The first and foremost concern of Internet sales is the audience. For that purpose, you need a marketing list. Of course, the product for sales is also an important factor but if the marketing list is small or incompetent, then the product is pretty much useless.
You shouldn’t be too confused here; products or services are there to attract the audience but to make it less confusing we can follow a few simple steps. Firstly, you need to remember that you can’t create or increase a marketing list without a “what’s in it for them to be attracted to you for?” meaning, the product.
Unfortunately, when it comes to marketing, many businesses tend to leave it to the end of the budget, like people leave the pie for the dessert. Although, in reality, it holds the main volume of the success of a business and, as Dean Winchester would totally agree, the meal. Following are the main steps to make the seamless Internet Marketing Pie, one that actually works.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is considered one of the top internet marketing strategies. After conducting thorough research, both the on-page SEO and off-page SEO need to be twitched and worked on. That is, the web pages and link-building should be constantly updating. This may include content development on the blogs as creating exceptional content will
definitely compel the visitors to come back.
Here are some of the eye-popping stats that shed light on the importance of
1) Yes, 93%:
2) Here’s the Google Market Share:
3) 70% are organic:
5) It’s all about getting on the first page:
6) 300% difference in driving traffic:
7) A ratio of 14.6: 1.7%, astonishing!
8) It’s all about the 1st, 2nd and the 3rd position:
Thanks to IMFORZA for all the stats above.
Web Presence:
Having a web presence is the topmost priority of internet marketing. This is basically a no-brainer when it comes to marketing on the internet. An attractive website, presenting all the services & products, and providing sufficient social proof of success, is the key to having a perfect web presence. In order to attract the clients, it is necessary to have a proper branding and marketing of your product over the internet.
As Chris McCarthy in his Linkedin Post suggested that, “48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.” He further added, “94% of people cited web design as the reason they mistrusted or rejected a website.”
Customer Care & Relationships:
Good and strong customer relationships are the most important chunk of the internet marketing pie. The main key is to keep the customers happy and engage them in the business updates. When the customers are happy, they’re ultimately going to bring new customers and prove successful for the venture. Keeping the customers up-to-date is really important as they add value and services in a personal way. Internet marketing is becoming hugely dependent on customer relationships.
Ninety percent of B2B execs indicated their intention to maintain or increase spending on customer experience.
This video of Accenture’s Strategy would elaborate the point a bit more.
Email Campaigns:
Another important piece of the marketing pie is the email marketing campaign. Businesses take advantages by sending newsletters and solicitations to the prospective and present customers. This helps to reach and engage more audience and increase the chances of getting new clients. Monitor the progress by keeping track of ‘opens’, ‘bounces’, ‘unsubscribes’ and ‘conversions’.
Here’s another pie chart indicating the new email subscriber behavior:
with that also comes to some spam complaints and a stat from the third quarter of 2012 would elaborate the idea a bit more.
Social Media:
Coming on to the wonderful world of social media, this piece of pie might be the most fun in internet marketing. This usually engages people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest etc. The greatest power of the internet is to share content everywhere possible. This also helps you to stay connected with the community. Post an image, an update or basically anything in a matter of minutes.
If your business doesn’t have a significant social media presence, you need to reconsider your marketing choices very carefully. This is a great platform to create fresh and audience-oriented content and direct it towards the targeted audience via Paid Ads. However, as it can be an easy place for customer support, if any comment or request is missed, it can be a bad impact on the business. So be mindful of such travesties to avoid a bad reputation.
Here’s a snapshot from the next web indicating the current scenario extracted from January 2017 statistics.
For more insightful data and stats about the latest digital trends in internet, mobile and social media usage, check out the full report here.
The penetration of different social media channels and its users can be highlighted by looking over the below image:
This report is updated April 2017 and you can check out some key statistics here in the source.
Content Creation:
A prominent part of internet marketing consists of creating content to attract the audience. Content creation is very valuable to the users and it builds engagement as well as customer loyalty. It helps you increase the value of the website to search engines and increase the overall traffic. Businesses are increasingly creating rich and informative content for long-term marketing effects.
Jeff Bullas compiled some key facts and figures highlighting the importance of epic content marketing.
We don’t need further convincing once seeing all the above data. Do we?
Analytics:
When you have set up the marketing campaigns you must analyze your audiences, what your visitors are doing on your website, for example, who are they, where they come from, and what they like reading the most? Knowing these things help you focus on what is working the best for your business and helps you eradicate what is not working. So you can direct your resources where they’re proving to be fruitful.
Networking:
Last but probably the most important piece of the marketing pie has to be Networking. Never, under any circumstances stop networking! To increase the business you need to constantly keep working on it and build it stronger. Networking happens to be the key practice of making new relations and also maintaining the primal ones.
The importance of Networking Activity can be illustrated by the graph below.
This indicates how important networking activity is generating a majority of direct referrals.
And, that too doing online reaps greater results.
Attending events and conferences with prospective customers, employee, and partners would definitely pay in the long-run. It is your determination to grow the relationships and community and your commitment to increasing your business.
The ingredients and effort combined together can deliver the best pie ever. Either it is a Blueberry pie or the marketing pie, the key is to mix up all of the ingredients and wait for the pie to cook up. The final results will speak for itself. If you fail to perfectly slice the marketing pie discussed above, you’ll ultimately lose. As much as making the pie is important, so is the way you cut it, meaning, you need to follow the list in a precise way to get the desired end results.