When you take the business online, you’re going to have to learn a specific set of tools that are going to help ensure your brand gets the kind of coverage that it needs to grow. Marketing in the online world might not seem too different from marketing in the real world. You’re conveying the same values to mostly the same kind of audience. But it’s all about the tools you use. There are right ways and wrong ways to use them and how you use them can make all the difference.
The advertisements
Online, it’s easy to do a lot of your marketing for free. So, when you invest in improving the reach of your branding message through advertising, you want to make sure that you’re doing it right. For one, you need to make sure that you’re targeting your advertisements appropriately. Social media networks, search engines, and other platforms that offer advertising opportunities to businesses give you the chance to target specific groups of people. If you make your advertising more specific to the people that it’s targeting, it’s likely to have more of an effect. Make sure that the outcome of clicking the ad is targeted as well. Use landing pages so that when someone clicks an ad for a specific product of yours, they’re taken directly to all the information and offers they want on that product, not your home page.
The website
Setting up a website is a given, but thinking that you should create a site just for its own sake is entirely the wrong way to go about it. Any good website designer knows that the site isn’t about the person who made it or the identity of the business. It’s about the visitor first and foremost. Don’t bog down navigation with links to all the information under the sun about your business, but limit it to those pages that are most likely to appeal to a potential consumer. It’s a consumer experience, their way to find out more about what you offer. An ‘about us’ page is fine, but don’t clog up the front page with all kinds of irrelevant information. It’s about the product, its value, and how you deliver it.
The community
Building a community is a great long-term strategy to give your brand some weight. When it comes to making use of that community, however, you need to be careful. For instance, if you’re using social proof in your marketing message, use it properly. Testimonials are good, but only if you have enough of them. Feature one or two and it looks like you just have one or two happy customers. Get at least five on there. Get on more testimonials than your visitors are willing to read. When it comes to organizing community marketing campaigns, like social media efforts that get them creating content, make sure they’re actually interested in it. Offer a prize or get them to do something they’re already interested in doing. Otherwise, it will look like you’re throwing a party online and no-one came.
Getting to know how to use the tools of online marketing well is going to make sure that your creative efforts are always supported by the proper techniques. Otherwise, that meticulously crafted brand message could be going entirely unseen.
