Picking the right strategy for your business and implementing it can be overwhelming and complicated, and especially daunting for someone who isn’t sure where to start. It helps to break online marketing down into its most basic strategies – the ones that have been and will continue to be successful in the future, rather than the quick hacks and tricks that will quickly fade into obscurity. If you’re going to spend whatever little time you have on marketing, you want to choose evergreen strategies, as opposed to trying to keep up with the latest tips and tricks to hack the system.
1. Focusing on mobile
Whatever strategies you choose to implement, it’s crucial you take mobile users into account. According to a Google survey, 95 percent of smartphone users who use mobile search take action, and 88 percent of them do so within one business day. If you’re not considering the mobile user experience, you could be losing a big share of your audience’s attention.
Making sure your website is completely optimised for mobile and is responsive is crucial to making more sales and growing your business. So take the time to ensure that content is quick to load, any social media marketing puts mobile users first, and any direct marketing (i.e., email marketing) is also optimised for a positive mobile experience, and make everything—phone numbers, calls to action, etc.—clickable.
2. Search engine optimisation
Keyword research and on- and off-page search engine optimisation (SEO) are critical marketing strategies for achieving organic search traffic to your website. When you do a deep dive, SEO can be quite complex, so if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of it, it might be in your best interest to get an SEO company on board to help, but the basics are simple to grasp and apply.
Find out what keywords people are using when they search online and utilise them in your content, but avoid keyword stuffing. Write quality content that specifically is of interest to your target audience, while optimising it to rank in search engines. Earn backlinks from respected websites to cultivate trust and social proof. Make sure your website meta-data and title tags are all optimised as well so that search engines can properly index and crawl your site.
3. Content marketing
Everything online is considered content of some kind. Whether it’s images, videos, articles, blog posts, or infographics, everyone online consumes content. Content marketing really is the backbone of every other marketing strategy, because without quality content, your marketing efforts won’t be effective.
Starting a blog, guest posting on other company’s blogs, creating a video to promote your business, and hosting podcasts or webinars are great content marketing strategies that can be done separately or in tandem with each other.
If you have the budget to do so, you could consider the benefits of link building. This is a process used in SEO marketing techniques to bring more traffic to your website by having links from external sources such as other blogs. An article is built around this link, and you should see your business reaching more and more people.
4. Conversion rate optimisation
Getting conversions is what marketing is all about, so taking steps to increase your conversions only makes sense. Make sure your website is designed to be conversion-focused, meaning it should be modern, easy to navigate, and include lots of social proof, like testimonials and reviews, and logos of familiar companies or brands you’ve worked with. Also, having CTAs (
5. Social media still works
Of course, this wouldn’t be an online strategies article without mentioning social media marketing strategies. The easiest way to be successful on social media is with great, quality, shareable content. Understand who your target audience is, and choose the right platform for your brand based on where your audience is online. Take the time to interact with your customers to show them that there is a person behind the business. Your customers will appreciate the effort you go to and could potentially spread the good word about your customer service.
Use social listening tools to manage your reputation and hype up any positive press you get online. If you want to dive into paid advertising, it’s a lot to learn, but it can pay off big time when done correctly.