Internet Marketing For Newbies: Where To Start To Avoid Going Broke.

Compared to offline promotion, this method has three main advantages.

1. Targeting; There are tools here, with the help of which you can find your most interested audience and show the advertising message only to it. Geographic location, age, gender, interests, income, place of work - a lot of filters are available to direct the campaign in the right direction.

2. Interactivity; Online promotion allows you to better control the situation and interact more closely with the audience. With digital marketing capabilities, you can track customer reviews, communicate directly with them, and in some cases visually see the impact your actions are having.

3. Web analytics; Online promotion is also convenient because it makes it easy to analyze your actions. You can always visually see how this or that tool worked, how many visits or buyers it brought to the site. At any time there is a chance to refuse a promotion that does not work, or to change the settings.

Where to start promoting on the Internet

Three obvious but must-have steps to get started.

1. Decide on the target audience

Neither the Internet nor offline will it be possible to successfully sell goods and services without understanding who your target audience is. In addition to gender, age and place of residence of a potential client, there are at least three other criteria that will help to compose his portrait.

Here's a guide to help you get a hold of your niche

What is the client interested in?

Let's say you have determined that your audience is women 18-30 years old. With the help of various services.

It will also not be superfluous to monitor messages on thematic forums and on sites with reviews. Pay attention to what your audience is most actively responding to, which posts get the most likes and comments.

How solvent is the client?

Pricing, the choice of sites for promotion, the style of advertising messages and much more depend on the social status of the audience. It's a huge mistake to create a product that your client cannot afford.

What problems does the client want to solve?

For example, you open a women's clothing store in a large but provincial city. Based on the information from the previous paragraphs, try to simulate the situation and understand how your project is useful.

2. Study the market and competitors

To stand out from your competitors, it is important to study their product and understand what its strengths and weaknesses are. Pay special attention to what marketing moves they use, because they may have been able to better understand and feel the audience, while you missed something.

Such analysis provides an understanding of one's own strengths and weaknesses. Next, your marketing strategy should be based on reinforcing what you are already good at and working on the flaws.

3. Define goals

For internet marketing to work, it's important to be clear about what your campaign's goals are. For example, this can be an increase in primary and secondary sales, launching a new product on the market, increasing brand awareness, and so on.

At the same time, any goal should have a deadline and be achievable, measurable and as specific as possible. Plan not just to "increase sales", but, say, "to raise turnover by 25% in six months."

Social networks

So, the first thing to start promoting on the Internet is to work with social networks. They will help you get closer to your audience, communicate directly with them, and gain loyal customers.

In fact, social media gives the aspiring entrepreneur a powerful free resource to promote. There are many small companies that successfully work only in social networks, refusing to create a website and offline points. However, you should not think that everything is so simple.

It takes a lot of time and effort to create an interesting community. You will have to regularly interact with the audience, generate content and promptly answer subscribers' questions. In addition, you need to think about the design of the page: make high-quality avatars, covers and photos. To do this, you can turn to a graphic designer for help or work on your own with special services, such as Canva.

Landing page and website

When your social media presence is not enough, you should think about your own website or landing page.

Landing page, or landing page, is a small one-page website with a presentation of a product, service or service. It always contains a call to action: buy a product, register, subscribe to the newsletter, and so on.

Compared to a full-fledged website, this option will cost less, however, it is not suitable for everyone. If your firm provides a lot of not the cheapest services, the landing page may not work, because the client needs more information to make a decision. For a company that is engaged in the construction and maintenance of real estate, a site that contains enough information on the topic is more suitable.

Both the landing page and the site should be as simple as possible. Do not overload them with different fonts and a lot of media content, make clear navigation, simplify the purchase process and constantly optimize the resource.

Using Tools like getresponse and convertkit can really make the difference.

Newsletter

Use the power of your site to build a customer base. After some time, you can use it to create an email newsletter.

This simple and inexpensive promotion method should not be associated with spam: the newsletter should be interesting, useful and voluntary. You can get email addresses from your leads in exchange for something useful: a discount, temporary access to paid content, a series of free lessons, and so on.

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Paid advertising

If we talk about advertising, then it is best to start promotion by setting up contextual advertising, which the user sees at the moment when he searches for something on social networks. It will quickly increase traffic, help you test keywords, experiment with headlines and image selections. In addition, you can launch contextual advertising with a minimum budget and increase it only if the campaign works.

Based on this information, it will be easier to work with banner and targeted advertising and SEO-website promotion.

How do you know if internet marketing is working?

Digital marketing is impossible without analytics. It helps you better understand your target audience and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in order to determine in which direction to go.

The main web analytics tools are Google Analytics. With their help, you can find out how many people visit your site, where they come from and at what time, what pages they view, what actions they take, and so on. Register on both resources, add the site you want to analyze to your account, and regularly follow the reports.

The following indicators are considered important:

How many unique visitors come to the site;

What is the conversion of the site (the percentage of visitors who made the targeted action to the total number of visitors);

Which pages of the site are the most popular;

How much time the visitor spends on the site;

How many visitors close the website page in the first seconds;

How often users return to the site;

How many times and from what sources the user visited the site before taking the targeted action.

Conclusion

In this article, we gave a short introduction to what internet marketing is and explained how to start promoting a company or brand online. However, the digital market is constantly changing and growing: new tools for analytics and promotion appear. To successfully conduct business on the Internet, you need to constantly monitor trends and learn new technologies.