Nowadays, the Online Marketing strategies represents a very important role in the distribution channels of products or services of companies. Online Marketing is a channel for innovation that demands more investment on a daily basis and is the sector of biggest growth thanks to the high commercialization of desktops and mobile devices worldwide.
Its main advantages are:
- Measurable results
- Viral power
- Lower production costs
- Flexible budgets
To know the keys that help us to elaborate a suitable strategy in an Online Marketing Plan increases its importance. It is no longer a question of digital or traditional marketing, now it is a question of blended marketing, where the On and Offline actions are integrated.
Every business plan must take into account a digital marketing plan that is in line with the global strategy and with specific plans in social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
If you are a marketer, business administrator, project manager, SEO or entrepreneur and need some steps to carry out a strategy governed by results, here are a few tips focused on converting new users for your business, get quality traffic and have good results ROI (Return on Investment):
The product
Begin by analyzing your product. Relate each one of the product’s variables in the market: why will your audience choose this product or service, does it solve a specific problem, how does it perform, does it offer any added value, how is its price compared to the competition’s?
The analysis of these variables will help you to define a concept on which you can start the guideline strategy.
Then you must suggest a creative solution. From the variables that you have defined, you can design the message with which the product, its advantages and added value will be known.
Afterwards, you can go deeper into the differentiating elements. Before taking decisions, you will carry out a benchmarking, it will show you different alternatives and you will know important elements of your competition.
The campaign
Analyze the scope: what do you want to achieve with your campaign? Keep in mind that if you want your campaign to function, you must provide enough tools to generate a high impact on your target.
Set general and specific objectives. Make them measurable (traffic, sales). Be realistic and constant.
Propose actions: how are you going to do it? What steps are you going to follow? Specify them one by one in order to avoid the bumps in the road. This will help you evaluate the results of each action without losing sight of your reactions and what impact it generated.
Of course, in every campaign you must be very clear about the budget. Calculate a total for the overall investment, then divide the investment for each of the different media.
Advertising methods
Identify the modality under which you wish to advertise: CPM (cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per action)
Before you choose one of them, cross these possibilities with the budget you want to invest. Remember that it is very important to optimize the investment to obtain good results.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the base of everything. It is a long-term marketing strategy that consists of generating relevant content for your target audience, within the area of knowledge and sector that we want to influence. We will not sell anything, but we will offer our knowledge and experience for free. By solving needs, we will position ourselves as references that can help our future clients in this field.
In this way we will gain their loyalty and trust and they will be the ones who want to approach us, our Value Proposition, attracting future projects.
The best way to start is with the creation of a blog where we will provide quality and contextual content that will add value. It can be an approach of how to approach a problem, tools for the management of social networks, make available templates, infographics, etc.
It is a work that requires perseverance but that, without a doubt, will bring us the greatest returns and on which the other strategies within an Online Marketing Plan will be based.
Attractive Landing Page
The landing page, or Landing Page, is the place where users and potential customers of our products or services will arrive. Even if we do not sell anything and we simply want to develop our personal brand, the Landing Page is the image we will offer to the outside world. It is us and what we offer.
It is very important that it is well built, with a nice design that helps navigation. The goal of this page is to get leads, users who have left us at least their name and email, so we must take great care of style, make a good copy.
It is essential to show what benefits your potential customers will get using your services. What problems are you going to solve for them? This is the key. Therefore you must have:
- A title that hooks and shows the benefit to be achieved.
- A small explanation that reinforces the previous message.
- A simple text that shows the user what needs you are going to cover and what they demand.
- An attractive Call to Action, that incites to sign up.
- Comments that help to transmit confidence and that help the users to feel more identified.
E-commerce
For all those who sell or want to sell products on the Internet, a virtual store is the key tool to do it. The disappearance of physical contact, the confidence in the site is crucial. To achieve this, it is necessary a strategy in content marketing, where we have made ourselves known and established relationships of trust with users who have become followers of us or our brand.
In order for the bounce rate (those who arrive at our e-commerce site and leave without completing the purchase) to be as low as possible, the virtual store must have at least the following characteristics:
- Usability: The structure of the site has to be understandable, intuitive and comfortable. Navigate in a natural way that approaches the final process: shopping cart and payment.
- Images: The aesthetics of how the product is presented is very important. High quality images, attractive, that show the products in a clear and attractive way.
- No purchase barriers: The whole purchase process in one or two steps. Clearly explained and with a powerful call to action. Ask for the essential purchase data, not one more. Let’s learn from Amazon.
