Nick’s Online Marketing Cheat Sheet

Nick’s Online Marketing Cheat Sheet

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Marketing as a whole can often be a minefield and difficult beast to tackle, even for marketing professionals. The most important question you have to ask yourself is, ‘What are we trying to achieve?’. If it’s more customers, better brand awareness or reaching out to a new market, you can use different marketing tools in various ways to achieve your goals.

Rather than choosing one specific tool, a successful marketing strategy often has many layers that are all integrated and intertwined to create a consistent message that, collectively, is highly effective. Here’s a quick check list of online marketing tools that you could use… See how many you can combine to create a marketing strategy that works in the long term.

  • Social Media – I’m guessing I’m not telling you anything new if I say ‘social media is a vital marketing tool’. If your business is not active on social media by now, do it this week before your competitors have a head start that’s difficult to catch. Remember, inform your followers and create content that’s interesting. Sell at your peril. Have you tried Pinterest, Instagram and Foursquare to promote your products or services?
  • Email Marketing – Often dismissed and underlooked, Email Marketing is becoming increasingly more powerful as time goes on. As social media sites battle for supremacy and user engagement, they all have one thing in common – an email account to sign in. Email newsletters and marketing can be customised, highly segmented and is easier to use than ever.
  • A good website – This is now the online portal to your customers and potential customers. When I say ‘good’ I mean ‘brilliant presentation that blows your competitors away and a simple navigation that is easy for the user to get the information they want in the quickest time possible’. Constantly re-evaluate your website and ensure there is fresh content to give people a reason to return.
  • Write a blog – As mentioned above, constant fresh content is important for your search engine rankings, but it also gives people a reason to come back to your website and potentially explore some of the products/services that you have on offer. Ensure that the content is accessible enough that the general public would find it interesting, not just your target market.
  • Targeted online ads – Both Google and Facebook ads can be used as highly targeted online marketing tools to quickly reach your target market. Spending, say, £300 on these type of ads with get you far better targeted exposure than a quarter/half page ad in your local paper. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), is more of a long term strategy that can get you results over a sustained period of time for a number of key words.

I hope you can use some of the above to help you create a marketing plan going forward. Try and think what’s going to benefit your business in the long term, instead of looking for a quick fix.  Remember, you can always get in touch with us for a free brainstorming session to start the ball rolling!

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