3 Problems and the Solutions for Successful Online Marketing

First things first: what is online marketing? It’s actually really straightforward. Any tactic that gets your company name out there on the internet is considered online marketing. Examples include search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing and even good old EDM blasts.

Note that online marketing is not the same thing as digital marketing. Digital marketing uses digital channels (hence the name!), whether they are online or not. This includes using mobile phones, TV, outdoor digital billboards and more.

But let’s go back to online marketing. It seems straightforward enough. After all, anything you do online is online marketing, right? How difficult can it be? Successfully conducting online marketing campaigns, however, can be tricky. There are several reasons for this.

Reason 1: There are so many people online that if you try to target them all, your marketing efforts become extremely diluted and far less effective.

Solution: Target only the demographic that your product or service appeals to. Fortunately, online marketing is a mature enough industry that there are heaps of tools available to help you direct your campaign efforts to the right audience. Facebook marketing, for example, lets you choose the age, gender, geographic location and even interests of the users you want to show your advertisement to.

Reason 2: People on the internet are bombarded by a lot of content. This results in fierce competition when you try to get your content out there.

Solution: Be smart about what you put out there. After filtering out your target demographic, it’s possible to narrow your focus further to increase your success rate. When running a Google AdWords campaign, for example, you could target people who are looking for “office furniture” and hope they visit your site and see something they like.

Or you could work smart and tweak your campaign keywords to target people who are looking for “ergonomic adjustable office standing desk Singapore”. By making your keywords longer and more specific, you don’t get as many eyeballs on your ad, but the quality of the views are way higher. You are more likely to convert people who see your ad to customers because they’ve filtered themselves out for you – these are people who know what they want, and you have it. At the end of the day, your purpose of running this online marketing campaign is to increase sales, isn’t it?

Reason 3: Every online marketing platform has its own tools and best practices, which takes time to learn and understand.

Solution: Sit down, do the research and learn how to run campaigns on every platform you want to target. Or, if you don’t have the time or bandwidth to do so, you could simply hire a specialist to do it for you. We recommend doing this because there are a lot of intricacies when it comes to online marketing and it is a better use of resources. Of course you should still do some basic research so that you know what you are spending your money on and to ensure that you hire a good online marketing agency, but unless you’re willing to put in the time and energy, it is easier to harness the expertise of people who do online marketing for a living.

What other problems have you faced when running online marketing campaigns? Contact us to let us know and we’ll see what we can do to help!