The Online Marketing Strategies Cheat Sheet
Are you still using conventional ads to promote your business?
Do you have a good looking website but doesn’t generate any sales for you?
Are you looking for the right internet marketing strategies to promote your business?
If your answer to any of these question is yes, then you have come to the right place.
We are going to share the common mistakes made by business owners in online marketing and how to do it the right way.
The Fact
Let’s face it. There are still dozens of business owners in Malaysia who do not take advantage of internet marketing tools to promote their product or services.
Some of them often spend thousands in conventional ads such as newspapers or TV only to be frustrated with the results.
Why settle for conventional media when the internet has already provided a larger platform to reach your target audience?
Do you know that there are 3.5 billion searches in Google every day and 1.49 billion monthly active Facebook users?
Online marketing is one of the biggest marketing tools you can apply immediately in today’s business world.
If you are searching for help in online marketing, you probably stumble different type of services such as Social Media Marketing (SMM), Google Pay per Click (PPC) Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Website optimization, and email marketing.
These all sound promising, but it’s important to not rush in implementing any of these strategies without doing proper analysis and creating a marketing blueprint in place.
Here are a few quick questions to ask yourself before you start any campaign.
- Do I have a website or sales funnel that will be able to convert a visitor into customer?
- Do I have an irresistible offer to my visitor?
- Who are my dream customers and where they are hanging out online?
- What primary traffic source should I use? SEO, Google AdWords or Facebook Ads?
Sounds complicated? Stay with us.
We will reveal and answer all these questions on this site.
Achieving consistent business growth is similar to participating in a long-distance car racing.
#1 – You need a good engine that is able to convert the fuel effectively.
#2 – At the same time, you need to consistently supply high-quality fuel in order for the car to run fast and far.
#3 – You will also need fuel diverters to collect any leaking fuel where you can reuse it.
Same Thing Happens In Online Marketing
#1 – Car Engine
High Converting Website
The engine can be likened to your website. It is designed to convert your visitors in leads and customer.
On average, 96% of your visitors will leave your website without converting.
A good website/sales funnel will be able to convert more leads and increase your sales conversion.
#2 – Fuel
Website Traffic
Fuel is your website traffic (Visitor) which is used to move your engine.
You need to consistently send targeted traffic to your website through a series of sale events.
The answer is simple. No website traffic? No Sales.
#3 – Fuel Diverters
Follow-Up
Fuel diverters are the follow-up where you can have more engagement with the non-converted visitors.
Most of the business sales (especially high-price products or services) are done after 5-10 engagements.
This process will be able to increase sales conversion and turn more visitors to become your customers.
However, you may find that most of the marketing companies you encounter ignore this process and instead try to sell you to just one element of online marketing.
We also see a lot of internet marketing courses and services cover website traffic generation such as social media management, search engine optimization, and PPC but not the other 2.
In fact, you need all 3 of these to have the biggest success online.
These 3 key elements are applicable to any type of businesses including professional services, e-commerce store, and local shops.
Feeling Overwhelmed? Don’t panic. You don’t need to do everything at once.
The key here is to focus on one element, excel on it, before moving on to the next element. The great news is, you will start seeing a big improvement in your business even though you only focus on one element of online marketing.
But, it is important to understand the whole picture so that you can layout your marketing blueprint.
Feel better? Let’s get started with these 3 key elements.
The 3 Key Elements
#1 – Website/Blog
Your website is the foundation of starting your business online.
That’s the place where you serve your prospect, build your branding, and share your value, products and services.
Your ultimate goal is to convert them to become your customer and generate sales.
In other words, your need a highly converting website to maximize your revenue.
On average, only 2-4% of the visitor will become your customer.
What if you can increase the conversion rate to 10%, 20% or even 30%?
How much does it impact your revenue?
That’s where conversion marketing come in to picture.
A highly converting website will be able to generate great revenue even with low website traffic. It is extremely important especially if you are using paid advertisement as your main traffic source.
There are 4 important factors to consider when it comes to conversion marketing.
- Lookalike Authority Website
- Website Sales Copy (Content)
- Sales Funnel
- Value Ladder
Find out more about conversion marketing here.
#2 – Targeted Traffic
Traffic or visitor is the key element in the entire marketing plan.
The answer is simple. No visitor, no sales.
You will never get any sales regardless of how good your sales funnel is if you do not have any website traffic.
Imagine if you opening a shop selling bags in a small town that have very few visitors. Do you expect your shop to generate a lot of sales? What if you open the shop in a popular shopping mall?
The latter definitely has a bigger potential to get more sales.
The same thing applies to the internet business world.
But the good thing about internet business is you do not need to pay sky-high rental fees to get a lot of visitors to your shop.
With running an online business, you can choose your preferred target audience to visit your website. This is contrary to opening a business in shopping malls where people are coming from different background and demographics, and the majority are part of your non-targeted audience.
A “targeted audience” refers to the set of visitors that are in the right audience related to your business.
For instance, if you are selling evening dress or prom dress for women., do you think you can make a lot of sales if you are sending a bunch of male visitors to your site? Obviously not!
But if you are able to send in female visitors between 20- 40 years old, you may be able to get some sales as the chances for this group of people to buy your dress are high.
Once you have identified the target audience, you may start looking at where to get them.
To date, there are dozens of traffic sources commonly used including SEO, PPC, Social media, email marketing, solo ads, blogging, among others.
Each of them has its pros and cons. You will need to find the best traffic source to get started and move on to the next one once you have already excelled in the former.
Find out more about the 13 effective traffics source for your website.
#3 – Follow-Up
Remember that we mentioned about conversion rate previously?
In normal cases, you will get 2-4 % conversion rate for the first time visitor.
Some people assume that in order to achieve the 4% conversion rate, one visitor needs to bring in at least 100 more.
Where does 96% of the target audience go then?
Getting new targeted traffics is the most costly process among the 3 elements. You should do follow up, bring back the cold visitor to your sales funnel, educate them, and turn them into regular customers.
More than 80% of the sales are done after 5-10 engagement. If you can establish stronger engagement with these leads, the chances that they become customers will be higher.
With the remarketing ads, you can easily bring your visitors into different sales point where they stopped.
Here is a simple scenario which follows up can help to bring in more sales.
Imagine you are selling leather bags for men. You use PPC or Facebook ads to drive the visitor to the website. 96% of the visitors may leave your site due to various reasons such as styling not match, pricing too high, or lack of stocks.
With the remarketing strategies, you can collect an audience who visited your site but didn’t make the purchase. You can also track who visited a specific product page.
When you have a new product or special sales, you can use remarketing ads to push it at a very low cost.
If the specific product page is out of stock, you can even push the ads to these visitors once you restock the product.
Let’s say you post ads with the headline “Sorry for keeping you waiting. XXX bag is available now. Grab one before it goes out of stock again.”
If you are the visitor who is looking for the bag that is out of stock previously, will you go ahead and make the purchase when you see this ad?
This is the kind of advanced remarketing strategies which can be very powerful.
What You Can Take Away?
So now that we have seen that there far more things you can do to market your business online, you will never want to miss out on these opportunities, again.
An important reminder though: don’t just rush into implement any traffic generation without properly optimizing your website conversion. Similarly, don’t simply choose a traffic source without finding the pros & cons.
Read on to find out more.