Marketing is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts to put into practice. For marketing to be successful, businesses have to understand their target audience and be able to put themselves in their consumers' shoes in order to understand their buying patterns and behavior.
Online marketing is the new norm. However, advertising in an online format entails far more than just SEO. Yes, SEO is important, and you certainly want to get your site ranked for major keywords and appear in the top search engines. But you also want to engage with your audience in other ways besides through organic SEO.
Establishing Business to Consumer Engagement
Consumer engagement is extremely important and cultivating a strong rapport with your customers is the key to establishing trust and brand recognition. In fact, a good deal of resource should be devoted to building a strong B2C relationship. For the most part, this means forming a two-way communication and turning away from traditional hard sell tactics, which most people find to be obnoxious and off-putting.
Social media is perhaps one of the best ways for reaching out to a target demographic. It is a platform from which businesses can disseminate their content and encourage users to share and comment. It is also a place from which companies can form groups, host a contest or make major announcements.
Analytics
Companies that outsource their marketing to a third party digital agency are recommended to go with a firm that offers some sort of analytics tool. This enables businesses to really gauge their progress to see what is working, what isn't and what can be tweaked for refining results. An analytics tool can measure the amount of traffic generated from specific keywords, measure the traffic brought in from individual social network sites as well as track the results of your PPC campaign or check the conversion rate of your email list.
Web Design
It is a fact that a goldfish has a longer attention span than a human; the latter can usually only hold a thought for an average of eight seconds. While this may seem like a completely irrelevant fact, it has everything to do with marketing. Most visitors to a website will only stick around if they are captivated and intrigued with the layout and presentation. An ecommerce website, especially the landing page, should be professional in design with a blend of images and text. Additions like videos, animation and motion graphics are also additional possibilities. The text also needs to be attention grabbing and should be brief, to the point and compel the reader to explore additional subpages within the site.
Marketing is not an Option
As cumbersome as marketing may be, it is an aspect of running an enterprise that all businesses must learn to do and do well. To obtain a desirable ROI, marketing has to be at the forefront of any business agenda. While there will be trial and error and tremendous resources spent, marketing is what will put your company on the map.
