Digital Marketing for Beginners

Online marketing continues to change in many ways, which makes it important to keep up with the most recent trends and practice critical thinking, independent action, and consistent creativity. Using this basic guide, you’ll be able to learn more about the kind of mental exercises you’ll need to stay above competitors in today’s aggressive internet marketing environment.

Keep Your Internet Marketing Strategies Customer-Centric

Customers are the ones who decide whether your business fails or succeeds, which is why you should develop an effective internet marketing strategy based on your target audience’s needs and wants, with a good understanding of what customers want from your products or services.

Learning about what kinds of products your customer base uses, and what they’re looking for from companies like yours is vital to making sure they continue to come back to you and draw more business from other previously overlooked prospects.

Some questions to ask to get a better understanding of your customers might include:

• How did they discover your services or products?
• What make them go from interested prospects to paying customers?
• What do your customers truly care about and value?

Asking these questions will give you superficial answers such as whether or not the customer found you online via a Google search, but you can use these answers to further determine how your company was able to solve certain problems that they’ve experienced.

Build and Tell Your Brand’s Story

To address those prospective customers in the most effective way, your brand should have its own story to tell, one that can engage your target audience while displaying empathy for their struggles. Copy in everything from your website to Facebook ads should tell a story that compels people from beginning to end.

Brand storytelling involves explaining your company’s origins, what motivates your employees, how you conceived of and developed your products, what types of customers value working with your brand most and why, a close look at the company, and something every member of your team advocates.

What storytelling shouldn’t be is an overly long essay about your company, a simple blog post, separate from all other content, fragmented, content that only the marketing team can appreciate, or an obvious tool intended to manipulate your customer base or prospective audience.

In many cases, it’s often best to let the customer tell your brand’s story in the form of detailed testimonials, or even in the form of a marketplace where people can share advice and ideas.

Use an Inbound Marketing Strategy to Attract and Nurture Customers

It’s important to know exactly how to nurture leads as they become customers and wind up in the sales funnel. There are 4 stages of inbound marketing that businesses should follow for a successful inbound marketing campaign.

1. Attract

The first step is to attract those sales qualified leads by developing a detailed and accurate buyer persona by understanding your customer base, and building on it with high-quality blogs, thought leadership content, video content, social media engagement, SEO, PPC, display ads, and social ads. This will include content that utilizes the aforementioned storytelling methods that your company has developed.

2. Engage

Once you have attracted those leads and gained their attention, it’s time to engage them with calls to action, social media monitoring, live chat, and landing pages.

3. Nurture

To further encourage leads to convert to paying customers, you should further nurture them through the sales funnel with customized email campaigns, retargeting ads that keep them coming back, and sales outreach that can help them learn how you can solve their problems.

4. Convert

Once you have successfully nurtured those sales-qualified leads, it’s time to convert them into customers and keep them satisfied with your services.

There are many aspects to each of these steps that businesses need to keep in mind, but these are the basics regarding an inbound marketing strategy.

Implement a Complete Internet Marketing Campaign for Your Business

It isn’t always easy to determine the best way to develop an internet marketing strategy for your business, but by focusing on customer wants and needs, building a compelling story for your brand, and following up with effective inbound marketing strategies, you can turn more high-quality leads into delighted customers.

If you would like help with your Chicago internet marketing campaign today, contact OneIMS to get started with a comprehensive SEO strategy today.