Today, we are deep diving into the internet marketing strategies.
We’ve dedicated this article to provide you with timeless strategies for your:
- Website
- Social media management
- Advertising
- SEO
- Email marketing
- Blogging
You know, the strategies that we actually used, not just read about.
Today we are covering the exact internet marketing strategies we used to transform our business to a multi-year Inc. 5000 company.
And regardless of your expertise level, this will be easy to follow and implement yourself.
So keep on reading as we tackle each of these internet marketing strategies.
Takeaways
- Having a website opens the door to almost every other internet marketing strategy and opportunity that drives people to your business.
- Write down a list of all the goals and pain points of your target audience. Second, focus your content solely on these goals and pain points.
- Something that’s becoming a more important ranking factor over the years is how users interact with the webpage they land on.
Internet Marketing Strategy #1: Website
So why do you need a website?
There is only one reason but it’s a big one. The answer is control. When you have a website, you gain control over two aspects of your business.
First, you control how people find you.
Think of your website like an airport. An airport that acts as a central location for internet users across the globe to reach your business.
Having a website opens the door to almost every other internet marketing strategy and opportunity that revolves around driving people to your business.
Want to advertise? You need a website to send people to.
Want to blog? You need a website to create content on.
Want to show up on search engines? You need a website to optimize.
And so on and so on.
Secondly, with a website that is yours, you control the data.
A good example of this is those that have built their entire business solely on Amazon, Etsy, or eBay, without having a website they own and control.
You see, when you build your business on someone else’s website, you basically give up your ability to do the following things:
- Design and update the site as you like and your customers prefer. Want to add pictures to improve the checkout process? No, can’t do.
- You miss out on the opportunity to collect and use customer information. Want to send emails to previous customers to increase your repeat purchases? Sorry.
- You give up the ability to control the fees that you pay. Want to change the wholesale providers to help decrease operating expenses? Not an option.
Do you see the danger here? Basically, you are risking losing control over the three major activities that can increase your revenue or your profits.
Want control? Build a site that is yours.
Website Marketing Strategy #1: SEO
So, after you’ve obtained your owner website, the first strategy for your website is to begin SEO as soon as possible. Yesterday, if you can.
Depending on your site’s authority, it can take between 6- 12 months to begin ranking for search terms that you optimize for.
Even longer if your domain is brand new.
So, the key is to begin the process of creating your SEO strategy as soon as you possibly can so you can start the clock- the time to results.
We’ll cover more of SEO as its own marketing strategy later in the section below so just keep on reading.
Website Marketing Strategy #2: Develop Lead Magnets to Capture Leads
A lead magnet is a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details. Popular examples of lead magnets include:
- Ebooks
- Checklist
- Calculators
- Trial discounts
- Free consultations
Lead magnets are the perfect strategy for those in the research phase of the buying process.
It creates a win-win scenario for you and the potential customers, as potential customers gain valuable information that can help them in their buying decision…
…and you get brand awareness, trust and contact information that can be used to follow-up with the potential customer.
If cash is king, contact information is queen.
Website Marketing Strategy #3: Optimize Your Follow-up Sequence
In sales, there is a saying that goes “The fortune is in the follow-up.”
And we believe it.
In almost all cases, you’ll get more people to provide you with their information…
…become leads on your website and purchase your product or service from your website with a follow-up plan.
Actually, on average, less than 90% of potential customers will buy from the first interaction.
By improving your follow-up sequence, the steps taken with a lead will improve the odds of your converting leads into sales.
The two best ways to improve your follow-up sequence is to increase your speed and your consistency.
Here’s how you optimize your follow-up sequence with speed and consistency.
- Email faster and more often
- Retarget strategically
Luckily for you, we’ll be going over email marketing and retargeting later in this post. So there’s two more reasons for you to keep reading.
Social media management is the act of consistently creating content and posting that content to social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram…
…to build a relevant community and then monitor and respond to comments from that community.
You need to be on social media because businesses that command attention builds bigger businesses and the attention of your consumer is on social media.
In fact, according to HubSpot, 97% of digital consumers have used social media in the past month…
…and people spend 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day on average, across their devices.
That means 1 out of every 3 hours spent on the internet is on social media platforms.
Our first strategy for social media management is also the secret to creating great content on social media.
Social Media Management Strategy #1: G&P
In this secret method, the G stands for Goals and the P stands for Pain Points. There is nothing more relatable and valuable than speaking to your audience’s goals and pain points.
So, here’s a simple 2-step process to use the G&P method in creating social media content.
The first step is to write down a list of all the goals and pain points of your target audience. Second, focus your content solely on these goals and pain points.
