Marketing Your Business Online – Easy Steps Anyone Can Take

Marketing is the breath that keeps your business alive and kicking. It is essential for life and it is essential for your business. Without marketing, your business will go nowhere. That being said, marketing doesn’t have to be a stressful and excruciating experience. Developing a marketing strategy is a fairly straight forward process that involves three basic steps:

– Creating a marketing strategy
– Implementing it
– Testing it and improving

Now you may be looking at that list and saying, “How do I create a marketing strategy?” That is of course the first step. As a small business owner you probably have one product or service that drives the business. It is the one product or service that represents your company and brings in the majority of your customers. This isn’t necessarily your most expensive product in fact it may be your least expensive product.

For example, if you own a dog sitting business that also sells homemade dog treats or food and even sells homeopathic supplements your primary product, the one that brings customers in, may be your actual dog walking service. However, if you’re a personal coach who offers coaching, seminars and motivational talks, online courses, and you have a book, your lead generating product may be your book. That may be the one product that brings customers into your business. That’s the product you focus your initial marketing strategy on.

Whether you’re a brick and mortar business or an online business, the internet may be your most valuable marketing tool. Communications are instantaneous, more than 70% of internet users use the internet to research a product or service before they buy it, which means the internet may be your first communication with a prospect, and many internet marketing tools have a very good return on investment meaning you’ll make more than you spend which is of course the goal of marketing.

So what internet tools can you use to market your business online?

The initial phase of any marketing strategy is generally a lead generation campaign. The internet can be an extremely useful tool to collect a database of prospects even if you’re a brick and mortar business. For example, Bath & Body, a brick and mortar retail store, implemented an in-store campaign where they collected email addresses in exchange for a free tube of lip gloss. The catch was that people who signed up would receive a coupon for the tube of lip gloss in their email. This campaign was so successful that Bath and Body collected more than 10 million email addresses, the largest specialty retail database created to date. They value each email address at $18 each because now they can market specifically to their database.

So if step one is to determine your business’s most important product and step two is to develop a database then step three is to market to that database. You’ll likely use a mix of tools to communicate your marketing message to your prospect including blogs, article marketing, email campaigns, social networking, sales letters, and even video and audio messages. The online marketing tools you choose to use will depend largely on your target audience. What websites do they visit? What do they read? What is important to them?

Once you’ve determined a few marketing tools to use to communicate with your prospects, don’t hesitate or wait until you think it is perfect, get your campaign up and running. Why? Because you won’t know how effective your marketing strategy is until you test it. Test everything. Test your headlines, test your email open rates, and test your click throughs. You can find a number of tools to help you track that information online and via your website host. As you collect data on your marketing you can hone each message to receive the optimal results. Creating a marketing strategy, like most things in life, is a process. Online tools and tactics can make it an easier, more powerful, and more successful process.