Steps to Market  Your Business Online

Internet has emerged as a medium that facilitates communication and commerce globally. With its growth and power to reach large audience, businesses can work productively and quickly. However, market your business online moves in a speed of light in the competitive industry, requiring you a strong foundation in order to keep up.

Here are 5 steps on how to market your business online:

1. Know your customer – Before starting your marketing strategy, you should be familiar with your audience first. Being familiar with your audience is more than knowing their names, gender, and ages. This means listening more than talking, and knowing more than providing. It is crucial to understand their interests, wants, needs, and behavior for you to be successful in providing effective goods and services.

Being familiar with your customer will help you create a good customer experience, which can lead to more brand recognition and loyalty.

2. Create a marketing framework – After understanding your customer, plan the results you want your business to achieve. Like other business functions, online marketing needs thorough planning; you need to structure a plan towards the goals you care the most. This step includes defining your marketing goals, creating your offers, developing your creative, choosing your medium, testing your market, and measuring your success metrics.

3. Tell your brand’s story – One of the souls of successful businesses is the connection between customers. A great way to build this is through brand storytelling, which lets your customers engage with you by knowing the backbone of your business. In telling your story, make sure you provide your audience a relationship building tool, a look into your business’s presence, the reasons why your business was built, and the things that motivate your workforce.

Contrary to what most people think, brand storytelling is not about the business itself. This method should focus on your customers, such as the values and benefits they get in engaging with your business.

4. Build a traffic acquisition – You need a traffic acquisition strategy to attract the right audiences—your possible paying customers. SEO, blogs, advertising, and social media can help you gain traffic acquisition, but there’s more to effective online marketing. Not all businesses value the same traffic; it always differ from the goals and needs of each company.

In building traffic acquisition, you need to consider who you are reaching, the key drivers of traffic, paid and free traffic, and the possible traffic takeaways.

5. Get the word out – Launching your business won’t make sense if people are not aware of it. Among all the options in spreading the word, press release is the most effective and cost efficient. To be successful, focus more on the results of your business; prioritise the updates of your services and goods. Above all, make sure to build connections by providing newsworthy pitches. Remember, journalists care about compelling stories, not sales.