You can do this with the following types of posts:
- Quotes
- Tips and tricks
- News
- Curated content
- Product features
…and a lot more. Remember, providing value builds a brand.
Social Media Management Strategy #2: Boost Your Post
Boosting is a term for putting advertising dollars behind your posts on social media so they can reach more people, which should ultimately lead to increased followers and engagement for you.
This is necessary because organic reach, the number of people who sees your posts without advertising, is extremely low.
In fact according to HootSuite, on Facebook, the average reach of organic posts hovers around 5-6%.
That means, roughly 1 in every 19 fans sees the pages not promoting content. Now, this is a great segway into the next internet marketing strategy.
PPC, also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising or Search Engine Marketing is the act of paying search engines like Google to show up for relevant search terms.
Now what makes social media advertising and PPC advertising so attractive is your ability to simply laser target.
Beyond keyword phrase targeting for PPC advertising, and interest and behavior targeting for social media advertising, you can also target based on the following:
- Time of day
- Day of week
- Geographic location
- Language
- Device
…and more.
Social Media and PPC Advertising Strategy #1: Funnel Advertising
So, imagine you have a three part funnel. The first part is the top of the funnel.
The audience is new people who have not heard of your brand. And the goal is to introduce the problem and solution.
The second part of the funnel is the middle of the funnel.
This audience includes those who have engaged with your brand in some fashion but have purchased or shown a high level of purchase intent, like social media engagement for example.
The goal of the middle of the funnel is to get these users to the site by focusing on benefits and desires through education.
Now the third part of the funnel is the bottom of the funnel. This audience includes those who have shown high-level engagement aka purchase intent.
Common examples include add-to-carts, high-time on-site or video views. The goal is to answer questions and objections to move users to purchase.
The magic in viewing your advertising in terms of a funnel is that you can show the correct content to the right people based on where they are in the buying process.
Social Media and PPC Advertising Strategy #2: Use Retargeting
Let us ask you this, have you ever started to shop online but didn’t buy.
Then, later you see ads for that exact product or service on social media and other random websites. For this, you can thank retargeting.
You see, retargeting is the act of showing ads to users who previously visited your site.
It is an extremely effective form of advertising because on average, only 2% of shoppers convert on the first visit. Retargeting helps bring back the other 98%.
The goal of retargeting ads is to remove objections to purchasing.
There are a few objections you can answer with your remarketing ad.
- Is the product good quality?
- Does the product actually work?
- Why should I buy from you?
- What makes your product better than anyone else’s?
- How long does the product last?
- What ingredients are in the product?
- How long is the shipping time?
- Why should I trust your brand?
- What does it taste/look like?
- Does it fit well?
- Does it come with good packaging?
Internet Marketing Strategy #4: SEO
As mentioned, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website so you show for relevant search terms on search engines such as Google and Bing.
SEO helps open a lot of gates for quality traffic with a very high buying intent.
For perspective, over 5.8 billion searches happen every day on Google with the average person conducting between three and four searches every single day.
The good news is that when someone searches on Google, they’re looking for answers to their questions or solutions to their problem.
The major key here is that users on Google are actively looking or “in market” for a solution.
Not only that, but over the long run, SEO is cheaper than paid ads as costs to acquire rankings dwindle over time. There are a few strategies to help you dominate SEO.
SEO Strategy #1: Spy On Your Competitors
Tools such as SEMrush and Ahrefs allow you to see every single keyword aside from their ranking score.
Now, not only will you see the keywords, you can also see their positions and associated pages.
Seriously, try it.
This is a great strategy to understand Google ranking factors and SEO.
SEO Strategy #2: Skyscraper Technique
With this strategy, made popular by Brian Dean, you need to do the following things:
- Find a competitive blog with a lot of backlinks.
- Create a longer and more in-depth blog.
- Ask those linking to the original piece to link to your content.
This strategy capitalizes on numerous ranking factors such as:
- Content length
- Number of backlinks
- Intent
- User experience
These help you outrank and steal from your competition.
SEO Strategy #3: Optimize Your Site For Speed and Engagement
Something that’s becoming a more important ranking factor over the years is how users interact with the webpage they land on.
Users signal Google’s ranking and include the following things:
- Click-through rate: The percentage of people who visit your site after seeing it in search results.
- Bounce rate: The number of people who click on your page and go back to the search results.
- Time on site: How long the visitors stay on your site.
Thus, the site with the best user signals often ranks the highest. So, let’s discuss how you can improve on each signal.
You can improve your organic click-through rate by creating more enticing titles and descriptions for your pages.
