Best Online Marketing Strategies Every Entrepreneur

Being an Entrepreneur in the present digital age can be an overwhelming ride. To be successful,  you need to embrace right marketing strategies at the right time else you may be lost in playing catch up game.  However, seeing the present online scenario, it is easier to get intimidated by the vast amount of marketing strategies. Don’t despair we have got you covered.

In this blog, I am sharing 4 best online marketing strategies that will set you for success in the year 2017.

#1. Build a Powerful Personal Brand-

The term ‘Branding’ has been long associated with companies but in the present digital age it is equally important for an entrepreneur to build a personal brand. What exactly is personal branding?

A quote by Jeff Bezos (Founder, Amazon.com) explains it, “Personal Brand is what people say about you when you leave the room”. To be precise, personal branding is about your professional reputation in the market. Through personal branding, you can personify your brand and be visible & accessible to your target audience. At the end of the day,  your consumers are human and they can connect with your company in a better way when they know the person associated with it.

In simple words, personal branding gives a ‘face’ to your business. So, you need to focus on building a powerful personal brand to give your company more credibility in the marketplace. Build an effective online marketing strategy that helps you in branding yourself in front of your audience.

#2. Active Social Media Presence–

Social Media is a powerful platform that has immense potential in not only building rather nurturing your social media audience. It gives you great brand visibility and recognition. To engage your audience in a better way you need to share posts or content that is of  great value to your audience and represents your brand as well. Don’t use only promotional content if you want to gain traction rather a mix of promotional and interactive content will help you build loyal followers. Use interesting videos, live Q & A sessions to directly interact with your fans and followers, come up with innovative social media contests, giveaways to keep your audience engaged. Keep the consistent graphic design of all your social media profiles, it helps in creating brand familiarity.

Many successful entrepreneurs utilize the power of social media to gain more visibility and connect with their audience in a more agile way. Take a look at this example:

Richard Branson ( The genius behind Virgin Group, an entrepreneur, an author, and Philanthropist) he is actively involved in social media marketing and consistently creates unique content for each social media channel.  He keeps his fans and followers engaged by sharing unique content that interests his audience and also often shares about his professional journey, failures & fears to keeps his audience intact. This entrepreneur has become a personal brand in himself and enjoys a massive fan following on each of his social media channels.

#3. Utilize Email Marketing-

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools to drive engagement and ROI. It has become a go-to-channel for every business be it small or large.

Undoubtedly, email marketing is the most cost effective way to promote your products, services, communicate with your customers and reach your business goals.  Here are some stats uncovered:

  • On an average, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, a return of $48 can be expected.
  • As per a survey by Exact Target , 77% of  consumers still prefer emails over any other marketing channel for all communications, promotions, and any kind of updates.
  • In addition, promotional emails have great influence and it has been observed 44% of email recipients made atleast one purchase on receiving a promotional email.

Though, email marketing strategies have changed over the time and to get best marketing ROI here are 3 tactics:

1) Personalize your message- Gone are the days when sending a standard email to all your subscribers was good enough to drive conversions, now you need to send personalized emails to get better results.

Acc to Prnewswire.com, companies who employ personalized promotional mailings experience 41% higher unique click rates and 29% higher unique open rates as compared to non-personalized mailings.

Personalization refers to using customer data to create a personalized message. There are many companies that effectively utilize personalized emails, amazon is one such company that is great at personalization.

For example:

  • All the emails from Amazon are addressed by reader’s name to add a personal touch.
  • Promotional emails are based on buyer’s purchase history.

2) Send mobile-friendly emails- In 2014, 42% of marketing emails were opened using mobile devices and now the number has reached 54%.  Now you know if you don’t optimize your emails for mobile devices then you are less likely to experience conversions.

3) Use Drip Email Campaigns- Through drip email campaigns you can send pre-defined messages to your target audience over a consistent period of time. Emails in drip email campaigns are more personalized, target-specific and timely that result in both better click through and open rates.

To achieve success from your email marketing campaigns,  you need to employ above- mentioned strategies.

