Follow these steps to marketing success
A fantastic competitive advantage is to know what you’re doing when it comes to online marketing, it can be difficult because most people just don’t know where to start. It’s good if you can get yourself listed in major search engines and get advertisements on other websites, but it is important to get value for money. Here are seven steps to help you on your way to online marketing success:
1. Testing
Rather than go full steam ahead with a marketing campaign and blowing your entire budget, it’s often a very good idea to have a focus group first and find out what people want from you, then you will have an idea of how to advertise to them. Then you might want to put out a few ads and see what feedback you get on them, if the feedback is good then you can go ahead with the full campaign.
2. Optimise for search engines
You could have the most amazing website on the entire internet, but what good would it be if nobody saw it? You are actually much better off having a badly designed website which is optimised for search engines rather than having a beautiful website that isn’t because you will only get visitors to the one which is optimised!
3. Only pay for what you use
When advertising through search engines or by using banners it is advisable to use pay-per-click deals where you only pay when someone clicks on your link, rather that paying a lot of money for advertising space and potentially not getting your moneys worth. These deals are great because you know you are getting what you pay for and can even determine the number of clicks you wish to receive on some search engines.
4. Pick the best time to advertise
Once you have a product that you wish to advertise and a place to advertise it, it can be a good idea to push the advertising more at a certain time of day when you will appeal more to your target audience. An example of this would be advertising children’s toys between 3pm-9pm when they are home from school and before they go to bed, or from 9am-5pm to attract the attention of business customers.
5. Use behavioural targeting
This is a bit more specialised and more useful for larger companies, you can analyse user surfing patterns and behaviour over a period of time and give them certain advertisements based on those results. I’m sure you’ve all seen the personal recommendations on Amazon and other websites, that is behavioural targeting.
6. Affiliate with other websites
The cheapest way of advertising is to affiliate with another website, this is where you would link to another website and in return they would link to yours. It’s a good idea to affiliate with a website in the same area as yours, because people clicking on your link are more likely to the interested in your product. This form of advertising is usually free because both affiliated websites will benefit from it as they are basically sharing their customers.
7. Text based ads can be value-for-money
While they may not stand out as much, text-based advertisements can sometimes be better than ads with lots of images as they can sometimes come across better and make the user think it is a serious website, not just one with a flashing banner to get your attention. They can also be more cost-effective because they are usually cheaper and you will still receive a good amount of clicks.
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