13 Types Of Online Marketing Strategies For Your Business

Your business could benefit from the many online marketing strategies that are available for businesses of all types and sizes.
The following 13 online marketing strategies help you to implement your internet marketing plan and your choice between them will depend on factors such as budget, objectives, target markets and so on.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising

The list of PPC platforms continues to expand and some of the most prominent ones include:
• Google Adwords
• Bing Ads (formerly Microsoft AdCenter)
• Facebook Ads
• Twitter Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
Adwords is by far the most prominent with the highest volume of traffic on both its Search Network and Display Network. PPC is also known as search marketing and is about encouraging click through to your website when a person types a search that matches a keyword in your account.
Some important PPC metrics to measure are conversions, CTR (click through rate), bounce rate, average cost per click and click volume.

2. Organic Marketing

Organic or natural search marketing is one of the leading online marketing strategies due to its ability to drive high traffic that is free. Search Engine Optimisation is the discipline that helps to get your site to the top of the search engine rankings and it requires specialist skill and knowledge that you can acquire from an SEO practitioner.

3. Directory Submissions

Directory submission has many benefits including acquiring links for SEO purposes and more visitor traffic to your website. Directories are still relevant and some popular ones include the Yahoo directory and DMOZ.

4. Email Marketing

Signup for an email program like Mailchimp and if you are on WordPress and you can benefit from the many plugins available like MailMunch which integrate easily with Mailchimp and allow you to build your lists. You can use Mailchimp for free with basic features and build your lists and campaigns, and for a small monthly fee you can have additional features like auto-responders.

5. Online PR

Online Public Relations is about maximising favourable mentions of your brand, company and products on the web by using press releases, social networks and blogs. It also includes quick response to negative mentions and reviews.

6. Display Advertising

There are many banner networks to distribute your banners across the web on sites and placements that are popular with your target audiences. One recent growing option is programmatic which is seeing a wide range of merchants benefitting from affordable promotional options. Also, the Display Network in Adwords which you can use to promote your banners on news sites, price comparison portals, blogs and millions of other sites that are part of the Google Adsense program.

7. Shopping Ads

First you create a datafeed in XML or CSV format that lists all the products you want to promote on Google. Next you create a Google Merchant Center account and upload your feed and verify your website and then link it to your Adwords account. Then you create a PLA (Product Listing Ad) campaign in adwords and create the ad groups that are related to the products in your feed

8. Video Marketing

With the recent growth in video viewing on YouTube and other video sites, you can gain a steady stream of visitors to your channel and website with your videos. You can also promote your videos in Google Adwords by creating a video campaign. Video is also great for raising brand awareness and educating your target markets about your products and services

9. Social Media

Social media should form an important part of your online marketing strategy because it has grown in prominence especially on sites like Twitter. Using tools like Hootsuite, you can grow followers quickly, schedule your posts, save a lot of time in responding to mentions, and also retweet interesting posts. You can also signup to other networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ – however stick to one or two and maximise your presence there.

10. Blogging

Add a blog to your website and create a blogging schedule that will ensure you are creating informative and quality posts regularly that will increase traffic and engagement. The more you post to your blog, the higher your rankings will be and the more search traffic you will get, but you should do keyword research first, to identify keywords you want to rank for.

11. Shopping Comparison

Some leading shopping comparison sites include shopping.com, Kelkoo, Shopzilla and Pricegrabber and for online retailers, these are good portals to display products on and increase sales. Like Google Shopping ads, you upload a datafeed to your account and your products will be available on the comparison site and visitors can compare prices, features, reviews and delivery rates.

12. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a way to get other websites, blogs, portals and so on to publish your products and drive traffic to your website and pay them a commission for sales. So, if you are an ecommerce business for example, you can sign up with one of the leading affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Affiliate Window and affiliates will sign up to your affiliate program.

You will upload text and banner ads and datafeeds and your affiliates will place these on their sites and social profiles to promote your website and you will see an increase in traffic and sales.

13. Link Building

Link building has many benefits including increasing Google, Bing and Yahoo rankings, increasing traffic to your website and raising brand awareness. Options to increase links include creating quality content that people want to link to, guest posting and blogging, web directories, social media and many others.

Summary

Need helping launching and managing these online marketing strategies? Please contact me to discuss your requirements and to discover how I can create a winning digital marketing strategy for your business.