The Nuts and Bolts of an Online Marketing System

I’ve said it often enough in the past that your success in online marketing depends on your online marketing system, which is your strategic funnel for capturing leads and converting them to sales. I’ve also said many times that online marketing , especially in the starting stage, will take up much of your time, attention, energy, and yes, a significant sum of money so you can invest in reliable tools and products that can help you out.

Most of the hard work involved is in the trickiness of figuring out what parts and pieces to put together in  your own online marketing system so that all the bits and pieces work together  effectively once up and running to automatically generate traffic, conversions and sales.

To put all the info together now so that we can see the whole idea, here are the 9 components that make up a complete online marketing system.

1). A website that is attractive, functional and easy for your customers to use

2). A content system

• that communicates to your customers engagingly
• relays the purpose of your business effectively
• suggests helpful and useful information or materials that they can use for themselves
• informs your audience about your products and services and updates them regularly of new happenings

3). On-site optimization – Investing in legit and correctly done SEO goes a long way. Your website’s framework has to be effective for the search engines to capture easily. Web pages, posts, internal links, keywords and images you use will have to be planned for the long-term and tracked and updated regularly.

4). Off-site optimization – You have to invest in link building in the right way so that you stay on top of your competitors. You have to rank high and be visible all the time so that your customers find you first rather than lose them to the competition.

5). Local search strategy – I believe this is the best way for small businesses to be more visible nowadays especially since Google supports it in a major way. Creating a plan for your business to be found in local searches should be one of your top priorities.

6). Social media strategy – You need to be in sites where your local audience is. Your social media plan of action should be:

• active and busy,
• happening frequently to establish a pattern,
• monitored regularly for effectiveness.

7). Email marketing – A very direct and personal way to reach out, market and sell to your opt-ins successfully because they’re interested and receptive to your information.

8). Video marketing – A more powerful and engaging tool to talk to your audience since high traffic is in video sharing sites. I suggest a mix of text and video content to stay creative.

9). Analytics – The tools you use to measure and analyze your website activities are the only way you can understand how effective your marketing mix is in converting your website traffic.

How strategic the entire online marketing system will be is all up to you. You alone can make decisions on which tools, channels and methods will fit perfectly well into the marketing mix to make it powerful in producing your desired results.