Talk to any business consultant who’s not living with the dinosaurs, and they’ll tell you how important internet marketing is. With the population of internet users growing every day, and countless businesses putting major stock in the internet side of their ventures, the web is clearly an area that any smart business owner should look at carefully.
But with so many people online, and so many methods for targeting those people as potential customers, it can be overwhelming to try to come up with a strategy for making a marketing blitz on the internet. One of the worst things that can happen to a business owner as they contemplate a marketing blitz is to put too much stock in one idea or advertising option. With every internet marketer and their uncle telling you they have the miracle solution, this can be a very easy mistake to make.
If you want to make a marketing blitz online, and really push your services or product over a period of a few short months, it is important not to subscribe to one single technique. Instead, work to try out a variety of techniques so that you can quickly designate which ones work the best for you. Still confused? We don’t blame you. But here’s a step by step guide to get you started…
See also: Internet Marketing Tips for Start-up Entrepreneurs
1) Determine your demographic. The first thing you should do is figure out who your customers are. Before you put money into advertising, it’s important to know who you want to target. By knowing the age, gender, location, and other details about your potential customers, you can go ahead and cross out a variety of advertising methods that don’t target your customers. There are a variety of tools (such as Quantcast) which are designed to help you figure out such demographics. Find a few websites that are in the same niche as you and determine the demographic of its users. Determine which age category and sex category are the most likely to visit a website in your niche, and be sure to target just those demographics at first.
2) Be sure you are optimized. Before you start driving traffic to your site, be sure that the traffic going to your site has the most bang for the buck. If you don’t have any on-site SEO done, be sure to get it done before you waste money on traffic. Having the right keywords, meta tags, link shortening, etc. on your website is important to help give you good Google ranking. If you don’t know about on-site SEO, it’s worth a few hundred dollars to have a specialist come in and handle it for you. It’s the best investment you can make because google traffic is free in the end!
3) Make sure you provide value on your site. Whether it be free tips in your niche, blog entries offering strategies for consumers, or interesting videos with facts about your products, be sure to offer value on your website. If all you do on your site is offer a product without any other value attached, you will find yourself with abysmal traffic retention. It’s important to provide value to your customers, so before you start advertising your site, try throwing up a blog and getting it active. Try making a few videos to engage users. If you don’t have user engagement, you’ll be wasting your money.
4) Determine where you want the traffic to go. Are you trying to sell more of a single product, or are you just trying to get eyes on your website in general? If I am selling one kind of smartphone, it makes more sense for me to make a video about that phone, some interesting blog posts about it, and target my advertising specifically to that product page instead of directly to my home page. Determine what you want to sell and where you want the traffic to go before you start spending.
5) Advertise. This is easier said than done with countless advertising methods to choose from. First, do a bit of research about types of advertising. here are a few terms to get you started: Self-Serve, CPC, PPV, CPV, and Media Buy. All of these advertising methods will drive traffic to your site in a different way. Rather than simply putting all your money in google ad words and Facebook ads, choose a few good ad networks that utilize each advertising method. Then, depending on your budget, put a little money in a plethora of advertising networks to split test them. Try a few Self-Serve methods, a few CPC methods, a few PPV methods, etc. Put about 10-20% of your advertising budget into split testing. After the first month, evaluate which methods are performing the best for you, and put the rest of your budget into those.
So remember folks, if you want to do a marketing blitz online, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Determine your demographic, optimize your website, create valuable content, determine exactly what you want to sell, and split test your advertising. Do this, and the right choices will fall into place.
