You know what I love about online marketing strategies as opposed to old fashioned marketing?
You have them at your fingertips…
…the results are easy to measure, and…
They are also super cost effective (not to say cheap).
The trick is (and there’s always a trick) you have to be on top of your game if you are in a competitive industry, term which I think is completely redundant nowadays.
What industry isn’t competitive? Cricket farming perhaps?
But not to worry, this list of online marketing strategies will show you innovative approaches that will give you an advantage over your competitors.
Internet marketing gives a single person, a one-man company and a Solopreneur, the power that a super marketing department has.
Whether you are a mommy-blogger, run an eCommerce site or a hair salon in Shreveport, you will absolutely love this marketing strategies guide.
I will not only show you untapped or innovative digital marketing techniques.
I will guide you through actually implementing them in your industry, market or niche.
So here it is…
An effective online marketing strategy guide you will actually use.
I will break it down into 10 different actionable tactics, not necessarily based on importance or prominence.
1. Audience Segmentation to Increase Conversion Rates
You just made a face!
I know you weren’t expecting to see this one, but let me explain why it is in this list and why in the first place.
It’s no secret that I’m an audience segmentation geek.
But I think that online marketing is coming to a point where you can no longer throw generic content out there…
…and just hope for optimal results, especially if you are just getting started.
People want personalized content, stuff they can directly relate to.
The more you relate your content to the specific needs of your audience, the higher and better your results will be.
All of the marketing techniques that follow can be mixed with audience segmentation to improve your results.
Some examples of how audience segmentation helps your strategies
- Writing a blog post: if you are writing a blog post, and if your goal is to gather email subscribers (and it should) consider including a “content upgrade”, a giveaway related to your post.
This would make people much more likely to sing up.
- If you are doing Webinars: Let’s say you make weekly live online workshops to promote your products.
Well, consider making each webinar specific for each segment of your audience.
- Baking tips for teachers in New York, if you sell recipes or food related stuff.
- Recipes for moms from different countries.
Now how’s that for standing out from the competition.
You will see how you can target your audience with each of the following tactics.
Here’s how you can identify segments in your audience:
- Check your Google Analytics for popular content: Click the Behavior tab > Site Content > All Pages.
This will allow you to see the pages that are generating the most traffic to your website and therefore see precise statistics of the topics people in your audience are interested in.
- Check your Google Analytics for nationality: Click Audience tab > Geo > Location.
You can also identify where people in your email list are from if you are using a tool like aweber, mailchimp, etc.
This is an optimal thing to do if you want to cater country related content, which in my experience is super powerful for increasing the loyalty of your audience.
2. Doing Webinars to Gather Leads and Make More Sales
Webinars are a fantastic web marketing strategy if you sell…
Well…
Anything!
Webinars are live, online seminars, gatherings or events where you are teaching something to people in a live digital environment.
And you get to pitch them your product while they are right there chatting with you.
It’s like being invited by someone to do door-to-door selling in their living room.
“Webinars are the highest converting lead magnets” – Tim Paige from
LeadPages
The reason webinars are so powerful is because people are putting aside a whole hour of their time just for you.
And while they are still super engage, you get to tell them about what you are selling and why they should buy.
You are also providing a huge amount of value with this type of content, which is the number one thing you have to consider when crafting your content marketing campaign.
It’s all about the value you provide.
Consider doing monthly webinars, then every other week, then every week.
A webinar marketing strategy would look something like this:
- Create your presentation: Don’t over-complicate things, use PowerPoint for your webinar presentation, it’s simple and easy to use.
Make sure that your presentation covers:
- An intro to the problem you are talking about.
- Who you are, your background with the topic and some social proof (people who validates what you say, some numbers or social shares).
You can also invite someone that already has the audience you want to target and provide a commission for the
joint webinar.
- Free actionable tips that will help solve their problem and that leads to your pitch, your product.
- A limited offer, scarcity is one of the most powerful sales closing elements. But use it wisely.
[image use-scarcity-in-your-online-marketing-tactic.jpg]
- Questions and answers. Make sure to answer all the questions your attendees will have for you. 15 minutes for Q&A is the typical length.
- Create your webinar registration page: This is one of the most important assets of your webinar digital marketing tactic.
You want to have a webinar that converts.
As long as you explain in an understandable way what people will get from attending the online workshop, you will have conversions.
But you want to make sure to make the most out of it.
So make sure to optimize that page to get as many people to attend as possible.
The average conversion rate on webinars for sign-ups is 20%.
The best practices for creating a high converting webinar registration page are:
- A clear explanatory headline.
- Mention that its free and live.
- Include your picture. (Casual photos tend to convert better for certain audiences).
- Have bullet points that explain the most relevant things people will learn.
