Online marketing isn’t just a fancy set of words. In fact, there are 3 things you must get right from the start to give yourself a high probability of success in your online presence and effort.
You see, in using Inbound marketing, which is using online techniques that has almost unlimited potential to bring in new clients and grow your sales. In fact, not only is it more likely to bring you way more clients than your outbound marketing likely could. It is also likely to cost you far less.
With inbound marketing, all you have to do is create a good web presence by building a website, registering on relevant local directories, building your social media pages, etc, and then creating some relevant content.
Now, you have to bear in mind that this is only a simplified description of the online marketing process. In reality, there is a lot more that you need to now. Probably, a lot more than could be explained in one simple article. However, you will be off to a great start if you understand and apply the three simple principles of online marketing that I’m going to share with you below:
Know your audience
This is a simple rule that applies to all businesses of all sizes, across all industries. Many businesses make the mistake of trying to target anyone and everyone, but this will typically lead to frustration. Markets are divided into different groups of people, called market segments. There is no one way to create these market segments but typically people are grouped into segments based on either their buying behavior or their demographic characteristics.
This is so important because the varied tastes, interests, and behavior of these segments mean that the ways you can effectively target them with your inbound marketing tactics will differ significantly. And if you have a limited budget, this means you won’t be able to target all segments equally.
The way to beat this challenge is to choose the one segment that you are certain has the highest earning potential for you and concentrate on it. This means all the content and web copy that you create for your website will be tailored to suit the profile of this chosen segment.
Taking the idea slightly further, you can develop a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a profile of the customer segment that you have chosen. In developing one, you must take into consideration as many details as possible. For example, the average age of the customers in the chosen segment, their profession, education levels, number of children, etc. Doing this will help guide all your marketing efforts, ensuring that you get the highest marketing return on investment possible.
A great tool to understand the audiences that matter to your business is Audience Finder.
Get the Copy Right, Especially Copy of your Website
It is crucial you have a clear understanding of what your target market is and who your customer avatar. The next step is ensuring that you develop the right message to reach out to them. This is where web copy comes in. Web copy is simply the static content that you put on your web pages, starting with your homepage.
Remember the goal of every page is to lead them to the next step. And that next step may be different for every page.
Your home page is possibly the most important page of your website. Your text copy and all the other types of media you use here should convey clearly what problems you solve.
Use inbound marketing strategies to draw members of your target audience to your website. How? by providing them with useful content that can help them solve their problems. Once they get to your website however, you should be looking to lead them into making a purchase. The quality of your web copy plays a huge part in this process.
Now that you understand who your target customer is, and what specific problems they are looking to solve, you will need to create web copy that specifically addresses these problems, and demonstrates how your product or service can provide the ideal solution.
Build Your Funnel From the Start
When it comes to online marketing, a funnel refers to the stages people go through from becoming aware of your product or services to becoming paying customers. The idea is that if you understand what it is likely to bring more clients to you, also understand what is likely to make more people pay for products or services from you, then you can iterate these things over and over again with predictable levels of success.
Building Awareness
The sales funnel has four major parts though some marketers say it has three, and others say five. The first part is possibly the hardest: getting people to become aware of your business or website. Generally, this is called the awareness stage and with inbound marketing, it is usually achieved through the strategic use of content marketing and your overall online marketing.
So when we say build your funnel from the start, the first thing you need to do is correctly identify what pieces of content are going to attract the right audience. Don’t waste time or money creating content that won’t appeal to your target audience because then you may achieve high traffic rates but very low conversion rates.
Leads Generation
The next step in the funnel is the interest generation stage. This is where people who land on your website to read your content, become interested in buying what you’re selling. In marketing terms, your web traffic turns into leads at this point. Generally, you can’t convert all your traffic into leads, but with the right web copy, you will convert a high number.
Converting your web traffic into leads doesn’t ensure sales either. It just means that at this point you have people who have genuine buying intent. However, these people may want to consider their options before they buy from you. At this point, even your strongest leads are likely to navigate away from your website so you need to develop and deploy effective lead magnets.
Keep your leads in the conversation by leveraging lead magnets. How? by offering them some very useful piece of content in exchange for which you request for their email address. The goal here is to continue the conversation even when your leads have left your website and possibly even forgotten of their interest in making a purchase.
Start the Conversion
Then there is a conversion stage where your leads become paying customers. If you have followed all the previous steps correctly, you should have a relatively high conversion ratio. One step to ensuring that your lead-paying customer conversion ratio is high is by remembering to include call-to-action buttons.
Call-to-action or CTA buttons nudge your readers towards taking specific actions such as “call now” or “ buy now”. CTAs are essential because most readers tend to procrastinate taking action unless they are prompted to do so.
Conclusion
All three of these steps work together, so you can’t do one without the other. Once you have a good idea of who your ideal target market should be, then you can create the appropriate sales funnel, using winning web copy to convert your readers into paying customers.