Use power words, question marks and numbers. These are all things that are known to help improve click-through rate.
You can improve your bounce rate by improving the speed of your site and providing more relatable content.
You can also improve visitors’ time on site by improving your site’s speed, creating longer forms of content, and by adding media such as videos, images and audio transcripts to your pages.
Internet Marketing Strategy #5: Email Marketing
Email marketing helps more our clients generate tons of revenue.
We think it’s safe to say that email marketing is not dead and is still a viable part of businesses’ internet marketing strategy.
So, here are a few strategies to help you dominate email marketing.
Email Marketing Strategy #1: Email Automation or Drip Campaigns
The first strategy is also the answer to optimizing your follow-up sequence with speed and consistency by emailing faster and more often; it’s email automation also known as drip campaigns.
Drip campaigns help you to nurture leads and customers by sending automated emails over a period of time and frequency to help them move through the marketing funnel.
Learn more about what marketing funnels are and how to use them for your business.
The first step to a successful drip campaign is to segment your audiences. Send them their own drip campaigns. You may have the following segments depending on your business:
- Opt-ins/ Leads
- Abandon carts
- Meeting reminders
- Customers
- Non-engagers
…and many more.
The next step is to create specific email sequences or drips for every audience.
For example, your drip campaign for someone who downloaded a lead magnet will look like the following:
Email #1 is immediately after opting in. Provide the lead magnet and intro to your company.
Email #2 sent two days after email #1. Provide an email that shows the versatility of your product or service.
Email #3 sent two days after email #2. Showcase social proof through case studies and reviews.
Email #4 sent 3 days after email #3. This will be a hard sell.
As you can see, this type of sequence allows you to communicate fast and consistently. Get help from the experts, work with our credible email marketing automation services today.
Email Marketing Strategy #2: Act of Not Buying Email Lists
This second email marketing strategy is more of an anti-strategy.
You see, when you buy an email list, you risk harming your business in more ways than one. First, you’ll harm your email deliverability and ultimately your IP address.
When you continually email a list of people whose emails bounce or mark you as spam, you not only risk lowering your send score…
…this can hurt your reputation in every outgoing mail server IP address on a scale of 0 to 100.
Eventually, your emails will be sent to spam or even worse, not delivered at all.
In fact, 83% of the time when emails are not delivered to the inbox, it is due to a poor sender reputation.
Second, you risk your email provider simply banning you. Most email service providers don’t allow purchased lists and when they find out, your account will be deactivated.
You will no longer be able to use their service.
Third, you run the risk of poor results. Likely the biggest harm to your business is wasted time and money.
When you put time into purchased email lists, this list has no contacts with your business and is unlikely to become a customer.
In short, don’t purchase email lists. Instead, learn some effective email list building tips here.
Internet Marketing Strategy #6: Blogging
Why blogging? Here are some quick stats:
- Businesses that publish regular content receive 8x more traffic.
- Blogging helps reduce overall marketing spend by more than 60%.
- Blogging helps in achieving 3x more leads.
And we can see why.
Blogging helps create value for your potential customers and current customers by providing value through educating and when paired with SEO…
…you can turn your website into a traffic machine through blogging.
Here are two strategies that dominate when blogging.
Blogging Strategy #1: Optimize Your Blog to Capture Leads
Think about it, if blogs bring traffic, the next step is to figure out how to turn that traffic into leads. The best way to do that is through lead magnets.
Remember, a lead magnet is a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details.
Popular examples of lead magnets include ebooks, checklists, calculators, trial discounts and free consultations.
Lead magnets can typically be shown as a pop-up, on the sidebar of your blog or within the blog.
Blogging Strategy #2: Write Longer Posts
Aim for a minimum of 750 words but 1000 and above is ideal. Longer blog posts accomplish two important goals.
- Longer blog posts tend to outrank shorter posts.
- You are able to provide more value to your customer by going more in-depth on a subject.
If you haven’t started blogging for your business, here’s a tip: start now.
Here are our key takeaways:
- Websites give you control over your design and your data and you can gain traffic through SEO and convert that traffic into leads by using lead magnets.
- When creating copy for social media management, focus on goals and pain points.
- Take a funnel approach to your advertising by segmenting your audience into a top, middle, and bottom of the funnel audience.
- Use SEO to get relevant traffic to your site and optimize for user signals such as CTR, bounce rate, and time on site.
- Email marketing is a great way to optimize your follow-up sequence with speed and consistency.
- Create longer blog posts and optimize your blog to capture leads with lead magnets.
There you have it! Six timeless internet marketing strategies that will help you dominate online. Reach out to us today and get a free quote for our services!