In this post, we provide a summary of the Top 10 Proven Strategies for Internet Marketing in 2020.
Many organizations hire an administrative assistant in hopes that in addition to handling paperwork and phone calls, he/she will also be able to handle the online marketing efforts. When you see the following list, you’ll probably agree as to why that’s a recipe for frustration and failure. Other organizations may have a dedicated marketing director, but he/she has to consider all the options for marketing the company online and explain to the entire staff which strategies to employ and why.
1. Daily Social Media Posts
Social media took the business marketing industry by storm a couple of decades ago. It was such a profound addition to a brand’s normal marketing options because it came with so much more social interaction. For the first time in history, companies could publish content that reached the masses and received immediate feedback such as likes, comments, and shares. Try that with a TV or newspaper ad. Thus, social media marketing was born with the advent of online social networks.
Tip: We recommend coming up with a social media content rhythm so that not all your posts are the same type of content: e.g., education, inspiration, offer, repeat – or words, image, video, repeat.
Strategy: publish Brand-engaging content to social networks
Pros:
- It’s free to use for organic posts
- There’s an endless array of social networks to use
- If your content is relevant, users engage and share your branded content with more potential customers
Cons:
- It’s crowded – like, 2-3 billion users crowded
- Social networks are constantly trying to keep their users engaged by prioritizing friends & family posts rather than branded posts
- Social networks are also wanting to make their money by selling advertisements, so again they lessen the priority of branded organic posts so that brands will “pay to play”
- Most important: the “shelf life” of an organic post is a matter of hours or one day. If you post once a week, it’s as if you don’t post at all. And even if you post 5x/day for a month, you still have the next month to keep pace. It’s an endless treadmill that keeps your brand top of mind but doesn’t necessarily convert customers at a high percentage. Enter blogs, videos, email, and SEO to the rescue!
- PagePerfect Service: We ♡ social media. We can manage your social media campaigns across all your networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google My Business, Pinterest, and more.
2.Weekly Blog Posts
As has been said for internet marketing for years, content is king. And if you can post articles weekly, Google will reward you – your website will begin to rise to the top. While this may initially sound the same as the social media marketing treadmill, the key difference is that blog posts live on forever. They never expire. Their shelf life isn’t hours or days, but years. Every article and video you post is like a fishing net in the water catching new visitors and potential viral shares for years to come.
Strategy: Post a blog every week and share snippets from the blog on social media
Pros:
- Blog articles live on forever, continually bringing traffic to your site
- Posting on a weekly basis can increase your SEO because Google sees your site as active and authoritative
- You can utilize nearly every paragraph of an article as a social media post, even scheduling the “soundbites” to post on a recurring basis throughout the year
- Most important: internet users prefer to “discover” products and services through articles and videos rather than paid ads – they trust your brand more when they discover it for themselves
Cons:
- It takes time and money to write a high-quality, relevant article each week
- Research shows if you’re trying to rank your article on the first page of Google, you should write a minimum of 2,000 words
- PagePerfect Service: We work with talented US-based content writers to produce content specific to your industry. If you’re interested in pricing or to bundle with other services, simply chat with us now in the lower-right.
3. Regular Video Posts
Here we have essentially the same strategy as the previous section, but in video form. Internet users consume video content more frequently and quickly than all other forms of content combined. And it just so happens that YouTube is the second largest search engine where users search for education content, humor, news, and conduct research on brands, products, and services. If content is king, video content is Superman. Again the principle remains: if you post weekly to your channel, YouTube will reward you.
Strategy: Post A Video to your channel every Week, embed in your blog, and share across social media
Pros:
- Video content is the most relevant and preferred form of content online
- Videos can live on your YouTube channel, then be embedded to your website, and shared across social media
- Bonus: Videos are amazingly effective for retargeting users who watched, say 50% of the video. You can then pay to show only these engaged viewers more ads across the web to move them closer to your brand and down your funnel.
Cons:
- Creating video well typically takes lots of know-how and time
- Buying specialized equipment is expensive
- Coming up with video content can prove challenging
- You often need more than one person to create and edit the video
- PagePerfect Service: We offer a remote video production service where we send you equipment, direct you through your smartphone, edit it and add professional b-roll, music, and images. Chat with us in the lower-right for pricing and questions.
