Nothing sucks more than having an eCommerce venture or digital business fail. After all, you built a website and put your merch or service online. That’s a far stretch hoping that traffic would just trickle into your digital business without any other effort.
Don’t fret about it. Thousands, maybe millions, of other online businesses and digital ventures have failed. The core is being able to build the actual “business” with the digital environment being but a tool. Besides, you need to be proactive about finding customers and roping them into your store.
In this article, we’ll delve into the essential components of how to fuel your digital footprint and marketing strategy. Take these lessons into note as you move your business to the next level.
1- Build a Customer Profile
The internet is vast, and you can’t attract everyone. Heck, you shouldn’t even try to. However, there is a specific niche that you should be trying to appeal to and pull into your website. For example, if you run an essay service website, your target would probably be college students.
The first step to knowing what to sell and how to sell on the internet is to identify your target audience. This is not just knowing about who you are selling to (name, email, etc.) but why they are buying and what problem they need to solve.
But you can go beyond this. You can build an ideal customer profile by zeroing in on what your target audience looks like. This allows you to tailor the customer experience in both product and marketing.
2- Website Development and Branding
Now that you have identified what product you want to sell and the ideal customer you are selling to, it’s time to catch their eye. This is your website, and it serves as a digital storefront for your business or service. First impressions matter, so you must get the brand identity right the first time.
A visually stunning site can drive conversions and quickly catch the eye of organic traffic. If you’re on multiple channels on the web, you should ensure consistency in terms of logo design, color palettes, and overall identity.
3- Organic Strategies
Organic ” depends on your specific type of business. For content-based businesses, then it implies that you have such great and useful content that you can attract backlinks, organic clicks, and even just random traffic wheezing by. For eCommerce businesses, that has a lot to do with your brand and paid strategies.
We’ll get into paid strategies a little later, but let’s focus on content for a minute. Good content can attract views. But great content helps you build a strong organic presence. This is your strategy for long-term success and building trust with search engines (Viva Google!)
Consistently publish high-quality content and engage with your audience. Google bots and crawlers will eventually take notice and raise you in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). And that ties right back to building a customer niche that you create content for.
With a customer or audience niche, you can tailor content specifically to address certain problems and pain points. With great content, you rest assured that your audience will share your content with their networks across the web, thus building one big web. And that leads us directly to the next point, SEO.
4- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is all about ensuring that your website or web content ranks highly in the search engine and attracts organic traffic. That means optimizing your web presence through strategic content creation and backlink building. You can also target certain keywords based on what you feel your audience needs and the pain points you are trying to address.
Ultimately with SEO, you are trying to achieve first-page rankings on Google and other search engines. With first-page rankings, you will be able to get qualified and steady leads.
5- Social Media Management
Remember how we mentioned earlier that the internet is one big web? Well, your content gets across that web either through organic or paid SEO. However social media has also become a powerful way to bridge networks and content across the internet.
When you share your web content to social media and vice-versa, it’s safe to assume that Google is taking notice of those signals. But that only comes with relevance. For example, if you run a pet shop in your neighborhood or city, your social media profile can help boost your website.
When we talk about social media, it is important to still build from the customer profile you created earlier. How do your customers or audience prefer communicating? Which social media apps appeal to them most? Would you likely get them on a Monday morning on X (formerly Twitter) or Instagram during late nights?
Once you have identified the best social media channels to reach your audience on, you can now build your presence by sharing content. Engage with your audience, and encourage them to like, love, or share your content across their networks. Meaningful interactions will be shared as links even across the greater internet.
Maintain an active presence on social media, conduct surveys, create great content, and build a community around your brand. Remember to stick to the rules of the particular social channels that you’re using.
6- Paid Advertising
At this stage, you’ve probably given your best but still might not be getting the results that you want. Paid advertising makes sense at this point, and even before, to serve as rapid fuel for your growth. Remember our first example of running a website writing service? Well, if coursework is what sells on your website the most, you should take out a paid Google or Facebook ad with a specific URL link such as https://essaywriter.org/coursework-writing.
Paid advertising should be focused on the channel that gives you the most ROI. It can accelerate your digital business, but only if you perform the other strategies well. That includes strategic keyword research, campaign optimization, and crafting relevant content around the paid ads.
7- Email Marketing
Maybe your business has already built a customer profile and leads or has somehow managed to acquire biodata. Email remains one of the most effective ways to nurture leads and drive conversions.
Emails should be personalized both for your audience and for specific campaigns. Remember to go for great design and consistency to achieve higher open rates.
Conclusion
The digital marketing success journey is a marathon, not a sprint. Moving from building a customer profile and designing a website to sending email blasts can take months, sometimes years to successfully implement. The stories of the most successful brands on the internet are filled with ups and downs, and long seasons in the dry and wild.
Once you set the dice rolling there shouldn’t be any going back. Only beta-testing strategies and rethinking your content, interactions, and general modus operandi. Here’s to finding success on the internet.