Online marketing strategies come and go. Make sure you’re focusing your efforts on those that stand the test of time. Here are five of the best.
- Mastering the Customer Journey
Serving as a blueprint for everything a marketer does, an understanding of the customer journey helps you devise better marketing strategies. This is true no matter what technique du jour you’re using to drive traffic and convert visitors.
Most consumers embark upon a digital journey that’s complex and multi-staged long before they make their final purchasing choice. From realizing they desire a product to gathering information about it to honing a list of possible purchasing sites, they can be well along on that journey long before they visit your website or social media page.
Knowing where people are on that journey helps you to meet their precise needs and to interact with them on a more personal level.
- Thinking ‘Multi-Channel’
Being able to meet consumers at as many touchpoints along that customer journey is also key. Remember: it’s a cross-channel journey that might involve mobile, PC, laptop, brick-and-mortar stores, chatting with friends, and more.
How many of those touchpoints are you covering? How’s your website looking on mobile these days? How about your in-store marketing strategies, if you have stores? Do they match your online campaigns for a seamless, branded experience?
- Giving Social Media the Respect It’s Due
Saying you’re giving up on social media is the online marketing equivalent of throwing in the towel. Social media is an essential platform for marketing, not a strategy in and of itself.
If social isn’t giving you results, then change your approach but don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Pick your platform (the one your audience uses the most) and keep at it by staying current with marketing techniques and by putting in the time required to do it right.
- Making Use of ‘Big Data’
If there’s one sweeping trend to be aware of in online marketing, it’s the use of Big Data. It’s not as complicated as you think and it allows you to fine-tune your marketing strategy for maximum ROI.
It doesn’t do much good to market your lawn mowers to people who live in condos. Tapping into large stores of consumer data can help businesses target their marketing strategies to precisely the right people. That way, they won’t waste resources targeting people who would never in a million years buy their products.
- Blogging
Finally, there’s blogging. No longer the new kid on the block, it’s now considered one of the basic elements of a good online marketing strategy. Marketers love the dual benefits: blogging is a lead generation tool as well as an SEO booster. Consumers like brands that are authentic and good blogging is a top way to show that your company is real.
And that may just be the theme that ties all five strategies together: be real, stay true to your vision, and focus on finding exactly the right customers for your product or service.