- Show a timer and the date.
- Remember people to bookmark and assign the date and time for your webinar.
- Create a thank you page: Make sure you direct people to a registration successful or thank you page.
This should be obvious, but it doesn’t hurt to mention it. Remind them to book the date, check their email and share!
- Set up your autoresponder sequence: All email marketing software allow you to create autoresponder sequences.
This allows you to set a sequence of email messages that go out automatically to remind your subscribers about the webinar.
Set it up with one email to remind them of the webinar after they subscribe.
After the webinar is over send one email every day reminding those that didn’t purchase of the offer closing (3 days after the webinar is over).
- Use Facebook ads: Facebook ads are the best way to promote your webinar ecause it’s cost effective and you can target your audience easily.
An evergreen Webinar Facebook ad should contain:
- An appealing and relevant image (some people just use pictures of themselves).
- An understandable description.
A really good advice is that you practice your presentation once or twice.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but it won’t hurt to practice.
3. Creating an Audience With Podcasting
People can listen to your podcast while they are driving, at the gym or the grocery store.
It also helps you build a loyal audience and strong brand awareness, because people will connect with you on a deeper level.
Podcasting itself can become an additional source of revenue for your business by having sponsors.
Here’s my two cents on podcasting as an online marketing idea:
- Having a clear format: Make sure you have a consistent and unique format to your podcast to stand out from the rest.
Having one simple element that is different from other people is enough.
For example doing daily podcasts or having a unique beat box as an intro or interviewing certain types of people.
- Do interviews: this is completely optional and it’s not a deal breaker at all if you don’t do interviews.
But doing interviews, even if it’s once in a while, will allow you to establish relationships with the people you are interviewing, out of which your business can benefit in the feature.
- Have great audio: Static and amateurish audio will hurt your podcast like nothing else.
Having good quality audio is a step forward to making sure you don’t waste this marketing technique.
- Be consistent: some people publish one episode a month, others 1 every day.
Whatever your publishing periods will be, make sure you are consistent so that your audience doesn’t get disappointed.
- Have a call to action: It wouldn’t make sense to do podcasting as a marketing tactic if you are not driving traffic back to your website.
Have a clear call to action to get people to visit your site, offer a contest, a giveaway or show notes to make people visit your site.
This could also be to make people subscribe to your podcast in iTunes.
- Optimize your podcast for search: iTunes is a search engines too, and a lot of traffic will come from it directly.
Make sure to identify keywords or phrases you would like your podcast to rank for in iTunes.
Include these keywords everywhere; your description, author name, podcast name, episodes etc.
- Leverage new and noteworthy: iTunes allows your podcast to be featured in the new and noteworthy section for 90 days.
This is a big deal because it will give you a boost of exposure that is much helpful when you are getting started.
For this I suggest two things:
- Make an event out of your podcast launch
- Ask friends family and your audience to subscribe the same day you go live.
- Have a contest in your first week; make it a rule for people to subscribe to your podcast in order to participate.
- Advertise your podcast; yes, pay for ads, Facebook and Twitter ads and target your desired audience. If you have interviews, target each episode to your guests audience to leverage their credibility.
There are a lot of other things to consider, like having a well-designed icon and knowing how and where to host your podcast files.
4. The Influencer Marketing Strategy
They have the trust and authority you want and can eventually pass some of that juice on to you.
But establishing connections with influencers is not easy.
Well, it isn’t hard but it’s time consuming.
And I personally don’t like to establish relationships with people just because they have something I can benefit from.
So, even when most people out there will tell you to ask for things after you provide a lot of value.
I sometimes end up giving, giving and never asking, hoping it will come by itself.
And sometimes it does…
But don’t be like me at this, and ASK for it after a long run of providing value and help to these influencers.
But hey!
I’m human too and I also have to improve in certain things.
I promise I’ll get to it and overcome this internal conflict or fear of asking.
Here’s a couple of ways you can create value for these influencers to establish amutually beneficial relationship:
- Share their stuff, a lot: If you think that your audience will benefit from what these people say and create (and they probably will).
Do yourself, your audiences and the influencer a favor and share their content.
If you liked it, chances are your audiences will like it too, and they will thank you for sharing that with them.
Your audience will love you for it, they will love you for bringing them more readers and you will eventually benefit from it
But don’t just retweet them.
If it is a tweet you are sharing, then do a mention with some unique comments in your tweet, because influencers of any industry already get bazillions of retweets.
Share and tag on Facebook, Pinterest, your email list. Anywhere and everywhere.
As long as it is truly great content…
Because your audiences always comes first.
- What do they need, create it without asking: Analyse how these influencers could benefit from something you can create or provide.