- Shipping of the product: Take care of it as much as possible. Many times this is what determines the failure of many sites. Generally it is an external service so it does not depend 100% on our effort. The cost, which is the least possible for the customer.
Web Analytics
Web analytics is the result of analyzing activity with the aim of focusing actions on results.
In the digital world, where everything or practically everything can be measured, it is suicide not to put web analytics at the top of our priorities. A good data collection and its subsequent analysis improve the strategic objectives of our business and allow us to establish the appropriate tactics to achieve the objectives.
Four steps are necessary in an web analytics strategy:
- Definition of Objectives.
- Establishment of metrics and KPIs.
- Data collection
- Elaboration of dashboards and reports that allow us an evolution and improvement.
The last point is the key. If the analysis does not allow us to improve continuously, either it is not analytical or we have not done it well.
Recommendations: Google Analytics, Wroopra, GetClicky, W3Counter and ClikHeat.
Social Media Strategy
The positive statistics on social networks are constantly improving: number of users, reach, frequency of use, downloads, use of transmedia, etc. Everyone wants to be there, but relatively few really know how to get the most out of them.
The first thing to be clear is that social networks are not made to sell. It simply doesn’t work that way. So, what can you give me? Well, basically, you can get:
- Create branding, increase brand awareness.
- Attract traffic to your landing page.
- Create community about your brand and communicate with it
- You manage and solve many crisis situations that may arise and solve problems for your clients.
- Knowing how to listen to them, you can detect before anyone else what your users are demanding.
Identify the pattern channels
If your campaign is focused on an audience that performs massive searches you may need to use SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with Google Adwords and Bing Ads. If you want to invest in graphic advertising Google Adsense, Rich Media (in different affiliate channels) and Double Click will be the right ones.
If you want to advertise on social networks SMM (Social Media Marketing) Facebook and/or Twitter will offer you very friendly administration modules. Also Youtube offers us video marketing. You can even implement advertising on platforms like Instagram (How advertising works on Instagram). And don’t forget that Google Local Search is booming, so don’t rule out the possibility of using Google Places.
Gamification
Don’t rule out gamification. Create web applications that massify your message with games or entertaining applications that provide a long stay to your customers.
Offer them prizes and virtual credits that motivate them to stay longer in your site and to recommend your product.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
It is a process that seeks to position your websites on certain phrases or search criteria in engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Research new phrases or trend-setting words with a Keyword Research with the Google Keywords Tools and optimize your Landings Pages with keywords that describe your product 100% and offer direct contact forms (it will speed up the sales-conversion process and serve as a meeting point with new visitors).
Mobile devices
mobile marketingMobile devices are in an unprecedented acceleration. The numbers are overwhelming: there are already more smartphones than inhabitants on the planet. Hours of use are increasing. Mobile advertising has increased by 75% this year. Facebook said that in Q2, 62% of its revenue came from mobile advertising. And everything indicates that in 2016 the figures will be more spectacular.
The case of Spain is unique: we are the 2nd country in the world by smartphone penetration, 44%, according to Google.
However, mobile marketing is still a pending subject. Only 1% of the marketing budget is dedicated to mobile devices.
What actions should be followed within a mobile marketing strategy?
- SMS actions
- Messages segmented by geolocation.
- Contents contextualized to the device.
- Video and multimedia content.
- Promotions relevant to the consumer at the point of sale.
- Indoor geolocation through beacons and wifi network.
- Segmentation of consumers and advertising according to their interests
- M-commerce. The mobile as a means of payment. Coupons…
The possibilities are immense and we are at the right time to be able to differentiate ourselves from our competition by giving more and more weight to mobile marketing.
Email marketing
Email marketing is one of the oldest uses of a strategy within an Online Marketing Plan. The results in terms of conversions are among the highest. However, still many are not very favorable to its use. This is because they still associate it with spam, which saturates us in an intrusive way and without our interest.
When used within the parameters of permission marketing, a concept created by Seth Godin, the results improve significantly. In this way we will only send emails to those subscribers who have previously given us their consent to receive our emails based on their topics of interest. Its use should be moderate, not to tire and that our shipments are received with some interest.
Ideally, and most expensively, we should create our own database. With constancy, creating content that adds value and based on the previous points, we will build a quality database, with interested subscribers, updated and, if possible, segmented.
Tools, such as Mailchimp, allow us to create free email campaigns for up to 2,000 subscribers. In addition, the possibility of measuring all the steps up to the conversion, makes us able to make the necessary decisions to improve the results.
These are some important tips in any Online Marketing Plan strategy. I hope they are useful for the realization and conceptualization of your online campaigns.