There are tons of tools in digital marketing, but an inexperienced advertiser or a budding entrepreneur should focus on the simplest ones. Read more about them in our material.
Internet marketing is a set of tools that are used to promote products and services online. Compared to the offline promotion, this method has three main advantages.
- Targeting
There are tools here, with the help of which you can find your most interested audience and show the advertising message only to it. Geographic location, age, gender, interests, income, place of work – a lot of filters are available to direct the campaign in the right direction.
- Interactivity
Promotion on the Internet allows you to better control the situation and more closely interact with the audience. With digital marketing capabilities, you can track customer reviews, communicate directly with them, and in some cases, visually see the impact your actions are having.
- Web analytics
Online promotion is also convenient because it makes it easy to analyze your actions. You can always visually see how this or that tool worked, how many visits or buyers it brought to the site. At any time, there is a chance to refuse a promotion that does not work or change the settings.
Course “I am an Internet Marketer PRO”
Deferral of payment for six months. From scratch to first orders – in four months! Career counseling and employment assistance. The course is built on the cases of real customers.
Where to start online promotion
Three obvious but must-have steps to get started.
- Decide on the target audience.
Neither the Internet nor offline will it be possible to successfully sell goods and services without understanding who your target audience is. In addition to gender, age, and place of residence of a potential client, there are at least three other criteria that will help to compose his portrait.
What is the client interested in?
Let’s say you have determined that your audience is women 18-30 years old. With the help of different services, for example, Cerebro Target and Pepper.ninja, you can see what communities they are in on social networks, what they discuss in groups, and so on.
It will also not be superfluous to monitor messages on thematic forums and on sites with reviews (Yell, Otzovik, I recommend). Pay attention to what your audience is most actively responding to, which posts get the most likes and comments.
Learn More:
9 OF THE BIGGEST SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS ON INSTAGRAM
How solvent is the client? Pricing, the choice of sites for promotion, the style of advertising messages, and much more depending on the social status of the audience. It’s a huge mistake to create a product that your client cannot afford.
What problems does the client want to solve?
For example, you open a women’s clothing store in a large but provincial city. Based on the information from the previous paragraphs, try to simulate the situation and understand how your project is useful.
It will look something like this:
My clients are women 18-30 years old. They are interested in fashion, style, art and are in public devoted to unusual exclusive things. Their income is average.
The main problem is that there are few shops in their city that sell high-quality and exclusive clothing. Most often, they have to look for things on the Internet, order them from abroad and wait a long time for a package.
- Study the market and competitors
To stand out from your competitors, it is important to study their product and understand what its strengths and weaknesses are. Pay special attention to what marketing moves they use because they may have been able to better understand and feel the audience while you missed something.
Service SimilarWeb helps to understand what tools are used by your competitors, how much traffic they attract, and how they take.
Such an analysis provides an understanding of one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Next, your marketing strategy should be based on reinforcing what you are already good at and working on the flaws. For example, you see that a large number of leads – this is how Internet marketing refers to customers who have entered the site and have shown interest in the product. So, working on social networks is your forte.
- Define goals
For internet marketing to work, it’s important to be clear about what your campaign’s goals are. For example, this can be an increase in primary and secondary sales, launching a new product on the market, increasing brand awareness, and so on.
At the same time, any goal should have a deadline and be achievable, measurable, and as specific as possible. Plan not just to “increase sales,” but, say, “to raise turnover by 25% in six months.”
What tools are right for a beginner?
Digital marketing includes a large number of tools, including contextual and targeted advertising, SMM, email marketing, native advertising, SEO promotion, viral marketing, and much more. We talk about them in more detail in this article.
It is quite difficult for a digital beginner to independently explore all the possibilities of digital marketing and apply them effectively. There is a risk of investing in an expensive promotion and getting minimal results from it. The best place to start is with the simplest tools that will teach you how to work with your audience and create engaging content.
To grow and develop in this area, in parallel with the first steps, you need to read books on Internet marketing, communicate with experts, and take training courses. For example, Skillbox ‘s Profession – Internet Marketer course will help you master basic tools, target audience, and manage advertising campaigns.
Course “I am an Internet Marketer PRO”
Two-year training course for deep immersion in the profession of an internet marketer. You will understand the intricacies of end-to-end analytics and performance marketing, learn how to build effective advertising strategies, and manage advertising campaigns.
- The first six months of study are free of charge.
- The first clients are already in four months.
- Unlimited access to course materials.
- Learning on real tasks.
- Career counseling and employment assistance.
Learn More:
5 SECRETS OF SUPER SUCCESSFUL VIDEO MARKETING
Social networks
So, the first thing to start with online promotion is to work with social networks. They will help you get closer to your audience, communicate directly with them, and gain loyal customers.
In fact, social media gives the aspiring entrepreneur a powerful free resource to promote. There are a lot of small companies that successfully work only on social networks, refusing to create a website and offline points. However, do not think that everything is so simple.
It takes a lot of time and effort to create an interesting community. You will have to regularly interact with the audience, generate content, and promptly answer subscribers’ questions. In addition, you need to think about the design of the page: make high-quality avatars, covers, and photos. To do this, you can turn to a graphic designer for help or work on your own with special services, for example, Canva or Pablo.
Landing page and website
When a social media presence is not enough, you should think about your own website or landing page.
Landing page, or landing page, is a small one-page website with a presentation of a product, service, or service. It always contains a call to action: buy a product, register, subscribe to the newsletter, and so on.
Compared to a full-fledged website, this option will cost less, although it is not suitable for everyone. If your company provides a lot of not the cheapest services, the landing page may not work because the client needs more information to make a decision. For a company that is engaged in the construction and maintenance of the real estate, a site that contains enough information on the topic is more suitable.
Both the landing page and the site should be as simple as possible. Do not overload them with different fonts and a lot of media content, make clear navigation, simplify the purchase process, and constantly optimize the resource.
Newsletter
Use the power of your site to build a customer base. After some time, you can use it to create an email campaign.
This simple and inexpensive method of promotion should not be associated with spam: the newsletter should be interesting, useful, and voluntary. You can get email addresses from your leads in exchange for something useful: a discount, temporary access to paid content, a series of free lessons, and so on.
Email marketing is good for generating repeat sales.
Paid advertising
If we talk about advertising, then it is best to start promotion by setting up contextual advertising, which the user sees at the moment when he searches for something on social networks. It will quickly increase traffic, help you test keywords, experiment with titles, and image selections. In addition, you can launch contextual advertising with a minimum budget and increase it only if the campaign works.
Based on this information, it will be easier to work with banner and targeted advertising and SEO-website promotion.
An example of contextual advertising on Google
How do you know if internet marketing is working?
Digital marketing is impossible without analytics. It helps you better understand your target audience and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in order to determine in which direction to go.Digital Marketing Agency help you to grow your business and generate more leads.
The following indicators are considered important:
- How many unique visitors visit the site;
- What is the conversion of the site (the percentage of visitors who made the target action to the total number of visitors);
- Which pages of the site are the most popular;
- How much time the visitor spends on the site;
- How many visitors close the website page in the first seconds;
- How often users return to the site;
- How many times and from what sources the user visited the site before taking the targeted action.
Conclusion
In this article, we briefly discussed what Internet marketing is and explained how to start promoting a company or brand online. However, the digital market is constantly changing and growing: new tools for analytics and promotion appear. To successfully conduct business on the Internet, you need to constantly monitor trends and learn new technologies.
