5 Online Marketing Basics Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know Nobody knows everything about doing business on the Internet but it is pretty clear by now what the essentials are.
By Rocco Baldassarre Edited by Jessica Thomas
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Entrepreneurs spend a considerable amount of time learning how to boost their businesses. Marketing is key to the success of a business and online marketing is ever so important. According to Constant Contact, 84 percent of people say that the biggest difference in small businesses between now and five years ago is the use of more online marketing tools.
Every entrepreneur needs to be familiar with these five concepts to maximize online marketing results.
1. Upselling and customer loyalty are profitable.
The standard online campaign is expected to sell products profitably. This is also referred to as "single sale campaigns" because each sale is meant to be profitable. These campaigns can turn out to be unprofitable due to rising advertising costs and price wars. One solution is to make it profitable with upsells and the life time value of a newly acquired customer.
It is much easier to sell to existing customers than to acquire a new one. Consequently, create a strategy that increases the amount of items or services they order once they have come to trust you.
Related: The 2 Fundamental Things Ecommerce CEOs Should Know About Retaining Customers
2. Look-alike audiences do work.
Let someone else do the heavy lifting. By installing a few pixels you can allow advertising platforms to collect data about your customers and learn more about their online behaviors. These pixels will then work as a targeting tool and help the advertising platforms to find additional users with similar online behaviors with the goal to increase your online sales.
Typical examples are the Google Display Select Targeting and Facebook Lookalike Audiences. Google Display Select targets people who are similar to the ones that visit your site through the search campaigns. It works best if your campaigns have had traffic and conversions for a couple of months.
Facebook Lookalike Audiences target either people who are similar to those who already like your page or profiles similar to the profiles of your existing customers.
3. Social media is good media.
Many businesses worry social media might be not a good advertising tool. However, social media offer so many targeting methods that it has become a good advertising platform for most businesses.
Social media can work better for some businesses than others. As a rule of thumb, test Linkedin when marketing to businesses and Facebook when marketing to consumers, though many B2B businesses have been successful with Facebook advertising. Try Twitter Video Ads, Stumble Upon's Paid Discovery, Promoted Pins, +Post Ads for Google+ and more to reach your target audience.
Related: 4 Free Must-Use Analytics Tools for Social-Media Marketers
4. Testing is not immediately profitable.
Testing new advertising channels might not be profitable at first but that doesn't mean that you should pause it right away. You should expect to have new advertising channels converting up to 50 percent more than existing ones.
This implies that they have potential and simply require tune ups or optimizations before scaling up the budget. Testing is especially advantageous for accounts that are successful but require more traffic volume to boost sales.
5. Expand campaigns based on what you learn.
Using a platform such as Google Analytics is a must for collecting data such as what pages people visit, what products they bought after their first purchase, how much time they spend on certain pages, what pages they visit after, age, gender, geographical area of your customers and more. The trick in using Google Analytics is to take this data and use it across platforms to scale up results.
For instance, generate traffic through Facebook, find out what portion of this traffic is behaving well on your site and show ads to only this portion via the Google Search Network. A concrete example would be to find out what services or products people who came from Facebook Ads bought. Step two would then be to make a list of the people who spent the most and show ads to those people on Google with a traditional Google Search Network Campaign.
