Online marketing strategy in 6 steps

The online marketing strategy is the starting point of online success. In an online marketing strategy, you describe how you are going to achieve your online goals.

A good strategy gives direction and ensures more results. Because you develop a clear online marketing strategy, you are required to make choices. These choices ensure that you don't target everything to everyone, but that you make very specific use of an online marketing plan. This ensures that you target the right audience in the right way, which ensures more results.

The most likely answer to the question "what is your goal?" is "more sales" or "more customers." In the end, that is always the goal. You want to sell more of your products or services. And yet, every website or web shop has unique online marketing goals. Not everyone starts at the same point. Are you launching an entirely new product? Then your online marketing goal is different than for a website that will sell more to current website visitors.

The question of where you are now is hugely important in this regard. By researching your current situation and your current position in the market, you can determine what online marketing is the reality.

Examples of online marketing objectives

Your online marketing goals can be about brand awareness, website visitors, leads or direct sales. Some examples of online marketing objectives are:

• Increase website conversion rate from 1% to 2% for the same number of users on the website
• Number of website visitors from social media increases by 30%
• Growth in repeat purchases
• Increase number of brochure downloads by 10%

To reach your target audience, though, you must first know who your target audience is and where to find them online. We often hear as an answer to this question "Everyone between 18 and 65. It may well be that your product or service is of interest to people of 18 and meanwhile also to a target group of 65, but you still want to narrow down this target group. If you don't choose a target group, no one will choose you. Your target audience wants to feel addressed and recognize themselves in the content you share with them. That's why it's important to make choices and choose your target audience.

You can start by researching your current Web site visitors or customers. How old is this group? Are they mostly men or women? What region are they from?

You can also answer these questions by doing research within your organization. Ask questions of your sales or customer service department. They are in frequent contact with the target audience and can probably tell you a lot.

Try to recognize patterns in this that occur regularly. This will help you form a clear picture of your target audience.

Chances are your competitors (already) have an online marketing strategy. To establish your own online marketing strategy, it may be helpful to research your competition. What are they betting on online? What are they doing well? What are they not doing as well?

By researching your competitor's strengths, you can determine whether to go in the same direction or take a completely different online marketing strategy.

Some examples you can look at when researching competitors are:

• On which search terms is the competitor found well organically?
• What search terms is the competitor advertising on?
• What social media channels is the competitor active on?
• Does the competitor actively share content? If so, what content is it?

An important part of your online marketing strategy, are the means you will use to reach your target audience. If you know where your target audience can be found online, this should be a relatively easy choice.

We do not recommend starting all at once on all online channels where the target audience is. It's better to do some channels well than to do all channels halfway.

Examples of online marketing resources

There are a huge number of online marketing resources where you can reach your target audience. Some examples:

• Google
• Bing
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Twitter

KPIs (Key Performace Indicator) allow you to measure whether you are on the right track to meet your online marketing objective. So within the online marketing strategy, your KPIs are important for evaluation and optimization.

At BTTR, we work with reports that provide insight into the KPIs. For each KPI you see the progression in a graph. This year in relation to last year. This also provides insight into seasonal trends, updates from Google and adjustments to the website.

Online marketing dashboard

In addition to standard KPI reporting, we also make data insightful in an online marketing dashboard. In this way, we make the results of an online marketing strategy insightful and readable.

Examples of online marketing KPIs

Online marketing KPIs are based on the overall online marketing goals you have already set in the online marketing strategy. The KPIs provide insight into whether you are on the right track. For online marketing KPIs, you can think of:

• Number of visitors to the website from Google
• Number of visitors to the website from Facebook
• Number of sessions on the contact page
• Time on page of a specific product page
• Bounce rate of a specific service page

Once the online marketing resources are known, you can start working on an online marketing plan for all of them. For example, the strategy to increase findability in Google is very different from the strategy to attract more visitors from social media.

SEO strategy

In this SEO strategy, you describe the main focus search terms for the website and what work needs to be done to improve online findability. The first step is to research relevant search terms. What search terms do you want to be found in Google for? What search terms is the target audience looking for? Read more about how to get higher in Google here.

Google Ads strategy

For Google Ads, as for SEO, a strategy is determined. The first step is to find relevant search terms. This is because it is important to advertise in a targeted manner in order to achieve the highest possible results. Specific search terms are important, because then you can be sure that you are addressing the right target group. On the page 'advertising on Google' you can read what else needs to be done when you start advertising in Google.

Social media strategy

To create a social media strategy, it is important to decide whether you are going to advertise through social media or only grow organically. This is because these are two very different ways to appeal to your target audience. The difference is actually the same as between SEO and SEA. With social media advertising, you pay for your reach and you can reach a target audience in a very targeted way. With organic social media content, you interact with your followers, who are often already engaged with your brand. There are also many different social media channels, such as:

• Instagram
• Facebook
• Linkedin
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Pinterest

Your social media strategy is an important part of your online marketing strategy because social media allows you to reach an audience that you do not reach through Google or an audience that you can once again influence.

Conversion optimization strategy

The SEO strategy, SEA strategy and social media strategy often drive more visitors to your website. That is a great first step, but ultimately you want those visitors to take action. You want them to contact you, purchase a product through the web shop or subscribe to your service.

With the right conversion optimization strategy, you increase the conversion rate on your website. The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who proceed to an action you determine. Collecting relevant data is an important part of this. Because what works for one webshop may not work so well for another. This involves analyzing, applying, testing and adjusting. This is how you find out what works for your customers.

Want to read more about conversion optimization? Then go to our blog "higher sales with conversion optimization."

Email marketing strategy

You can deploy e-mail marketing from different objectives. So that's step one of your strategy. What do you want to achieve with e-mail marketing? Examples of objectives, are:

1. Becoming top-of-mind again with your existing customers, to trigger them to make a new purchase from you.
2. Convert potential customers to paying customers.
3. Expand the mailing list, to increase awareness of your brand.

Depending on what goal you have, determine which email marketing strategy suits you. For example, are you going to work with objective 1? Then you can use email cross-selling. This means that you offer the customer a product that is related to the product he already bought from you. For example, if a customer bought a pair of sports leggings, you can offer her a unique offer for a sports shirt.

This cross sell strategy is an example of the strategies we employ as an email marketing strategy.

Help with your online marketing strategy

As you have read, creating an online marketing strategy is not a matter of an hour's work. You need a lot of information about your goals and your target audience, as well as the possibilities of online marketing resources, tools, channels and developments. That's why it can be helpful to tackle this with an online marketing agency.

We can help give you direction on your goals and clearly map out your online marketing strategy. Together with you, we get to work on achieving your online goals. Want to know more? Please contact us.

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