Online Marketing Strategies | How To Create A Winning Online Marketing Campaign

This guide will introduce you to some of the most important and different online marketing strategies that businesses need to get a good grasp of. These strategies will certainly help you improve your customer acquisition both in the short-term and long-term.

Online marketing has evolved quite significantly and keeping up with all the online marketing strategies out there can be a bit overwhelming. There are many strategies out there. How do you know which ones are good on paper and which one are actually effective?

It’s important that you constantly discuss with your digital marketing agency and or in-house marketing team the best online marketing strategies that suit your business and your business model.

 

My philosophy in life and couldn’t be more practical for marketing too is the following. To become more effective, there are three steps anyone should follow.

1. Learn from others’ mistakes. Don’t make the mistake they made.
2. Follow the blueprints of others who have achieved what you want to achieve.
3. Internalise, evolve, improve and innovate on what others have done.

My advice is to take this approach and apply it to the online marketing strategies I have in the post.

What is an effective online marketing strategy?

Here are the qualities an effective online marketing strategy needs to have for your business to adopt it.

1. Incrementally higher or equal ROI as to your current average ROI
2. Falls inline with your over-arching marketing strategy
3. Relatively easy to implement and integrate
4. Provides quick wins
5. Will ensure a medium-term to long-term upside
6. Scalable and your team can scale as your business can grow
7. Not widely adopted by your competitors. If everyone is doing it, you are likely not going to see a massive upside.

#1 Create content with virality in mind

Marketing experts will have mixed opinions on this. Seeking virality shouldn’t be your ultimate goal but it is one concept every business should draw practical ideas from. And if you ‘go viral’ well done. If you haven’t yet, ‘thinking viral’ will still have a ton of benefits.

I’ll draw an example from a YouTube channel called Mr Beast which you may or may not have heard about. It’s currently in the top 20 most subscribed YouTube channels with over 40 million subscribers. If you ask Mr Beast himself whether he tries to create viral content or not, I am not sure if his answer will be a straight ‘yes’. However, when you analyse what he does and the type of content he produces, there is a lot of ways you can see him focusing on going viral. One of the most watched videos on the channel is ‘Last To Leave $800,000 Island Keeps It‘

Now if that’s not a type of content that can go viral, I don’t know what is. He is giving $800,000 to the person that is the last to leave an island. Just the title makes you want to watch it. There are a ton of lessons you can learn from this. You are probably thinking, so I got a business that sells insurance or software or even women clothing, how does this even apply to me?

Well, the first thing is that Mr Beast (as other highly ranked YouTubers) don’t just pick cool titles and descriptions for their content. They think hard about content ideas that elicit certain emotions from their audience. Shocking, crazy, fascinating, unbelievable, controversial, hilarious, are all emotions that are high state that people seek. And what they aim for is to create content that can truly trigger these emotions.

Is your content triggering high state emotions? Content that aims for triggering high emotion states helps elevate your online marketing strategy tremendously. If your content is doing that, thinking about things like ‘how I should write the title’ or ‘how do we get the maximum visibility on our posts’ will become a lot less important. Mr Beast spends no time on trying to get his content viral. All he does is invest a lot of time creating content that’s stimulating.

Regardless of your business or industry, adopting this mentality or strategy, will unequivocally bring you excellent results in the short-term and long-term.

#2 Create a content machine

There are two important components to creating effective content. The first is the type of content, how engaging, authentic, creative, and valuable it is. The second which is just as important is about utilising one idea, one piece of content and maximising it’s potential by allowing it to multiply and transform into an army of content pieces that can be reach the most amount of your audience. I call it the true content potential.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the pound-for-pound king of content marketing in my opinion. He created a framework for people to follow to create more content everyday. Your online marketing strategy couldn’t be complete without a sound content marketing strategy such as the ones Gary often talks about. Here is his high level approach. He called it ‘How to make 64 content pieces in a day’.

How To Make 64 Pieces Of Content In A Day from Gary Vaynerchuk

So how do you create your content machine? You have to think about the medium types. You essentially have

1. Test
2. Images
3. Audio
4. Video

There are endless ways you can create content through these medium types. For starters, you have

1. Blogging
2. Text posts
3. Image Posts
4. Short form videos
5. Long form videos
6. Webinars / Presentations
7. Audio / Video Podcast

I have a complete guide on content marketing that you can check out to get more ideas and learn how to implement a great content marketing plan.

#3 Ace your sales and marketing funnel

What separates winners from losers in online marketing is how effective their marketing funnels are. Your funnel is one of the most online marketing components. I have a complete guide on how to build the best marketing funnels for any type of business.

To create an effective marketing funnel, you need to do the following

1. Understand your customer personas / buyer personas
2. Personalise your communication based on your audience segments
3. Focus on providing value and educating your audience
4. Constantly A/B test your funnel to fine-tune it as you go

#4 Focus on loyalty not following

What is brand loyalty? Is it when people recognise your brand name? Is it when they come back for more purchases? Is it when they tell their friends and family about you? Or is it when they expect more from you? Brand loyalty starts with recognition that you as an organisation, product or service represent something significant for them to be acknowledged and recognised.

The old definition of brand loyalty is the tendency of consumers to continuously purchase one brand’s products over another. Today’s definition of brand loyalty is when people go out of their way to recommend your product and business.

Brand loyalty is a journey that starts with awareness and purchase. In fact, sometimes repeat purchases don’t necessarily guarantee loyalty. Loyalty is a much deeper state. Think about sports fans. Rarely do they change teams or players they support, do they?

One of the most important online marketing strategies that people often ignore is brand loyalty.

I am a huge UFC fan. And for the last 5 years, I was a big fan of Jon Jones, previous light heavy weight champion – amongst other fighters. But Jon Jones had many controversies over the years from performance enhancing drugs to drinking while driving. In his recent fights, I remember him saying to his fans something along the lines of ‘Thanks for the support, I know it hasn’t been easy to support me’. And although he remained a popular athlete, his viewership declined relative to other athletes of his level and achievements. To me, that was one of those moments I realised that loyalty is one of the hardest things to build and maintain.

The question I have for you is what are you doing to build and maintain loyalty? Having an excellent product is where you scratch the surface. People want to see your business lead on all fronts. How do you contribute to them outside the product or service they buy from you is a good place to start. But also, people like to see how your business contributes to the community and our lovely planet EARTH.

For example, becoming environmentally friendly is a way a lot of brands jumped on. A couple of years ago, Adidas pledged to use only produce fully recycled shoes by 2024.

Having a superior product that constantly pushes that bar is important. But loyalty is much more influenced by what you do and what you represent out of that. To do that, you need to understand what makes your audience tick. What topics and issues matter to them? Is it mental health? Is it political topics? Is it about giving back?

Another important aspect is having consistency. Using the same example, if Adidas is committed to fully recycled shoes yet their factories produces relatively high carbon emissions, that can fire back and damage the brand. Consistency is an important tactic and so, for your online marketing strategy to be more effective, you need to communicate consistent values throughout your content and all forms of communication.