With the rapid development of e-commerce, online marketing is becoming more and more popular. Many online marketing experts believe that it will be the next hot career. Although the threshold of online marketing is not high, one without any technology is able to do this job; it needs the following ten skills to do it well:
I Accumulation of marketing resources
It is essential for a marketer to find the right platform to market products. Resources are the foundation of the whole marketing process, the more the better. First step to accumulate marketing resources is to create a folder of online marketing and set different categories inside it, such as health websites, auto websites, entertainment websites, webmaster class, design class, design material, tourism, website navigations, etc. This will help you to find corresponding resources conveniently. Then you can make an Excel table and fill it with abovementioned websites. It will become a huge wealth over time.
II Product positioning and target customer identification
When you market a product, the first and foremost thing you have to do is to get familiar with your product. For example, suppose you are a marketer of a video website, first of all, you have to get a general idea about which video is main product, HD or SD, which channel is main channel, video update frequency, popular videos and comments, etc.
Next, you have to analyze target customers. For example, your company is a video website and entertainment video is main product. With this information, you can nail down target customers: most of them are young students, age 18-25.
III Search for target customers
After the appropriate positioning of target customers, you need to analyze how to find them. Back to the above example, you have already known students are target customers, and then you have to launch a series of investigations of their favorite places:
1. Popular post bar
2. Entertainment forum
3. Blog
4. Related entertainment video websites
5. Social networking websites
6. Similar websites of yours
IV Shaping product value
Nowadays, there are numerous brands in the market, most of which are of little difference. Even different brands of different companies are produced by the same manufacturer. In order to make your product stand out, you need to give customers a sound reason that your product is different from others and competitive.
V Develop detailed marketing plan
After the above preparations, all you need to do is to attract the target customers to your website. Here are eight common ways:
1. Forum marketing
2. Blog marketing
3. Article marketing
4. SEO marketing
5. Traffic exchange
6. E-mail marketing
7. Paid marketing
8. Q&A marketing
VI Data analysis
Data analysis plays a central role during the whole marketing process. After keep doing the above five steps for some time, you need to have a general idea about which forum, website or blog has maximum traffic by analyzing the data you collected. When you reach a conclusion, you can narrow the scope, and focus your marketing job on most effective forums, websites and blogs to save cost.
You can make good use of some analytic tools, which are for enterprises to analyze website solutions. It can not only let you learn more about website traffic and marketing effectiveness, but also offers flexible and convenient ways to check and analyze traffic data. With the help of which, you can write accurately-positioned advertisements, strengthen marketing plan and increase the traffic of the website more confidently.
VII Search for latest and popular materials
When you find target customers, you need to search for appropriate materials to attract their attention. You can search for the billboards in such places as Google trends, Google insights, etc. The former demonstrates relative orientation of the user when he searches a topic in Google; the latter displays recommended topics and hot billboards on the internet.
VIII Observe the rules of each marketing platform
You have to know and observe the rules of each marketing platform, such as, what content can be sent, which column is of high popularity, and what the current hottest topic is, are there levels and incentive mechanism, etc. You need to develop special marketing plan for corresponding rules.
IX Willing to share your resources and experience
Once you share your resources with others, they will be willing to share with you theirs. With these interactions, you can not only expand your social contacts, but also improve yourself a lot.
X Self-review
You had better to summarize your success and failure everyday. Keep the successful experience and remove failed one, so as to get better day by day.