4. Email Marketing
Email marketing has been thought to be dead for some time ever since SMS, retargeting ads, and chat-bots proved so much more effective. However, while it’s true that email opens, clicks, and replies can be dismal compared to other forms of marketing, it is still the cheapest form of marketing. Furthermore, growing and nurturing an email list has additional benefits as well, including targeting that list with ads on Facebook/Instagram, creating lookalike audiences, and increasing the value of your business if you choose to sell the business in the future.
Pro Tip: In the current wild frontier of digital data, you can now grow an email list from anonymous traffic to your site using 3rd-party software. It is legal because the users opted into a privacy policy on 3rd-party websites and happened onto yours which shares the same partner privacy policy. Contact us to explore this amazing strategy to turn your current anonymous traffic into targeted email marketing.
Strategy: Email your list weekly with a variety of topics, including educational, inspirational, Engagement, and offers
Pros:
- It’s virtually free to send emails
- We’re currently experiencing 50-80% open rates for cold email marketing campaigns
- “Train” users to click links in your emails to your website – this will increase your overall traffic to your site which helps for SEO purposes
- Ask for replies to your emails for quick and easy engagement
- Offer private, single-use coupon codes to incentivize your list to take action
- Now you can retarget users who abandoned cart or bounced entirely with email
Cons:
- It’s easy to end up in SPAM or junk mail folders
- People are inundated with so much email marketing that it’s hard to stand out
- For cold email marketing campaigns, you have to know what you’re doing so you don’t ruin your deliverability
- PagePerfect Service: We offer a white-glove email marketing service where we use your current software or set up new software to email your current list and grow your list to a massive size using opt-ins, abandoned carts, and even turning anonymous traffic into known emails. Give us a shout in the chat widget to inquire.
5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is one of the most, if not the most, effective internet marketing strategies available today. It’s actually a blend of…
- Strategies #2 and #3 above (blog articles and video posts) – which we call content marketing;
- Technical optimizations to your website to clearly communicate to Google what your site is about; and
- Off-site optimizations in the form of backlinks. Backlinks (or inbound links) occur when other websites link to your site, signaling to search engines a vote of confidence, trust, and authority.
The currency of Google search is trust, and backlinks have been shown to account for 60% of the trust Google assigns a website in search results. Therefore, we build trust on your site by working daily to grow the number and quality of backlinks to your site. We do this in several ways:
- Press Releases on major news networks and media sites.
- Listings (or citations) in online business directories. There are hundreds of these and we work hard to create, maintain, and fix online directories across the web.
- Sharing information about your brand, products, and services on freely accessible blog posts.
- Organic outreach to high-trust blogs in your industry for guest-post opportunities.
- Creating original, high-quality content on your site that shows up in search engines and eventually get’s shared across the web.
Strategy: Optimize Your Site to clearly communicate with google, then grow the number & quality of backlinks to your site to increase trust with google
Pros:
- SEO is a proven way to market your brand online
- Showing up on the first page of Google for your products and services ensures you will see massive amounts of intent-based traffic to your site every month
- Once you’re ranking on page one for your main search terms, it’s much easier to rank your secondary keywords and to rank in other regions
- Most important: Organic-search traffic is the highest converting of all traffic to a website. This is because users are searching for your products/services and they trust what Google shows them. Industry average close rates are 14.6% vs. 1.7% for cold ads.
- ROI (return on investment) is 22X that of paid ads.
- Depending on the keywords and industry, once you’re at the top of page one you could stick there for quite some time.
Cons:
- SEO is a patience-based strategy, like the game of chess. Depending on your industry and/or region, it can take anywhere from 2-8 months to rank on the first page and see that sweet ROI roll in.
- PagePerfect Service: This is our flagship service. We have ranked national products on page one of Google in as little as 52 days. You will be ecstatic to see customers consistently engaging with your brand from new markets. It’s like having a physical store on the edge of an interstate. Book a free strategy call with us to explore your website’s current rankings and research the most advantageous keywords in your industry.
More coming soon…
6. Facebook Boosted Posts
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7. Facebook Ad Campaigns
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8. Google Paid Search
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9. Google & YouTube Display Ads
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10. Chat Bots
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