PrintEmail

Marketing your business online has massive potential leverage for business – it can work 24/7 marketing your business, anywhere in the world, but like offline marketing you need to put in work and have a successful working online marketing plan to get real, sustained results online.

There is so much “noise” out there on the internet today that it can be very hard to get traction online for most businesses, but that is where most consumers and businesses are searching to make purchases.

When marketing your business online you want to follow the PITT formula, which is:

Plan --> Implement --> Test --> Tweak

First you want an online marketing strategy for you business, don’t just go out and run around the internet trying to market your business, have a clearly defined plan of how you are going to market and advertise your business online.

Where are you going to advertise?  How often are you going to market?  Where are you sending the visitors you are marketing to?  How are you planning on converting these visitors once they are at your site? 

Next you want to go out and implement the plan, and make sure you are testing all of your online marketing to see what is working and what is not working.  Where is your traffic coming from and how is your site working to convert visitors into leads?  Make sure you are tracking all stats for your marketing and your site so that you can easily see which of your marketing strategies are working and which aren’t.

Then ‘tweak’ - start making small changes to your site and to your marketing to improve your results.  Making small changes and testing gets you ahead of the game and means that you are constantly improving your results online, and if something isn’t working, then that small change can simply be undone and there is no huge loss to your business.

Lastly, repeat the cycle to ensure you are always moving your business marketing forward.  The biggest mistake I see most businesses make online, is that they try one thing online to market their business and it doesn’t work, so they give up.  Getting results online for your business is about constant planning, implementation and tweaking.

So where is the best place to market?

Use a wide variety of advertising and marketing sources online, don’t just pick one source and focus all of your effort on that one source, because what will happen if that source suddenly disappeared?

The best place to market online really comes down to the business and who their target customers are.  Not every online advertising and marketing strategy is going to work for every business – it is not a one size fits all thing, and the strategy needs to change for every business depending on their size and their target customers.  That is why the testing and tweaking system is so important.

Businesses want to think about who their ideal client is and where are they hanging out online?  What sites do they visit?  What are they doing online?

If you are a business selling fishing gear, then go and find fishing hobby sites and forums where fishing enthusiasts are hanging out and go an interact with them to market your business.

Search engine advertising works well, as long as you have a website that is converting visitors, otherwise you are just wasting money.