Internet marketing may appear daunting and complicated. There are ample possibilities. But which one should you start with first?
To offer you clarity, we’ve broken down and simplified internet marketing into its most fundamental strategies.
Below are 11 internet marketing strategies that’ll actually work.
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet marketing is the process of promoting a business or brand and its products or services via the internet with the help of tools that’ll help increase traffic, leads and sales.
Internet marketing is a rather broad term that encompasses a range of marketing tactics and strategies—this includes content, email, search, paid media and many more.
While its primary purpose is to sell goods and services, it’s not the sole reason businesses pursue it.
A company may be marketing online to convey a message about its brand or to conduct research. Internet marketing can also play a role in identifying a target market, discover a marketing segment’s needs and desires, form long-term relationships with customers, or establish authority and expertise within an industry.
Internet marketing evolves at an exponential rate. It’s highly dynamic and calls for online businesses and marketers to stay abreast of the latest changes in the system.
There are two components of internet marketing:
- B2B: A business to business e-commerce, whereby business forms sell their products and services to other business firms on the internet.
- B2C: A business to consumer e-commerce, where business firms sell their products and services to consumers on the internet.
11 Internet Marketing Strategies You Need to Start Adopting Today
1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the very process of optimising a website or webpage to increase both the quantity and quality of its traffic from organic search results. When pages rank high on the search engines and are able to maintain their current positions, the website can almost gain free, passive traffic consistently.
How to Do It?
If you wish to rank high on search engines, you need to target topics that your audience is searching for. This process involves keyword research, that’s to find out what these topics are. The easiest way to begin is to utilise a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs or its alternatives.
Head over to the tool of your choice, and go to the option that allows you to explore keywords. Enter one or a few search terms that are relevant to your website or niche. For example, if you sell bouquets, then you may want to enter keywords like florist, graduation bouquet, anniversary bouquet, etc. Then, look into the matching terms. From here, you’ll be looking through the list and picking out relevant topics you wish to target. In general, the best keywords are those with high traffic potential (TP) and low keyword difficulty (KD).
After identifying your target keywords, you may proceed to create a page that is worthy of ranking for that keyword. While there are multiple aspects to consider, the most important one is to figure out why searchers are looking for that topic—this is referred to as search intent.
You can easily do this by looking at what’s currently ranking of the search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, if you’re targeting the topic “best coffee machine”, you’ll see that most of the top-ranking pages are blog posts about the best coffee machines.
Once you’ve created and published that page, you may work on getting backlinks. Building links with other similar websites is paramount for Google ranking factor. While there are many ways you can get backlinks, one of the basics is via email outreach.
Finally, you’ll want to ensure the technical aspects of your website are performing well. This is because, if Google can’t find and index your pages, it’s impossible to rank them on the SERPs. With that in mind, run a consistent technical SEO audit to identify problems if any.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating and distributing content that’ll attract and retain customers.
How to Do It?
To get started, answer these five simple questions:
- Who are you creating content for?
- Why are you creating content?
- What type of content will you create?
- Where will you publish the content?
- How will you create the content?
Answering these questions should set you on the right path to creating content that’ll improve your business. Having said that, remember to also promote your content after it’s published!
Promoting your content means not waiting for your target audience to discover your content. Instead, you’re actively presenting the content to them.
3. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing
Pay-per-click marketing is a form of online advertising whereby advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks on their ad.
Search engine ads are the most commonly used ad format in PPC marketing. Other formats include displaying ads on websites and social media ads, such as those you’ll see on Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
How to Do It?
You’ll first need to choose an advertising platform of your choice, and opt for those where your audience exists. For example, if you’re selling computer hardware or peripherals, you may consider advertising on Facebook or Instagram, because they make the most sense.
Then, get yourself familiar with the platform. Explore the ad platform by clicking around or even taking a course. These platforms usually offer educational resources to guide you on how to run ads.
Bear in mind that ads can either succeed or fail. This has to do with your targeting, so make sure you have data to back up your targeting choices. For instance, if you’re running search ads, you’ll need to perform keyword research. You also need to know what people search for and how much you’ll be paying for clicks on average. You should also make sure you’ve set up your tracking properly.
In terms of budget, decide on a daily budget that prevents you from splurging on your marketing budget. Most important, monitor and optimise your campaigns regularly. Once you start generating solid results, you can slowly increase your budget.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing is any kind of marketing done through email.
How to Do It?
Email marketing encompasses more than just sending emails. It also includes:
- Building an email list;
- Designing, writing and sending emails to your subscribers;
- Segmenting the list;
- Deciding when to send the email;
- Monitoring the results;
- Curating the email list.
To start, come up with a list of email addresses you want to send messages to. The easiest way you can do this is to offer an incentive to website visitors in return for subscribing, for example, a 10% off their first purchase if they subscribe to your mailing list.
It’s also important to decide what kind of emails you want to send to your subscribers. Essentially, you need to have a welcome email with the incentive you promised earlier.
From that point onward, you’ll need to take a mix of intuition and experimentation to figure out what to send because it all comes down to the nature of your business.
5. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is where other people promote your products in exchange for a commission. For instance, should your product cost $100, you can pay an affiliate fee of $10 for each sale they generate for you.
How to Do It?
First, you’ll need to create an affiliate program which people can sign up for. This will provide them with a unique link they can use to promote your product and track the sales they successfully generated.