It could be…
- An analytical report of their business or product
- A Social media account (build a social media account for one of their products like an event or course or something and then give it to them as a gift).
- Some sort of asset that will bring value to their brand.
- Offer to work for free as an assistant.
- Interview them: Any sort of interview will work. But if you have a podcast where you can establish a conversation with them…
…even better.
This is why I said podcasting is such a good online marketing strategy.
Again, remember you are building true relationships that can turn out into nurturing friendships and not just some artificial relationship.
On to the next strategy…
5. Viral Marketing on News Voting Websites
Sites that feature news based on votes from users are huge!
If a piece of content created by you grabs a spark on one of these sites.
Well.
It can catch on some good viral fire pretty quickly.
Just so you get an idea, that’s a photo that got almost 5,000 up-votes in 4 hours.
Again, just so you get a tiny idea of what could happen to your business if it gets there…
Here’s a list of news voting websites:
- Reddit
- GrowthHacker (For the marketing industry)
- ProductHunt (Not exactly news, but works all the same)
- Digg.com
Here’s a 3 step process to create amazing content that goes viral over these type of websites:
- Open BuzzSummo and enter a keyword or term related to your industry.
2. Find articles that have a lot of shares, but try to identify articles that have not just gone viral because of the author being some famous guy. You want articles from regular joes putting in the work.
Use the topic and model the title (Titles play a huge part in virality), but for the sake of your brand DO NOT copy the style. Be unique.
3. Submit the article to the proper categories in the upvoting sites, in Reddit it would be related subreddits.
Being an active member on those communities is very important, they do not tolerate spam so make sure you are not there just to share your stuff.
6. Mobile Marketing Will Keep on Rising
You know how kids behave around big shinny toys they don’t quite know how to use?
Well
That’s how mobile marketing still is for a lot of digital marketers.
This is such a young field that a ton of marketing tools are born every month for mobile.
The fact that people spend more and more time browsing the internet from their mobile devices is just one indicator that your business should utilize mobile.
Not only that.
And 61% of those searches end up becoming purchases or transactions.
And those are amazing numbers in online or any kind of marketing.
This is all only to show you that you should embrace mobile marketing, especially if you are a local business.
Now, here’s three ways you can do this and take advantage of mobile device shoppers.
- Have a responsive website: By now this shouldn’t even be said, but A LOT of small business owners still have a non-responsive website.
So I feel it still needs to be mentioned. Get a
WordPress theme and make your site mobile friendly.
- Have an app (push notifications): Regardless what business you are in.
Consider spending some of your marketing budget in building an App, at least for iOS (iPhones)
Why?
You get to send push notifications. You know when you download a mobile app and a message pops up asking you for your permission to send you push notifications?
Which are basically messages that pop-up on your screen even if your phone is sent directly from the app.
Well, those are gold if you have something you need to notify your clients or audiences.
And it’s not as invasive as a text message.
It’s like when you send an email to your email list.
It’s also an additional asset for your business which increases your value and the perception your clients and audience has about you.
I’m spending $1500 on creating the moneydiver.com app.
And I think they are going to be well worth it.
Even if people don’t use it, you are right there on their screen every time they swipe through their phone.
- Text message marketing: I haven’t personally used this for moneydiver, but I have use it for some of my consulting clients.
It basically works the same way as an email marketing campaign.
You ask people for permission to send them text messages and you communicate with them in a very direct way.
This is very convenient if they are on the run (who isn’t?).
LeadPages released today a mobile marketing tool called LeadDigits (
and yes that is an affiliate link and thank you very much if you use it).
This tool allows you to build your email list with the use of text messages.
Another use for text message marketing is coupons and special offers, which people LOVE.
Here’s an excerpt from a sales video that explains a mobile marketing strategy (I created this excerpt because it would be awful to include a sales video here especially if it’s not mine):
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) The Right Way
This could be an entire series of books on itself, but it has to be mentioned.
SEO is one of the most important online marketing strategies any company should consider when crafting their marketing plan.
But if done wrong, it can backfire and hurt your business.
SEO basically means optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results.
And gaining backlinks (links from other websites that point to your).
Think of backlinks as votes, and Google as the judge that determines what site is more popular, trustworthy or authoritative in any given search query.
This is an ever-changing field because of Google’s algorithm changes, so trying to go evergreen is the best option for a long term effect.
And even though I hate having to rely on another company for traffic, leads and sales, Google is one that can’t be ignored.
I’m not going to go into super-duper specific details, but I will enlist some best practices that will work on the internet and search marketing space this upcoming year.
There’s White Hat SEO and there’s Black Hat SEO.
White Hat is basically “playing by the rules”, trying to get natural, organic links to your website without being spammy, sneaky or anything shady.
