The 4 Step Guideline To Online Marketing Success Intermediate Understanding and Winning with Online Marketing is as Simple as Understanding the Following Four Areas Attract traffic to your website Convert traffic into leads Convert leads into customers Measure & analyze the above activities for continuous improvement www.brandmanagementllc.com
Before we get started, let me explain what online marketing is based on. It is based on something called keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase that a person uses to gather information on a topic online. People can enter keywords into search engines like Google and Bing or social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With that being said, now let us look at how to attract visitors to your website, convert those visitors to leads and then into customers, while analyzing the entire process to better improve its effectiveness. Attract Traffic to Your Website Paid Advertising Paid advertising is the process of gaining traffic by purchasing ads on search engines. It is sometimes referred to as CPC (cost-per-click) or PPC (pay-per-click) marketing. Use PPC when you need to get found immediately and don t have the time to wait for other, more organic results. PPC advertising consists of text ads, image ads, or video ads. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Optimization takes place on your website s pages and on other parts of the internet that are outside of your website s pages. Hence, the name on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-Page SEO Websites and Blogs are made up of pages. The content of a page is what makes it worthy of a search result position. It s what the user came to see and is thus extremely important to search engines. As such, it is important to create good web page content. The web page links and content should be optimized with the keywords of your potential customers. Off-Page SEO Google was the first search engine to use links as a significant factor in determining where your website would appear in search engine results. They viewed a link from one site to another as a vote for the target site. The more votes you have, the more important your site is considered. Inbound links are quickly becoming a broken metric, while at the same time social media is quickly escalating as a ranking factor for search engines. 2 Online Marketing : www.brandmanagementllc.com www.brandmanagementllc.com : Online Marketing 3
Social Media Please Share Your initial focus when getting involved with social media should be to build relationships, have conversations, and establish connections. Once you have a following, you can share CTA links to your own content via your social media accounts, in order to drive traffic to your website. Blogging Blogging is a critical component of helping you achieve online marketing success. Businesses that blog have been proven to attract 55% more site visitors, 97% more inbound links (Off-Page SEO), and 434% more indexed pages. Further, companies that blog achieve 126% more lead growth than companies that don t blog. Once you have your social media accounts setup, you should start monitoring important keywords like your brand and product names, as well as keywords you ve identified through your keyword research process. Blogging is effective because of its ability to drive search engine traffic from its fresh content. Search engines favor fresh over old content. Old content might no longer be accurate or relevant to searches. Fresh content, in contrast, signals to search engines that the information is up-to-date and more relevant. As a result, blogs, a generator of fresh content, help with search engine optimization, which in turn drives site traffic and promotes a business. 4 Online Marketing : www.brandmanagementllc.com www.brandmanagementllc.com : Online Marketing 5
Convert Traffic into Leads Call-to-Action (CTA) CTA s are tools used for converting prospects into leads and subsequently nurturing leads into potential customers. They can be text links or clickable buttons. Landing Pages Landing pages are critical for turning a website into a lead generation tool. What will you offer to entice people to hand over their contact information? You should have a different landing page for each offer in order to measure its effectiveness. Businesses with more landing pages produce more leads and convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads. Offers Offers are valuable resources made free to website visitors. They are effective tools to engage visitors. Free resources make potential customers more willing to stay on the website to explore other pages. When a potential prospect clicks on the CTA link or button, they will be directed to a landing page. These pages are where prospects are asked to provide their contact information. CTA s can be placed on social media sites or blog pages, within tweets or email campaigns, or wherever your potential customers will interact with them. These resources can take the form of an ebook, video, trial offer, music, research reports, access to webinars, downloads of any kind, etc. Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of sharing free resources is to acquire customers. 6 Online Marketing : www.brandmanagementllc.com www.brandmanagementllc.com : Online Marketing 7
Convert Leads into Customers Email Marketing You must have someone to email, so first build your email list. A smaller, targeted list is preferred over a large list of people who don t want your newsletter Keep emails or newsletters concise. Use read more links to direct readers to larger bodies of content on your website or blog. Ideally, promote new offers and landing pages to get your email subscribers to engage with your content and opt-in to your sales funnel. Lead Nurturing is a relevant and consistent dialog with viable potential customers, regardless of where they are in your sales funnel. Use lead nurturing to send an automatic sequence of emails to new leads. Create calls to action in your email newsletters and lead nurturing campaigns that drive traffic to your landing pages. The effectiveness of your lead nurturing is dependent on how well you ve segmented your leads. Lead Nurturing Leads are qualified but not ready to buy. Businesses that build relationships with their leads over time have the greatest success in turning leads into customers by staying top of mind until the lead is ready to buy. 8 Online Marketing : www.brandmanagementllc.com www.brandmanagementllc.com : Online Marketing 9
Measure & Analyze The Above Activities For Continuous Improvement Be sure to have good analytics in place, so you can calculate the ROI on each ad campaign and keyword. Over time, you should invest more in campaigns that produce qualified leads and customers and cut budgets for keywords and ads that don t produce an ROI. There are many statistics that you can measure over time to determine how successful your Online Marketing Strategy is, and how to improve your results. most easily be improved. Probably the most valuable measure of success is your conversion rates. Your conversion rates indicate the number of visitors to your website that became leads and the number of leads that became customers. You should measure conversion rates and overall numbers from each traffic source including SEO, blogging, social media, PPC and email marketing. Then, you should evaluate which activities to continue, tweak or stop based on what s working and what s not, as well as what can 10 Online Marketing : www.brandmanagementllc.com www.brandmanagementllc.com : Online Marketing 11
In conclusion, your online marketing process should resemble the following: About Brand Management, LLC Brand Management, LLC is a marketing education company and marketing services provider. Since 2007, the company has been providing marketing consulting and has worked with small business development agencies to provide marketing training for small and micro business owners. For more information about Brand Management, LLC, visit http://www.brandmanagementllc.com 12 Online Marketing : www.brandmanagementllc.com