Then, you’ll need to look for people who’re interested in promoting your product.
The easiest way however, is to look for people who are already promoting competing products.
6. Influencer Marketing
Influencers are basically people who boast an active, sizable audience (usually on social media) and the ability to influence their audience to do something.
Influencer marketing is the practice of collaborating with influencers to promote your brand’s massages, products or services.
How to Do It?
The simplest way to find influencers is to rely on existing third-party tools. There are various tools for various social media platforms. Below are a list to look through:
- Followerwonk (Twitter)
- Influenx (YouTube)
- Heepsy (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch)
- inBeat (TikTok, Instagram)
- Intellifluence (Amazon reviews, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc)
- The list goes on…
When you’ve gathered a list of influencers, don’t reach out to them yet! Since social platforms can be gameable, some of these influencers may possess a large number of fake followers. A small number of fake followers is inevitable, but you don’t want them to be a significant percentage of those influencers’ following.
The quantity and quality of following, you’ll want to make sure engagement exists too. If an influencer has many followers but barely gets any comments on their posts, it’s a potential red flag.
Remember that the absolute number of likes, comments, shares, etc doesn’t matter either. Quality does. Be on the lookout for sincere comments or conversations.
Once you’ve narrowed down the list to those influencers with the amount of reach and resonance you’re looking for, and those with an image and a reputation that represent your brand well, you may proceed to reach out for collaboration.
7. Video Marketing
Video marketing involves the use of videos to promote and educate your target audience. This internet marketing strategy is also used to increase brand awareness and social engagement, allowing you to reach new and wider audiences.
How to Do It?
To begin, you need to know what kind of videos you want to create. There are three main objectives for video marketing: brand awareness, education, or entertainment.
Suppose your goal is to create videos for brand awareness or entertainment, you should make use of your own creativity. Be on the lookout for trends on YouTube on TikTok so you can use them as references.
On the other hand, suppose you wish to create educational content, you may perform keyword research to see what kind of topics or questions people are searching for on YouTube.
8. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn for the purpose of marketing a company’s products or services.
How to Do It?
To begin, you’ll want to establish a solid presence on big social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Even if you’re not going to be active on those platforms, having a page or brand account shows legitimacy and also protects your brand account from squatters, if any.
Remember that social media is all about content. To build a following and obtain engagement, you must have the habit of posting regularly. Though it’s understandable that being active on so many different social media platforms is challenging, especially if you’re resource-stretched.
At the very least, you should be active on standard social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
And if you’re already creating content, you can always share those articles, videos or podcasts on your social media pages. On top of that, there’s always room for the content to be repurposed.
If there’s a platform you want to further invest in, consider producing custom content for it. Refer to how other brands and influencers craft their content, and you’ll get the gist of what works and what doesn’t.
Experimentation is the key. You may follow existing formats and templates, but don’t let that stop you from trying new things.
9. Podcasting
Podcasting is a type of content marketing that emphasises audible content, which is great for building brand awareness and growing an audience.
How to Do It?
There are two primary strategies when it comes to podcasting:
- Start your own podcast
- Appear on someone else’s podcast
Starting a podcast is a whole topic on its own, but basically, it’s almost like writing a blog article, but in audio form. Except you need to make it much more lively and engaging.
However, if you wish to appear on podcasts, you’ll need a list of podcasts to join. You may google for the top industry podcasts and look for someone in your niche who’s already appearing on them.
After coming up with a list, you may start pitching to the shows. In your pitch, try to cover the three Ws:
- Who? Explain who you are, who you work for, etc.
- Why? Explain why you’ll make a good podcast guest.
- What? Explain what you want to talk about.
10. Conversion Rate Optimisation
A conversion is when a website visitor takes an action you want them to take on your website. Essentially, conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your website or its pages to prompt or encourage more of the actions you want visitors to take.
How to Do It?
Just like SEO, CRO is not a one-off task because it’s a systematic process informed by data, and you can always do more.
CRO involves understanding user psychology, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI), copywriting, persuasion, running A/B tests, statistics, data and many more.
If you want more people who visit your page to take a specific action, you may want to systematically A/B test things like:
- The page design
- The headline
- The sub-headline
- The call-to-action (CTA) button
- Social proof (testimonials, case studies, etc).
- The list goes on…
In order for your A/B tests to be statistically significant, you’ll need a significant amount of traffic coming to your website.
So even though CRO is vital, it’s not something you do right from the start. Focus on using other internet marketing strategies to drive quality traffic to your website before considering running split tests.
11. Reputation Management
Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of using digital marketing tactics to help shape the public perception of a brand, an organisation or an individual in the online world.
How to Do It?
Reputation management encompasses various activities. For instance, it involves using social media to jump in on conversations and tackle any negative comments made on your company.
By acknowledging the source of unhappiness and listening to the customer, we are able to deflect anger and enhance our relationship with him or her.
However, it’s not only about social media. You can do reputation management in search engines too which is called Reverse SEO. For example, you may find high-ranking articles on Google that speak negatively about your brand or perpetuate a misconception.
If it’s something you can correct, you should try to nip it in the bud before things escalate.
Moving Forward
This list of internet marketing strategies is exhaustive, but it should have educated you on some of the more popular ones. When executed correctly, rest assured that the strategies will work and will continue to work.