And Black Hat, well you are smart enough to figure it out by yourself.
Do these two things and you will have a good foundation in your website’s search marketing strategy:
- Optimize Your Content: Make sure that everything inside of your domain is optimized to please the big G (Google) and its ugly cousins (Bing, Yahoo, etc.)
Some best content optimization practices include:
- Killer, amazing content that is preferably over 1500 words long.
- Actually if you can make it 2000 to 3000 words long even better, but I know how hard this is.
- Make sure your main images are named after your keywords; include them on the titles and alt text of the images also.
- Throw in a relevant, high quality video once in a while in your content.
- Include your keywords in the title of your content, in the first paragraph, and at the bottom of he page.
- Include LSI and long tail keywords in your subtitles. Go to Google, type in the main keyword in the search bar, space and that drop down list of keywords that shows up are long tail keywords.
- Link to other cool, relevant, authority websites (like moneydiver
- Link to other pages inside your website. And now to what I believe is what will set the difference between SEO that will work the upcoming year and old school SEO.
- Build Backlinks: This is so extensive, we could write an encyclopedia on this strategy but I’ll try to give you some good sources and link building strategies.
- HARO (Help a Reporter Out): Who has control over the most authoritative content anywhere?
Reporters do!
So Join HARO > You will receive 3 daily emails from reporters requesting information> Answer those related to your content > get some links!
- Voting websites: These are sites where people provides reviews, feedback or votes on your website.
- Link hunting: Find out people who have linked to similar content to yours and reach out to them gently asking for a link (make sure your content is actually better than what they are already linking to).
- Check for broken links on old pages, contact the owners and ask for a link where these broken links are. Install the chrome extension “Check my Links” > Search for old pages with related content > activate the tool and identify broken links > contact the owner and ask for your link.
Don’t get overwhelmed by all of these internet marketing stuff, just try to schedule to do one thing every once in a while, once you get a hang of them, outsource them.
8. Google Plus Marketing
This section would normally be social media marketing, but instead of writing a little about each social network I prefer to specifically talk about
Google +
Because I believe Google plus is the place to be coming into next year.
It’s the only social platform that actually contributes to your search rankings.
And people here are much more serious about what they share and consume.
“Google plus is a nice place to have a lake house” – Ryan Hanley
This is what that quote means:
You don’t build on rented land, your main content and business strategy has to be located at your website.
But, it turns out that longer Google Plus posts have so much better results when it comes to shares and ranking by themselves in Google.
So here’s the Google Plus strategy I’ll be using from now on:
- Extended Google + Posts: I will share my blog posts at Google Plus but I will add a unique extended “excerpt” of each post.
- Target LSI Keywords: With each Google plus post I will target LSI Keywords related to my main blog post.
So for example if my main blog post is targeting “Chinese Food”, I would target “Best Chinese Restaurants” with my Google Plus shared post.
- I will add the keyword as a “title” which basically is a bolded phrase, and you make it bold by adding asterisks before and after your phrase.
- Add keyword as a hashtag.
- Create links to my Google plus post: I believe this is a great opportunity to rank for very low competitive LSI keywords that are related to your main blog post (the one at your website).
The fact that it’s a unique piece of content located in Google’s domain, plus having links pointing to it should make it fairly easy to rank.
- Circloscope: This is a cool tool that basically lets you control any action done in the social platform and automate it or organize and segment what you share and with whome.
- Circlecount: http://circlecount.com is a website that lets you find circles and communities related to your industry so you can interact with your target audience and build your own community.
- Separate your profile from business page: Similar to how you have your Facebook page and your personal profile.
The bottom line is Google Plus is one of the fastest growing social media platforms and best online marketing strategies for next year.
They are constantly improving and simplifying it.
There’s a lot other internet marketing strategies that could be included in this guide/post but if I keep going my fingers are going to bleed.
I will release a second part of this post hopefully midway next year.
One super important strategy that I’m not including here because it should be obvious is Email Marketing (always be building your list).
Now that you have identify what strategies will have prominence, this is what I want you to do next.
- Open Google Calendar and add each one of these strategies to your agenda, even if it’s trying it out for 15 minutes each day.
Set goals on your calendar and at least do one of these tasks every week, if you schedule them for every day like I do then even better. You can always refer back to this post if you get lost.
- After you experiment with each one of these online marketing strategies, start outsourcing them.
Write a how to guide based on your experience with them, include this article and find a virtual assistant to whom you can delegate some of these tasks.
With those two steps you start to create a system that can be scaled and improved.
What did you think of this article?
Follow me on twitter and let me know what other effective online marketing strategies (that means proven) you will be using for your business, use the hastag #OnlineMarketingDiver.
…Thanks for your time
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