If you’ve existed in the online marketing space for any amount of time, you’d most likely have seen the amount of work that can go into it, so it’s understandable if you’ve ever wondered to yourself if it even works. We’re here to tell you: yes, online marketing really does work, but only if you go about it the right way! A lot of factors go into the success of an online marketing strategy, and by not putting enough focus into any one of them, you can throw off your entire plan. Let’s go over what some of these factors are and how you can get your start in online marketing!
Where is Your Audience?
Some may have the misconception that when it comes to online marketing, you have to cast the biggest net as possible. While it’s important to make yourself known in new communities to try and expand your audience, you also have to pinpoint where those communities exist. The market is constantly shifting and telling you the newest and best place to promote yourself on, whether that’s Facebook ads, Instagram, or Tiktok. It’s up to you to filter out that noise and know which of those platforms your audience actually uses. Creating content for and uploading your marketing onto communities that you’re not likely to find new customers in will end up just being a misuse of your time.
Create a Goal
A common issue that we run into with business owners is that they don’t have an end-goal in mind when they start their online marketing. We always recommend that before putting a plan together, you focus on a defined goal that you want to accomplish, whether that’s increasing sales by x amount or generating interest in a new product. Without a goal, not only will your content not feel cohesive, but there’s no way to measure your success. By the end of it, how will you know if your marketing did its job or not if you didn’t have a benchmark for it to meet?
Learning From Mistakes
A business story that our founder, Mindy Lundy Kramer, likes to reflect on and learn from is that of 3M, a conglomerate that operates in multiple different fields. Despite their intial failiures, they used the innovations they discovered along the way to launch their business into all new directions that has sent them skyrocketing into success.
When a marketing strategy that we employed didn’t give us the results we were hoping for, it can be rough to see, but we always make sure to find the value in it because after all, it’s data that we didn’t have before. Just because it didn’t go as planned doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful, since now we know what doesn’t work, we’ll have an easier time finding what does work the next time. Maybe it’s not the right season, or the content doesn’t mesh well with the audience, whatever it is, you can always learn from it.
When it comes to online marketing, what you put into it is what you get out of it. It can be easy to dismiss it as something that “doesn’t work” when a strategy plan doesn’t yield the results you were looking for, but if you target the wrong platforms, don’t chase after a goal, or don’t analyze the results, all you’re doing is setting yourself up for even more failure next time. But if you put time and effort into your plan with all of this in mind, your chances for success can go way up!
