The Different Online Marketing Tools And For Today’s Businessman
Thanks to the Internet, businessmen of today have access to cheap and free ways (with emphasis on cheap and free) to market their business to their prospective customers. In this article, we’re going to give you a rundown on these marketing tools so you can draw up a marketing plan by the end of this article.
Marketing tools can be divided into two groups: Marketing reach-out platforms that put you in the path of your prospective customers, and tracking tools that tell you how your customers are responding to your marketing campaigns.
First, let’s talk the about the marketing reach-out platforms.
* Social Media
When we say “social media”, we don’t just mean Facebook and Twitter, we also mean LinkedIn and other social media. Unlike other forms of marketing like newspaper advertising, social media requires that you interact with your customers in an interesting play of posts and feedback.
If you are a local business with a solid following, the best way to get started in social media is to create a Facebook page or group where you customers can send you a message and post feedback.
* Information marketing tools
Information marketing is a science on its own which takes people’s natural thirst for knowledge and giving them the information that they want.
The idea behind information marketing is to establish you as an authority or expert in your niche. There are two known ways that you can do information marketing. One is to build a website and make it rank on Google for keywords that are relevant to your website. Two is to write an ebook, publish it and distribute it to the different ebook publishing channels.
The main advantage of information marketing over social media marketing is the trust factor. If you rank high on Google or you are a published author, people will trust and believe your brand.
* Email marketing
Email marketing ties in with information marketing. When you are ranking on Google or have published an ebook, you can lead your visitors to a page where they enter their email address. And when they give you their email address, you communicate with them in a certain way – send four valuable and information-packed emails before sending an email that sells something.
Experienced online marketers know for a fact that email marketing is THE most profitable marketing benefit cost-benefit wise. You will only need to capture an email once and you can sell to the same person over and over again.
* Pay-per-click advertising or PPC
PPC is really no different than advertising on mass media (TV, radio and newspaper) in that you need to write advertising company and pay for your advertisement to appear on the different media. There is one BIG difference, however. With PPC advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Among the different marketing platforms, PPC advertising is one of the quickest ways that you can make money, however, it can also be one of the most costly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
All of the marketing platforms we mentioned actually have tracking tools that are either built-in or that you need to get as an add-on service. For example, Google Adwords lets you track your campaigns right on your account.
We can’t emphasize this enough, but whatever marketing platform you use, you should track how your market is responding to your marketing campaigns.
Marketing And The Importance Of Focus
People who are just starting out in marketing are usually tempted to try different marketing methods at once, sometimes jumping from one method to another with no results to show for it.
The purpose of all marketing methods is, really, to earn money, but that won’t happen if you don’t focus until the money comes in. That said, choose one marketing method, learn all you can about it, and make marketing campaigns.
Test different marketing campaigns until you find a winning formula. If you follow our advice, it won’t be long until you see money come in.
We mentioned earlier that these marketing methods are relatively cheap and some are actually even free. The free methods are Facebook pages and other social media.