We can agree that there are a plethora of tactics and techniques when considering an online marketing strategy. From SEO to Google AdWords, to social media and video marketing, the options seem endless when considering developing your marketing plan. Which strategies should you focus on? Where should you begin?

The goal is to provide a step-by-step, perfect formula for an “All-in-One” online marketing strategy. Following this guide will give you clear direction on which tactics to concentrate on to connect with your audience, boost your presence, grow your leads, and increase online revenue!

1. Establish Your Buyer Personas

The prerequisite to a strong online marketing strategy is being crystal clear on who your ideal customer is or target audience. Knowing their problems, challenges, and most impressing questions positions you to create content that speaks to their issues. Offering real solutions that resonates with your audience is what makes your marketing strategy results-oriented.

Developing buyer personas is perhaps the most effective technique to wholly understanding your audience. Some details included in your personas are:

• Job description and responsibilities
• Their role in the buying process
• Pain Points
• Their Typical Day
• Most impressing questions
• Keywords and phrases this persona is likely to use when searching online
• Their content preferences (i.e. the social media channels they prefer, what content format engages them more, etc.)
• Goals and objectives

This data will guide your entire online strategy to sharing content that truly speaks to your ideal customer.

2. Publish Remarkable Content on Your Blog

The benefits to business blogging are incredible when you consider the boost in search visibility, being viewed as an authority in your niche, sharing valuable content with your audience, and bringing more exposure to your brand. In fact, companies that blog have 55% more website visitors (Source: Business2Community). Blogging is the perfect tactic to continuously drive traffic to your website from the search engines, capture leads, and promote sales. It’s where you share your industry knowledge to the world, building the know, like and trust factor with your followers.

Use an editorial calendar to create a consistent blogging schedule to keep your audience engaged with your brand. In starting, consider common questions you’re asked and how you can convert those into topic ideas.

3. Simple Social Media Strategy

Consumers want to follow and connect with their favorite brands on social media. Social networks is an excellent platform to promote your blog content and other marketing campaigns. Piggybacking from the previous step, research has shown that compelling content (i.e. good blog articles) is one of the top 3 reasons people will follow a brand on social media. These sites are driving tremendous traffic to blogs and its important that yours is included.

Use social media marketing to share value, humanize your brand, entertain, interact with your followers and customers, and respond to breaking news. Increase your presence on sites where your target audience hangs out the most.

Finally, be sure to adjust your communication and writing style according to the tonality of that social media site. For example, you would convey your message differently on LinkedIn than you would on, let’s say, Instagram.

4. Leverage Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the best ways to capture the attention of your viewers and get them to take immediate action. It’s highly beneficial for sharing customer testimonials, showing product demonstrations, delving deeper into popular (blog) topics, and closing sales. Including videos into your marketing strategy is a must if you want to quickly build trust with your audience.

Add flavor to your social media strategy by leveraging live-streaming video platforms that conveniently auto-play in your followers newsfeed. Social videos generate 1200% more shares than images and text combined.  Marketers are experiencing huge success using tools Facebook Live, Periscope, and Instagram Stories to connect with their social followers to boost engagement, extend special offers to viewers that converts to leads, and giving sneak-peeks backstage to exclusive events.

5. Create Compelling Content Offers

Content offers like free whitepaper downloads, checklists, tools, product discounts, free trials, and video series are compelling ways to convert website visitors into leads to grow your email list. Also called lead magnets, your content offer must be enticing and beneficial enough to your audience that excites them to give their contact details. The more your offer solves a specific problem, the better your conversions.

Having multiple landing pages and content offers also improves your lead generation. An ideal tactic is promoting your content offer within a blog post that actually relates to your offer.

6. Nurture Leads through Email Marketing

Did you know that 91% of consumers check their email at least once a day on their smartphones? Email is still by far the top source that customer revert to in catching sales, taking advantage of special offers, and staying connected with their preferred brands. Your email strategy will be the bridge that moves your leads to becoming buying customers. You’ll find that email marketing will be a key to your overall online marketing plan in generating revenue for your business.

Cultivate your leads list by continuing to share valuable content that solves problems and answers questions. Use tools like within your email marketing software to create monthly eNewsletters, automated messages for campaigns, and to send quick emails with beautiful design.  Finally, segmenting your list is a highly effective practice to improving responsiveness and conversions!

7. Better Understand Your Customers with Surveys and Social Monitoring

The final step to the perfect online marketing formula is studying your current customers to remain abreast to what they want so you can continue to be the solution-provider with your audience. This is where the WOW factors comes to play…helping you to gain loyal, raving fans of your brand. Surveys are powerful marketing tools to gain direct feedback from your audience to meet ongoing demands. Use them for future content ideas, product innovation, and testimonials.

Also, social media management tools help you to manage and monitor your social campaigns, maintain an active presence, interact with followers and more using one system. By keeping up with social engagement, replying to comments and inquiries across all social media channels, it shows customers that your brand is live on social and takes interest in the responses from followers.

Conclusion

Implementing a working online marketing strategy is vital to achieving your business goals. This guide provides a clear overview of the needed components to build a strong Internet presence. Begin executing the steps now to generate results from your efforts.

Are you ready to bolster your online marketing strategy that engages your customers and attracts new ones to you? Reach out to us here and let's chat! We know how to make it happen.