Crafting an effective online marketing strategy always starts and ends with your customers. Your job is to create or find solutions for their problems. Most people go to a website to seek a solution to a problem.
That solution could be just information (in the case of a blog) or it could be a product or service they need (in the case of an ecommerce website). Whatever it is, you need to make it simple for them to find what they seek.
When you put emphasis on developing your online marketing strategy, you’ll be a lot more successful. You’ll get more leads and more buyers than if you don’t develop a strategy.
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How To Improve Your Online Marketing Strategy Skills
The main thing to remember when you’re marketing online (or anywhere) is that you need to understand your brand’s values and what it does for your ideal customer. When you start from there, you’ll be able to create much more success with your web marketing strategy.
1. Put Your Customer First
Everything starts with your customer. When you understand your customer, you’ll automatically craft better content ideas and better product ideas. You’ll even be able to target your audience better at every single level – whether it’s writing content or writing an advertisement.
In 1 to 3 mouse clicks after landing on your website, your website visitor should arrive at the page showing the potential solution to their problem, which is why they came to your website in the first place. Any more difficult than that, and you stand a good chance of them either getting lost and leaving your website. In the case of a monetized site, that can mean loss of an immediate sale and potentially a greater loss of future sales from just that one customer.
2. Adopt a Mobile-First Strategy
More people are buying mobile devices than are buying desktop computers today. And more people are reading your content, email messages, blog posts, and buying your products using their mobile device over their desktop computers. Because of this, adopting a mobile-first strategy is the best choice. If you design your website, emails, and everything to work on mobile, it will work and perform great on a desktop computer too.  Click here to see if your website is ‘mobile friendly’.
3. Pay More Attention to SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) encompasses both on-page and off-page SEO and its intricacies are covered in dozens if not hundreds of books and websites. If you want to do better with online marketing, you need to educate yourself on SEO or hire an expert to help you.
4. Blogging And Website ContentÂ
Part of SEO is content. Therefore, make blogging or adding articles to your website one of the first things you do to get more visitors based on SEO. Before you add content to some other website, including social media platforms and guest post, focus on your content on your own website and sharing it from there.
5. Host Webinars and Live Events Online
Going live on Facebook, YouTube or having a webinar is a great way to get more eyes on your business. When people can hear you speak as well as see your mouth and eyes when you talk, they tend to develop more trust for you faster. Plus, if you host with other people who serve the same audience but promote complementary products or services, you can gain access to their audience too.
6. Optimize and Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts
Just like a blog post can be optimized, so can emails. Work on your subject lines, work on the personalization inside the email, and work on your calls to action. You can always improve an email, even if it has gone out to people before. If it’s in your autoresponder, you can always edit and make it better.
7. Give Social Media Its Due
Don’t forget to use social media to share content you’ve created, promote your products and services, and to engage with your followers. Social media is important for marketing today, but it shouldn’t be put before what’s on your site. Consider social media a tool to use to market what you put on your website.
8. Create Systems to Make It More Effective
To truly succeed with a website marketing strategy you’ll need to create systems and processes. For example, each time you publish a blog post, you’ll want to do some things automatically such as ensure you’re using the right keywords, perfect your title, and use headers and other tools at your disposal to make the content work better for your needs and goals.
Free Marketing Plan Generator
You’ll no doubt have heard the famous expression, “Failing to plan is planning to fail”. Without a clearly defined plan and set of goals, your business will drift aimlessly throughout the next year with no clear roadmap for where you’re heading. HubSpot’s marketing plan generator helps you outline your annual online marketing strategy plan and identify top initiatives so you can hit your year-end goals. Simply fill in the blanks on this free strategic marketing plan example and you’ll receive a 12-month plan in less than 10 minutes.