The Basics of Web Marketing
Today, in the age of Facebook and Google, no marketing is complete without Internet marketing. Compared to traditional forms of reaching out to your intended audience, web marketing offers the fastest, most-wide ranging results, and one with less cost.
This doesn’t mean to say, however, that marketing on the Internet is any easier than its mainstream brother. Marketing on the web entails a mix of online tools and new, evolving strategies. These include online advertising, blogging, search engine marketing, social media, among many others. And each one of these can be a subtopic in itself.
Rather than tying you up with detailed explanations of each, here are some of the common tactics that underlie any online marketing campaign.
Reaching a wider audience
There are three ways this can be accomplished:
- Maintaining a business website
- Creating social media profiles
- Running online ads
While you could do without the third one, the first two are critical. First of all, a virtual storefront is where customers can transact business with you, or at the very least know more about your products and services before proceeding to your physical location.
As your “second branch”, your website must have the same professional look as your actual store. Hire a web design company, or a good designer with a proven portfolio, to do this for you. Next, get the services of a talented copywriter to produce compelling and polished content, not just adequate web copy that has been run through a grammar check tool.
Only when your professional website is up and running should you move to social media. Tap all the major ones, and make sure that each profile is complete without missing info. Upload a picture, fill in all the details, and take time each day to update posts, respond to comments and messages, and interact with your followers.
Fast response
The Internet moves at a very fast pace. Users expect action within 24 to 48 hours of an event.
This makes it very critical that you spend time each day to log on to your website and email to process orders or respond to queries. Once those are done, don’t forget to log in to each of the social networking profiles you created. To save time, you can change the settings on all of them to send you alerts in case of a new post, comment or message. That way, you will only need to sign in if there’s a new feedback waiting on a particular site.
Interact, don’t just market
There is a huge difference between interacting with your audience, as opposed to just marketing to them.
Between posting new developments in your company, take the time to ride on the current trends. For instance, if there’s a new viral video taking the net by storm, share it on your wall or newsfeed. Retweet a particularly humorous line, and like or comment on the posts of your followers to let them know you read what they say.
