Online marketing is a must nowadays if you want to grow a company. When 78% of people now conduct research online before buying products, you need to have a presence online when people do that search. You’ll miss out on a lot of business if you don’t.

However, learning how to market online is easier said than done.

Building online marketing campaigns isn’t something you should do on a whim. Use the 13 tips below to make marketing businesses online easier and more profitable.

1. Watch Your Competition

You can get far in digital marketing on your own. However, you’ll be playing catchup if you’re starting from scratch and have competitors that have been in business for a while.

If you have any competition that already does digital marketing, it pays to learn what they do. Are they focusing on paid ads, social media, or SEO?

You can learn what your competition does the most to determine what works in your industry. Use that information in creating your initial strategy to get a head start.

2. Start With One Platform

While it’s tempting to try and start on as many social media platforms as you can, try to avoid the temptation. Each platform has pros and cons and methods that work better on those platforms. If you try to do too many things at once, it’s hard to learn those things.

Try to stick with one primary platform when you first start. Focus on the website that your audience hangs out on the most. You can always move to the other platforms once you become great at marketing on your initial choice.

3. Understand Your Audience

Creating marketing messages is hard when you don’t know who you’re targeting. Even if you have a specific product, the people you sell to won’t always be who you expect.

That’s why it makes sense to figure out your most likely customers. Think of who they are as people, their interests, and any other information relevant to the purchase.

You’ll use this information to craft your marketing messages. The more fine-tuned your messages are for your audience, the better your chance of making more sales.

4. Create a Website

Starting a website sounds obvious for many business owners, but not every company goes that route. They believe they can do fine on social media and local listings. Unfortunately, that isn’t always enough.

A website acts like a 24/7 salesperson for your business. It will help you inform your customers about your products and services without talking to someone on a sales team.

On top of that, it’s easier than ever to create a new website. Build one for your potential customers to give people looking for what you have to offer somewhere to learn about your company.

5. Create a Blog

While having a website is a great first step to developing a web presence, it’s only the bare minimum. If you want to maximize the impact of your website, starting a blog is a great option.

A blog will help you grow your web traffic by using SEO. You’ll target common questions in your industry and optimize your answers for the keywords people use to search.

As you build authority in your industry with content for marketing, Google will reward your site with higher rankings. You’ll continue to get free search traffic for as long as Google keeps ranking your website.

6. Create Social Media Accounts

Social media marketing is a must if you want to establish your brand online. Many people spend their time on the internet using social media sites. You need a presence on those sites to introduce your brand to those people.

A social media business account gives you a place to promote content to your fans. Your content will show up in your followers’ news feeds and let them engage with your brand.

You can also point people to your website with links. That means you can post deals that people find valuable to make more sales.

7. Go Local

Is your business local to a region with a physical presence? If so, you have more than creating SEO content to handle. You also need to appear on local search results and on Google Maps.

Unfortunately, Google won’t do this without your direction. Google doesn’t want to display businesses that try to game the system accidentally.

To do this, you’ll need to sign up for a Google My Business account. Google will send you a postcard with a PIN code. Once you have your code, you can create an account and enter your business information to show up on the map results.

8. Build an Email List

You can generate a lot of new business by doing regular internet marketing tasks. However, you’ll only get so far doing this. Most people won’t be in the mood to buy when seeing your products, and it’s hard to reach back out to previous customers to get more sales.

An email list fixes this problem. Your email list will let you directly contact people interested in buying from your company. Offer people a compelling reason to sign up and add previous customers to your list.

You can contact people whenever you want without cost when you build your list. That means you can pursue more cost-effective marketing campaigns and not be at the mercy of algorithms from another company.

9. Connect With Influencers

The way many people discover products has changed over the past several years. Instead of looking at regular advertisements, people now look to see what products their favorite influencers use.

An influencer is a popular persona on social media. They usually have large audiences of followers and cater to a specific crowd.

Depending on your industry, you can reach out to one of these influencers and pay them to promote your product. This will help you get in front of people likely to buy from your business and give you credibility from a person people trust.

Your total cost will vary based on someone’s size. However, you can find good deals from people just starting to promote products.

10. Create Informative Videos

Social media sites aren’t the only new platforms people are using today. Many people now spend a lot of time online watching video content.

If you work in an industry with many questions, this is a perfect opportunity to create a video channel to inform potential customers about solutions to problems. You can solve general problems and promote your products that help make things easier.

If you don’t want to invest in a video production system, you can also create short advertisements to show on other videos. Targeting on video platforms is good, so you can directly target people watching content related to your products.

11. Set Up Tracking

You’ll need to do a lot of testing to optimize your digital marketing campaigns. However, that isn’t easy to do if you don’t have data that helps you understand how well your marketing works.

Many tracking scripts make this easier. You can use them to track traffic sources, paid ad conversions, profit margins, and everything else that relates to your marketing campaign.

Set up these scripts at the beginning of your campaign to figure out what works best. Once you do, you can focus on optimizing your winning marketing tactics to start seeing profit more quickly.

12. Consult With an Expert

There are a lot of options in the digital marketing world. Just taking on one digital marketing tactic can take a lot of your time. That’s time you probably don’t have to waste.

It makes sense in most cases to hire a digital marketing expert to handle the work. You can work with top rated digital marketing services with experts in every digital marketing field. You can start small with one marketing strategy or rely on your partner to tackle multiple marketing channels.

Going this route means you can get an expert to do things right the first time instead of wasting time and money doing things yourself. As a result, you can spend your time focusing on other tasks that make more impact on your business.

Take Your Time When Building Online Marketing Campaigns

It’s easy to create a few ads, fill your marketing account with money, and start a new ad campaign. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll get results from your efforts.

You need to take care when building online marketing campaigns. If you don’t, you’ll waste time and money without getting a return on your investment. Use the tips above when creating an online marketing strategy to ensure you get results from your efforts.

Head back to the blog to find more tips that will help you increase your company’s presence online.