#4. Conversion Optimization-

Conversion optimization enables you to maximize your rate of conversion by implementing small changes on your website.  Here are few things that help in conversion optimization:

  • User Journey Scenarios– Understanding buyer personas, purchase history, buying patterns and preferences make an important part of your CRO efforts.
  • User Surveying-It includes study of user opinions, attitudes, personality, preferences and lifestyle.
  • Analysis (Demographic and Psychographic)- Demographic analysis focuses on who your buyers are whereas Psychographic analysis focus on why they should buy from you.
  • Web Psychology– It is all about understanding human-brain interaction to communicate effectively with your target audience.
  • Regular A/B Testing- Regular A/B testing lets you know which part of your web pages perform better and which needs improvement.

#5. SEO-

SEO is the process of making your website search engine friendly so that people searching for your products or services can easily find your website. You need to abide by the latest SEO algorithms to climb up the ladder in search engine rankings. SEO is a vast concept and you need to invest time and energy to get results. Let’s take dive into 4 factors that can make your  SEO game strong.

1) Content Marketing– High-quality content delivers a tremendous value, when you consistently produce cornerstone content with specific keywords, it helps you improve your listings in the Google SERP.  However, creating content is not enough, you need to market it on authority sites like LinkedIn, Reddit and quora.

2) Link Building- Backlinks are backbone of Seo, so you need a well-defined link building strategy in place to gain better visibility on search engines. However, abstain from adopting unnatural tactics to get more backlinks as you may get penalized for same.

3) Mobile-friendly Sites- In the recent times, mobile searches have surpass desktop searches and to keep up the pace you need a mobile-friendly site to deliver a good user- experience on mobile devices else your bounce rate will shoot up.

4) Keyword Optimization– It is the best time to target long-tail keywords, they are specific keyword phrases that can improve your site rankings tremendously. Start with the easier keywords first then move on to more competitive ones.

#6.  Remarketing-

Retargeting or remarketing is an effective online marketing strategy that helps you in improving your conversion rate.  With remarketing you can keep your brand in front of your target audience using display Adwords & other targeted display even after they leave your website. SMS is also a very effective channel for retargeting, so consider using a good online SMS platform for this purpose. Retargeting is a great technique as you are making an advertising spend on people who have already visited your site once thus they are familiar with your brand and have shown interest in your product/services earlier. Majority of visitors don’t turn into conversions in the first visit, here retargeting plays a great role. It helps you to reach those visitors again who din’t converted right away.

However to drive maximum conversions, instead of using plan text retargeting ads, you can use short videos they are more engaging and give information in the most crisp way. 

#7. Live Streaming Videos takes center-stage-  

Live streaming videos are enjoying the center stage and it is not going away soon. Live streaming can be referred as an extension of video marketing and it has opened up an altogether new world of interactivity. If you want to stay ahead in the online marketing space then live streaming videos need to be part of your marketing plan. Now, audience are demanding more in-the-moment content and followers can watch the event live which they otherwise cannot be part of. Many brands are using this feature to keep their audience engaged.

For Example- Grazia, made an excellent use of this live streaming video feature, this fashion magazine company live streamed their many events to give users  a sneek peek into their behind-the-scenes footage. In addition, users were are given chance to participate in live debate wherein they can submit questions live over social media. Grazia received amazing response from this and it helped them in further increasing their fan base. It is the right time to thing of live video strategy for your business.

#8. Interactive Emails

Interactive emails are the latest marketing trend, they allow users to interact with emails right from their inbox without any need to open another page. Interesting isn’t it?

With the combination of integrated HTML and CSS, these interactive emails allow customers to make a buying decision without redirecting to website. Within the email, customers are given the option to add items to their carts, choose between styles and colors, check options of products using drop-down menus, make payments and in some cases even complete a purchase right from the inbox.

Though interactive emails are a relatively new concept but they can dramatically improve your click through rates. When customers will see that you are sending interactive emails not the conventional mails for promotions they will surely sense that your company is step ahead of others.

For Example- Burberry, famous fashion luxury brand did an amazing job with interactive emails. Burberry designed an interactive email that allowed users to personalized their product from within the mail. Users were given the option to personalize their scarf in a simple three-step process that too within the mail.

Last Thoughts- The above-listed strategies are tested and not only help you stay ahead of your competition but will also give you best bang for your buck.