Online Marketing: 3 Useful Tips to Get Started

Purchase decisions are made completely differently in the digital world than in the analog world. Today, even B2B buyers form 60% of their opinion about a purchase by researching on the Internet before contacting a company.

In B2C, the Internet influences customers’ buying decisions by up to 90%. To survive, you need to forge an online marketing strategy for digital customers.

Here is how to create an online marketing strategy and a few tips on what tools you need to implement it.

What is a marketing strategy in general?

The word strategy is completely overused today. Yet strategy is something very simple — a plan with actions to achieve a goal.

Accordingly, a digital marketing strategy is a series of actions to achieve an economic goal. It can, of course, achieve multiple goals. What is clear is that a digital marketing strategy is about actions that are mainly implemented online.

A digital marketing strategy turns marketing on its head. Basically, it’s about creating value for the potential customer with every action. Every piece of content, every posting, every mail has a benefit for the user that helps them move forward. This means that your online marketing strategy is designed in such a way that you and your products are found by customers first and foremost, and not you searching for the customer.

How to develop an online marketing strategy

1. Define one or more realistic and measurable goals

Unclear goals can never be achieved, they do not motivate and ultimately do not benefit anyone. Increasing the awareness and image — is not a good goal. Increasing the number of qualified leads by 20% within 12 months — is much better.

Goals must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and they must have a deadline. That’s why we talk about SMART goals. Of course, there are also goals that do not directly contribute to economic success, but which are just as important. Brand awareness, or customer satisfaction could be such goals.

2. Get a clear picture of your target group

Now that you have clear goals, the next step is about your potential customers. You need to segment the market and find your target group. The more precisely you serve a niche in the process, the better your digital marketing strategy will work.

As mentioned earlier, digital customers are all about them finding you. Of course, that works best when you offer a clear benefit for a clear problem. That simply works better in a niche than with an all-around offering.

Now that you’ve decided on a segment and found your niche, you need to start understanding your potential customers well. You need to know what problem they solve with their product and how their customer journey works — the best way to do this is to create a Buyer Persona. You describe the profile of your buyers with the help of questions and you explore all the questions that arise along the buyer’s journey with interviews.

You need the buyer personas for the marketing strategy. But also for the design of the website, for the content, for social media — in fact for everything.

3. Evaluate your existing digital marketing channels

Now it’s the turn of the channels through which you reach your potential customers. Better said, through which potential customers find you. You need to know how these channels are performing before you make a plan. This is relatively easy with the appropriate tools.

Your most important channel should be your own website. Social media should be used to drive as much traffic to your website as possible. Make sure your website is your home base, not social media. Social media is “rented ground.”

To evaluate the performance of your website, you can use Google Analytics. Pay attention to performance indicators such as traffic, performance of individual pages, bounce rates, dwell time, conversions etc. The performance of keywords is also important.

Social media is an essential measure in a digital marketing strategy to increase reach and promote content beyond your own website. Some individual social media channels already have sufficient analysis tools integrated as well.

Your last channel to evaluate is your e-mail marketing. All good marketing programs have tools for analysis. If you value efficiency, then you should choose a marketing automation solution where you have all the tools you need to execute your strategy on one platform.