Market Like a Master: Online Strategies for Business Growth

Article by: Vincent van Vliet

Last update: June 17, 2024

In 2024, Statista estimates that e-commerce sales will exceed $6.3 trillion worldwide. So, if you want your business to survive in today’s highly competitive market, you must have a digital shopfront.

As consumers increasingly turn to the internet for information, products, and services, you need to make sure your business has a strong online presence. This will keep your business in the eyeline of your target market and your product and service at their fingertips.

But a digital storefront needs to be set up thoughtfully. Without a clear strategy, your online marketing efforts can become disjointed and ineffective, and your brand could suffer. In this blog post, we will discuss our five-step online strategies for business growth so you can successfully establish an online presence.

Step 1: Define Your Goals and Understand Your Audience

You should start by clearly defining your marketing goals. They need to support your overall business objectives, especially since you will be using the company’s resources to build your online presence.
Common marketing goals include:

Brand Awareness: Increasing the visibility of your brand to attract new customers.
Lead Generation: Capturing potential customer information to build a pipeline for sales.
Sales Growth: Boosting sales and revenue through targeted marketing campaigns.
Customer Retention: Enhancing customer loyalty and repeat purchases by engaging existing customers.
Market Penetration: Expanding your reach within existing markets or entering new ones.

After you’ve set your goals, you need to know your target market.

Understanding your audience is critical for creating marketing campaigns that resonate and drive action. Once you know who your customers are and what they need, you can tailor your messaging, products, and services to meet their expectations.

To gather quantitative and qualitative insights about your target market, you can use online surveys, one-on-one interviews, focus groups, and website and social media analytics.

Create Detailed Profiles of Your Ideal Customers

Once you know your target market, you should create detailed customer profiles or personas. These can help you visualize and understand your target audience. Include the following elements in your customer profiles:

Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, education, and occupation
Interests: Hobbies, passions, and interests that influence purchasing decisions
Pain Points: Problems or challenges that your products or services can solve
Behavior: Online and offline behaviors, including buying patterns, preferred communication channels, and media consumption

Step 2: Analyze Your Competition and Choose Marketing Channels

You can optimize your online marketing by understanding your competition. As you learn about your competition, you can uncover opportunities, benchmark your performance, and learn from their successes and mistakes.

To do this, focus on the following areas:

Website: Examine the design, user experience, content quality, and overall functionality of competitors’ websites. Identify the features and strategies they use to engage visitors and convert them into customers.
Content: Evaluate the type, frequency, and quality of content they produce. Look at blog posts, videos, infographics, and other content formats to understand what resonates with their audience.
Social Media: Analyze their social media presence across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. Pay attention to the type of content they share, engagement levels, and follower growth.
SEO: Review their search engine optimization strategies by examining keyword usage, backlink profiles, and on-page SEO elements. Identify which keywords they rank for and how they optimize their content.
PPC: Investigate their pay-per-click advertising efforts, including the types of ads they run, keywords targeted, ad copy, and landing pages used. Assess the effectiveness of their campaigns by examining ad performance and ROI.

Criteria for Selecting Channels
Based on your competitor analysis, you should choose the right channels for your online marketing strategy by considering the following criteria:

Audience Presence: Determine where your target audience spends their time online and which channels they use most frequently.
Goals: Align your chosen channels with your marketing goals, whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, sales growth, or customer retention.
Budget: Assess the cost-effectiveness of each channel and allocate your budget accordingly. Some channels may require more investment but yield higher returns.
Resources: Evaluate your team’s capabilities and resources to manage and execute campaigns across different channels. Consider whether you can afford integrations such as appointment setting tools that can improve your customer’s experience with your website.

Step 3: Develop and Optimize Your Content Strategy

Now that you know where you want to promote your brand, you should prepare a content calendar.
A content calendar is essential for planning, organizing, and managing your content schedule. It keeps you consistent across all channels through synchronous posting and alignment with key dates and campaigns, like holidays or company-wide sales.

Your content calendar can include the following:

Blogs: Informative articles that provide value, answer questions, and solve problems.
Videos: Engaging visual content that can be educational, entertaining, or promotional.
Infographics: Visual representations of data and information that are easy to digest and share.
Podcasts: Audio content that offers insights, interviews, and discussions on relevant topics.

Tips for Creating Engaging Content

Creating content that resonates with your audience involves:

Understanding Your Audience: Tailor content to their needs, interests, and pain points.
Storytelling: Use narratives to make content more relatable and memorable. For example, if your target audience is young professionals, you can create content on how to deal with stress and happiness at work.
Visuals: Incorporate images, videos, and infographics to enhance engagement. You can create images tailored to your content, making your visuals more impactful and relevant.
Interactivity: Encourage audience participation through polls, quizzes, and comments.
Value: Ensure your content provides actionable insights and useful information.

How to Optimize Your Content With SEO

If you want to be found by Google and your target market, you need to use search engine optimization techniques (SEO) to identify relevant search terms your audience uses. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.

Incorporate these keywords naturally into your content to improve search engine visibility, using both short-tail and long-tail keywords.

Here are some quick SEO tips you should use in your online content:

On-Page SEO: Optimize title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and content. Use internal linking to connect related pages.
Off-Page SEO: Build backlinks from reputable sites to enhance domain authority. Engage in guest blogging and social sharing.
Site Speed: Improve loading times for better user experience and search rankings.
Mobile-Friendliness: Optimize your site for mobile devices.
Meta Tags: Use accurate and descriptive meta tags to improve click-through rates from search results.

Step 4: Implement and Promote Your Brand

After preparing your content, you need to promote it through the channels you’ve previously chosen. For example, you should:

Share content on social media platforms tailored to each platform’s style.
Distribute newsletters and targeted email campaigns.
Use PPC ads on search engines and social media for visibility
Collaborate with influencers to extend your reach.

By focusing your strategies to get more views on Instagram, optimize your posts with compelling visuals and captions that resonate with your audience. For effective email marketing, segment your list by demographics, behavior, and preferences to send targeted, personalized content. Keep a regular email schedule to maintain audience engagement.

Remember to respond quickly to questions and comments on social media, post interactive content like polls and live videos, and maintain a genuine brand voice.

Step 5: Monitor, Analyze, and Adapt

Track key performance indicators, such as traffic, engagement, conversion rates, and ROI, to measure the success of your online marketing strategy.

To gather performance data, you can use tools such as Google Analytics for website insights, social media platforms for engagement metrics, and email marketing services for open and click-through rates.

You can also collect more primary data to see what your customers think about your online presence. Measuring customer satisfaction can provide key insights into how you can improve your digital storefront’s user experience.

Review this data regularly to identify strengths and weaknesses, making data-driven decisions to refine your strategy.

Based on the data you receive, do your best to course-correct where necessary. Stay flexible and adapt to changes in market conditions, audience behavior, and emerging trends to make sure your marketing efforts remain relevant and effective.

Market Like a Master

In conclusion, businesses that embrace a strategic approach to online marketing are better positioned to achieve long-term success in the digital marketplace.

Implementing our five-step process can significantly increase your brand’s visibility online.

Through relevant and compelling content, you can achieve higher engagement, which will help foster stronger connections with your audience.

Moreover, a well-executed online marketing strategy leads to improved return on investment (ROI), as your resources are efficiently used to generate the maximum impact for your company.

Article by:

Vincent van Vliet

Vincent van Vliet is co-founder and responsible for the content and release management. Together with the team Vincent sets the strategy and manages the content planning, go-to-market, customer experience and corporate development aspects of the company.