What is an online marketing strategy?
An online marketing strategy is a plan for your company's online marketing activities. In essence, it is no different from a general business strategy. The only difference is that the online marketing strategy focuses specifically on everything online. In the online marketing strategy, you determine your objectives in the field of online marketing and you make a plan to achieve them.
Why an online marketing strategy?
But why would you invest in an online marketing strategy? You may then ask yourself. What is the added value for your company? The answer is simple. A good online marketing strategy will ensure that your website gets considerably more visitors. Eventually, you will also get more customers and make more turnover that way. So an online marketing strategy is definitely worth it!
How do you set up an online marketing strategy?
Many companies want to start with good online marketing, but do not know how to go about it. You can try anything at random, but there is a big chance that it will go wrong and not deliver anything. Setting up a good marketing strategy takes some time, but will be more than worth the effort in the end. Setting up the strategy consists of 6 steps, namely:
1. Draw up concrete objectives
It is of course very difficult to achieve a certain goal if you do not have a concrete idea of what you want to achieve. The first step towards success is therefore to have a clear idea of what your company is and where you want to go with your company.
2. Make sure your target group is clear
Next, it is of course important that you know who your target group is. Your content and strategy must be well adapted to this group in order to reach them. You can clearly define your target group by means of their geographical, demographic, psychographic and socio-economic characteristics.
3. Map out competitors
Once you have clarified your goal and target group, you can move on to the next step. You are probably not the only one offering a particular service or product. That is why it is important that you know who your competitors are and what they do. What are their USPs? How do they present themselves? And what are their strengths and weaknesses?
4. Choose a positioning
The next question is how to distinguish yourself from these competitors. How do you want your company to be seen? This is your positioning. It is, as it were, the identity or image of your company. The positioning is determined by a number of qualities that your company possesses. For example, your company may exude luxury or have the identity of being the cheapest in the region.
5. What resources do you want to use?
Ultimately, of course, you want to express this identity to your target group. To do this, you need to determine which resources you want to use. There are many ways to set up online marketing, namely through SEO, Link Building, Blogs, Vlogs, Social Media and much more. A number of these tools will be discussed in more detail later on.
6. Launch your strategy and make sure everything is measurable
Of course, the last step is to execute and monitor the strategy. The latter is very important, because it enables you to keep track of whether certain things within your strategy are working well or not. You can then adjust your strategy accordingly. This way, you keep on optimising and you will keep on getting better results!
Online marketing tools
Let's come back to the means to set up your online marketing strategy. As mentioned before, there are many ways, but in this blog we will focus on the most important ones. These are SEO, SEA and Linkbuilding.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means that you make sure that your content is seen as relevant by search engines like Google. This will put you higher up in the search results and you will therefore be better found online.
There are a number of tricks to get this done. The most important is that you ensure that all your content is optimised according to SEO guidelines. You can do this by making sure that certain keywords recur, that the text is not too long but also not too short and that you use the right structure.
SEA
Another effective way to get more visitors to your website is through SEA. SEA stands for search engine advertising. This may seem similar to SEO, but they are really two different things. SEO is basically free and takes quite a bit of work. It is primarily a long-term strategy. However, do you want more visitors in the short term and are you willing to pay for this? Then SEA might be more for you.
With SEA, you pay to be ranked higher in Google. This is done via a kind of safe whereby you can bid on certain keywords. The highest bid is then placed at the top. This is a fast way to get more reach, but unfortunately it can be expensive. In addition, the results are temporary and you will have to invest again and again. If your company does not have such a large budget, it is better to delve into SEO.
Linkbuilding
Finally, linkbuilding is also a good and frequently applied online marketing strategy. Linkbuilding is the acquisition of relevant links on other websites. With linkbuilding you want to achieve that as many external websites as possible link to your website. This is useful, because google sees such links as votes for your website. The more links, the more relevant Google finds your website, the higher you will be in the search results. This in turn leads to more visitors and thus more customers.