Do you know Chandler Bolt?
If you are a digital marketing nerd, you probably know him. But if you belong to the other group that is never excited about digital marketing stuff (99.9%), maybe you are wondering whether Candler Bolt is a person or a new marketing technique.
Well, the most interesting thing about him is that he dropped out of college in 2014 (at the age of 21) and started a business that was on track to earn $1 million in under a year!
You are now curious: How did he achieve that? Is Chandler rich?
And you said it; he is rich. That’s the beauty of effective online marketing.
Well, you can access digital marketing tools and, in most cases, without spending money. However, before you launch your digital marketing brand, you require an online marketing map.
Such a map will help you know the right direction to go and probably how to get there safely, helping you decide when and how to change your direction to achieve your objectives.
Your marketing plan is an indispensable tool when it comes to gathering your bearings in terms of your advertorial efforts and ensuring that they correspond to all your business objectives.
One thing every online marketer should know is that it’s not about spending all your time online ‘for the sake of it’ but utilizing all online marketing resources at your disposal to strengthen your brand and make the most out the benefits.
Are you ready to start online marketing? Let’s go!
Step 1: Research the market and competition
Focus on understanding your market and the entire environment you will be working in terms of competition. You need to study in depth your target market and the competition.
Get to know each market segment’s characteristics and trends and your competitors’ SWOT analysis and benchmarks. Finally, find your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): What makes your product unique and what effectively places it in a unique position in relation to the market competition.
Step 2: Define your audience
Online marketing tools are associated with endless possibilities of audience segmentation. To make the most of them, it important for you to know who you are targeting. Demographics is the first step to define your target audience.
It’s also wise to understand your audience needs and motivations, how they interact and communicate online, and other aspects of your audience. Such details will help you set up the best communication channels and strategies to reach out to them and keep them engaged.
Step 3: Set goals
The key question to the success of your online marketing map is, ‘what do you want to achieve?
Keep in mind that your online marketing goals must be coherent with your global business strategy. When setting your online marketing goals, make sure they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound.
Step 4: Strategies
The online marketing strategy will give you the global vision of the different actions you should take to accomplish a link to your customer, which directs you towards the goals you have set. To set up an effective online marketing strategy, it’s wise to divide your actions according to a well-defined conversion funnel.
Once you define your strategy, it’s time to make it highly creative, ensure that your marketing message goes further and leaves a lasting impression.
Step 5: Define your sales process
Based on the online marketing strategy you defined, you can define your online sales process. If you can seal the deal with an online sale, it’s sensible that you can define a series of steps through which a user has to go on your site before becoming a customer.
Step 6: Loyalty
After converting your site user to a customer, you are faced with the most important tasks of your online marketing: loyalty. If you think about how challenging it is to get a new customer as opposed to keeping an existing client, it becomes evident that keeping your existing customers is an important part of your marketing process.
Step 7: Set an online marketing budget
It’s time to talk about money requirements. Just like any other investment, online marketing requires financial commitments. Therefore, you should allocate enough money to the entire online marketing process depending on the scope of the project and your desired goals.
Step 8: Technology and means of steering your online marketing activities forward
Technology online offers endless possibilities that are always advancing. Therefore, you need to choose the most appropriate and effective tools to help you implement your online marketing plan. In case you aren’t sure of the right tool to use, don’t hesitate to ask for recommendations and guidance from professionals.
Step 9: Set key performance indicators
Your online marketing plan is almost ready to go, but you can’t ignore the analysis of your results. To define and understand the success of your online efforts, you have several key performance indicators.
Keep in mind that these metrics are directly related to your business performance data. Use the right tools to capture and analyze this data.
Finally…
It’s important to establish periodical control tests of your key performance indicator and analyze the results. This way, you can determine how successful are your online marketing efforts and make the right adjustments. Ensure that your online marketing activities grow in terms of scope and level of success.
Good luck. 🙂