You’ve done your research and you’ve decided that it’s time to start marketing your business on the web. Where do you start? Like with any new project, the hardest part is figuring out how to get started and how to organize your approach going forward.
Define Your Audience
Before you launch any marketing project you have to decide who you want to talk to. A lot of people forget this first, crucial step. “People on the internet” sounds like a wonderfully large market, but as it turns out, people’s interests and demographics are just as diverse on the internet as they are in the real world. To build a reliable base audience you’ll need to define who that audience is, so that you can speak to it directly.
Pick an Online Medium or Three
Depending on your audience you can apply any of a huge variety of marketing options. You can get active on social media through Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn, you can try writing e-books, pursue search engine marketing, buy PPC ads, or combine any of these and other methods to reach your audience. The universal purpose of these is to get people’s attention, establish yourself as an authority, and drive traffic to your website.
The most effective digital marketing strategies always integrate multiple mediums that work to amplify each others’ effects.
Set A Few Achievable Goals
You can’t usually get on the internet and plan to start driving a lot of conversions instantly. You need to develop a strategy. The internet community, like any other community, has existing authority figures for different industries, and you need to become one of these if you want to have a real impact. A few great types of goals when you’re starting out might look like this:
Gain 500 real (non-bot) followers on Twitter in 3 months
Get an online industry influencer to share an article that you wrote with his/her followers
Get an online industry influencer to follow you on Twitter, or like your business on Facebook
Get your website to show up on the first or second page of Google’s search results for certain keywords
Drive a certain number of clicks via PPC advertising
Do Your Research and Get Help
There are a lot of things that you can do wrong when you’re pursuing these goals, but that’s ok because that’s what we have experts for. When you’re getting started it’s a good idea to consult or hire a digital marketing professional for the specific strategies that you’re pursuing, whether that be social media, PPC, SEM, email marketing, or any of the others.
Branch Out As Your Grow
As you begin to build a following and establishing your authority you can begin to use that following to help you reach a larger audience. At this point you can begin providing expert advice to other professionals, hosting online events like webinars or Q&A’s, and defining your position as a thought leader in your industry. As you begin this process it’s also important to back up, re-evaluate, and revise your entire digital strategy to ensure that it’s as good as it can be.
Setting up your own digital marketing campaign is an achievable task no matter what kind of business you run, just dive in and get started on building that base.