As we all know, a big part of marketing nowadays actually happens online. Did you know that an average person spends 24 hours a week online?
Some individuals spend up to 40 hours a week surfing the net or scrolling down their social media feeds, which means that the numbers are growing as we spend twice as much time online than we did 10 years ago.
This means that even though marketing isn’t exclusively happening online, over 90% of businesses in the USA market their brands on social media, and you should too. A very large portion of your marketing strategy should be oriented towards attracting all those internet users who are your potential customers and keeping up with your competitors.
But where to start?
When it comes to online marketing, trends change quickly, so we compiled a shortlist of the three most important aspects you should take into consideration when you’re creating an effective digital marketing strategy.
1. Build a Buyer Persona
It doesn’t matter if your marketing strategy takes place offline or online, you have to know who your target audience is and create a buyer persona. Knowing who you’re going to market your services or products to is the first step towards building a successful marketing strategy.
Buyer personas are your ideal customers who you can create by researching and interviewing your target audience. It’s important to note that this information should be based only on real data since making assumptions can create a marketing strategy based on false data and provide unreliable results.
The research that is going to indicate who your target audience is should include several types of customers and prospects alongside their location, age, income, job title and other personal information like their interests, likes, dislikes, and so on.
Once you have a clearly defined buyer persona, you need to align your business goals and priorities accordingly.
2. What Are Your Goals and Digital Marketing Needs?
After you create your buyer persona, you should focus your attention on finding the right tools that’ll help you identify your goals and track your path to success. This is the only way in which you’ll be able to measure your progress later on and evaluate whether you’ve achieved what you set out to do.
Make sure that your goals are aligned with your budget, your needs, and your assets.
For instance, the choice of a web hosting provider has a lot to do with the ability to scale your business and create your online business strategy. Make sure that the bandwidth and disk space your host offers you will give you the opportunity to capitalize on all the traffic you’ll be getting with a solid digital marketing strategy in place.
3. Creating a Link Building Strategy
Creating a good link building strategy is essential for building authority in your niche – this is because the authority will improve your search engine rankings.
This means that if you don’t invest in an effective link building strategy, all your SEO efforts could be in vain. Getting quality backlinks should be one of the goals in your online marketing campaign, but here’s what you should have in mind:
● It should be based on quality instead of quantity.
● There isn’t one right way to get backlinks, you should incorporate as many tactics as you can.
● If you can’t get backlinks any other way, you can pay for links. However, this will not only cost you a lot, but you can be harshly penalized by Google. This is due to the fact that buying links is strictly forbidden by all search engines.
● Make sure you utilize some common hacks such as posting answers on Q&A sites like Quora. This will eventually get some users to follow your link and get to your website.
● When you go for an email outreach technique to get backlinks from influencers or well-known bloggers, make sure your email stands out from the rest because if it gets lost in the crowd, it’ll never be read and recognized. See that you offer them something in return, so don’t forget to mention what they’re getting out of the collaboration somewhere in the email.
● If you don’t want to depend on anyone for backlinks, you can build your own PBN Hosting (Private Blog Network). This is an easy way to get as many backlinks as you’d like to your own money site via other websites within your network, which would actually be yours. Make sure you choose a good web hosting provider that can cover up your Private Blog Network from the search engines – since this is a grey hat SEO technique that’s the only way to stay completely safe.
Final Thoughts
It all comes down to encouraging your users to come back to your site and obtaining new organic traffic, which is why you should invest in every part of your digital marketing strategy to get the best results.
Besides creating a buyer persona, defining your goals and creating a good link building strategy, there are other ways to succeed in the online world, like being active on social media and exposing your online business by collaborating with influencers and bloggers.
We hope that your online marketing plan will be a success and you’ll get as many conversions as possible!