary or numerical values. Hence one must set goals and map them with strategies that can be easily quantified.

Step 2: KPIs and the Measurements

After knowing what goals have been set and what needs to be achieved, one can start figuring out the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to be measured.

If you want to boost sales by 50% through Online Marketing and its various channels, that shall lead to measuring your conversion rates.

Therefore when you understand what needs to be measured, implementing the right tool to do it becomes easier.

Step 3: Reviewing the Existing Plans

This is a crucial step in building a perfect plan that can be considered one of the best Online Marketing Tips. What you have done in the past needs to be evaluated before you start doing something new. That's exactly what we mean by reviewing your plans. Marketing can be divided into three broad aspects as follows-

• Acquired Marketing: This includes the website that the brand owns, the blog posts, and social media handles and profiles.
• Achieved Marketing: It involves the PR articles or blogs you have received through publicity or due to a good reputation. This step is a good time to re-check if those links are still live.
• Paid Marketing: It can be easily understood that it is executed through various mediums by spending funds on creating brand awareness or boosting sales.

Studying these parameters will lead to a thorough understanding of what worked for your business and what did not.

Step 4: Building Buyer Personas and Setting Your Target Audience

Earlier the marketing professionals would draw the target audience's analysis by studying parameters like age, gender, location, profession, and interests. But nowadays, it has become vital for a business venture to study and create a brand-specific buyer persona. A client persona is nothing but the ideal buyer that can be analysed on the basis of a predetermined clientele group. Apart from this industry, experts suggest considering psychographics, i.e. buyer preferences, interests, values, etc. while drawing a target audience.

Another step that can be considered as one of the most vital Online Marketing Tips follows next.

Step 5: Keep An Eye on Competitors

What do the competitors do for branding their products? or what channel have they considered for attracting more sales? One needs to study the strategies and accordingly formulate your own plans.

• Study the plans that have worked brilliantly well for them.
• Learn from their mistakes.
• Re-structure your Digital plans through various channels.

Analysing these strategies can draw a full proof plan for your brand that can keep you ahead of any competition. On the other hand, we would also share one of the useful Online Marketing Tips and, i.e. do not imitate your competitors blindly. Mould every strategy according to your business, and you need to gain better results.

Step 6: Track the Buyer's Journey

While setting the Online Marketing channels in place, one must look after the buyer's path too. One must understand where your buyer stands, and what are they looking for? Are they hesitant to buy the product/service? It would help if you gave them some assurance. Are they confused about what to do? You must show them some client feedback and positive reviews. You, as a brand owner, must make the sales and checkout process user-friendly and simple. This shall lead to a hassle-free shopping experience for a buyer.

Step 7: Building Your Online Store

Many platforms like Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp have stellar features for building an online marketplace or store for your brand. May it be product or service-oriented, one can easily set up an online shop on these platforms and attract customers through regular postings about offers and trends. Hence, you must build a store online and keep posting regularly to attract more customers online.

Step 8: Time to Execute Campaigns and Paid Promotions

Once the strategy, target audience, and journey are in place, you need to focus on running campaigns. It would help if you capitalised on digital channels like pay per click, social media campaigns, sponsored ads, etc.

All these options can be deployed with the help of Facebook, Instagram, etc. One needs to manage these ads skill-fully. As the outcome expected is defined by the goals you set while drafting the advertisement. A sponsored ad can give your profile or page more likes, comments, and followers. It can give more website traffic. Or it can generate more leads too. Thus you need to select the goal properly to get improvised results.

This Google Adsense account can also be built and employed to generate revenue from your website and blogs. As only after the campaigns are set and done, you can analyse the results and re-adjust the Online Marketing channels.

Step 9: Keep Track Of the Progress

Formulating all the policies or strategies and sitting idle will not help. One must regularly keep track of their results. Analysing the reports of all the platforms and methods and reviewing the outcome will lead to better business. Many times a particular process does not turn favourable for your business. On the other hand, a certain strategy works wonders. Thus analytics provided by all the marketing techniques must be thoroughly studied and re-adjusted to create better brand awareness. Over the internet one can find various Analytics tools that can be helpful. It renders accurate and downloadable reports for website traffic and other business apps too.

Conclusion

Every business person wants his brand or venture to flourish and expand. But amidst this process, they forget the basic ground rules one needs to follow. The rules one needs to imbibe in the process and one's behaviour are honesty, integrity, humanity, generosity, and hard work. If one focuses on these qualities, the brand will be in the buyers' minds forever. One must always remember that making money is much easier than building good relations and maintaining them.

Also read:

1) How Small Businesses Afford Digital Marketing?
2) How to Use Google Adwords for Digital Marketing?
3) What is Digital Marketing? Scope, Opportunities & more
4) Digitalisation - The next step in the evolution of Digital India