Online Marketing Strategies and Tools

If you want your company to succeed in today’s
competitive economy, you need some serious marketing strategies. Reaching
customers has become increasingly challenging, which is why marketing personnel
often pursue many avenues to reach potential customers. These include social
media, email marketing, content creation, and search engine optimization, for
starters. If you want to make sure your marketing is effective, start with
these basic strategies and tools compiled by SEO and marketing company, Coalition
Technologies.

Get a
Handle on Marketing Effectiveness

Online marketing is a dynamic challenge for
businesses. While many techniques lose effectiveness and become obsolete, you
don’t need to completely ditch every strategy. Analyzing the effectiveness of
techniques you’ve used is a great first step in getting a handle on your
marketing strategy. Google Analytics is useful for tracking the traffic your
sites receive, and BuzzSumo can help you track the performance of content such
as keywords and backlinks. Using these tracking programs, you’re able to plan
the goals for your marketing campaign more effectively. As Joel Gross, the CEO at Coalition Technologies,
puts it:

“Analytics
allows people to track goals for their website. Once the goals are established,
SEO experts can compare goal conversion to a wide array of different metrics to
find ways for the website to do what it was meant to do better.”

Once you’ve established which tactics are most
effective, you’ll know what you should continue and cease doing.

Collaboration
Between Departments is Key

Whether you have a staff of four or 400, it’s
important to get everyone on the same page to maintain a consistent image
across all platforms. Successful marketing campaigns are a collaborative effort
between designers, social media specialists, and webmasters, and staying in
continuous contact is critical. Skype and Google Hangouts are popular, free
messenger services that allow for communication via instant messaging, phone
calls, or video conferencing through your computer. Once you have everyone communicating
and sharing ideas, Google Drive is useful for sharing files that everyone in
the company can view and work on, rather than sending emails back and forth.

Focus
on Customer Needs, Not Company Needs

To be effective, marketing campaigns need to be
designed with a customer-centric focus. The majority of online sales are driven
via search engines. Research how your target customers are browsing for your
products and implement effective keywords using Google Keyword Planner; this
can help with understanding consumer behavior and creating content that is
highly visible. It’s also important to know how your consumers are conducting
searches. With more internet browsing being done via smartphones rather than
traditional computers, you’re doing yourself a big disservice by not investing
in a mobile site with apps that can be easily downloaded.

Use
Social Media Strategically

Recently social media has exploded and taken
hold of multiple aspects of our lives, including conducting business. Engaging
with customers on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is no longer optional
if companies want to succeed. Followers want to feel connected with companies,
but avoid overwhelming your customers by bombarding them with information.
Instead, build a community and engage with the influencers – the customers most
engaged with your brand – to help grow your brand recognition and online
presence. One easy-to-use tool, Autosend, can aid your business by sending
targeted email or text messages to customers based upon what they do while
visiting your site. Social media management tools like HootSuite and Oktopost
are also beneficial when navigating social media, as they can help oversee
conversations between different platforms to avoid repetition.

Always
Study the Latest Industry Trends

Digital marketing techniques can go out of
style fast. Don’t let yourself fall behind the trends, giving your competitors
an edge. A large chunk of your online marketing time needs to be spent
researching the latest innovations and figuring out how to implement them.
Thankfully, by using Google Alerts, you can stay informed about news related to
your company. By telling Google which topics interest you, you’ll receive daily
email updates on relevant news without making research a full-time job.

Review
for Conciseness and Accuracy

While it may seem obvious, it’s still
important to double-check all of your posts, emails, and other correspondence
for conciseness and clarity. Stuffing in too many keywords or moving too far
from your brand’s core message will cause your content to be flagged as spam by
many search engines, preventing consumers from discovering your site. Lastly,
avoid any misspellings or other errors. Not only do they make your company look
unprofessional, but spam filters will likewise spot them and push your site’s
ranking further down on search engine results.

Author bio:

Rohit
Bhargava is a marketing expert and SEO specialist with over 5 years of
experience in website auditing, link building, and SEO. His work has been highly
contributive to the success of many websites and software programs, and has
been instrumental to the excellent results of his clients’ campaigns. During
his free time, he loves to write about new technologies, research and analyze
rising software systems, and read. Connect with Rohit on Google+ and Facebook.