Marketing In An Online World

Every business person is confronted with how to market in strategic and meaningful ways.

With the rise of social media in the past ten years, it is no longer a fad that is going away. But with any marketing strategies you implement it is imperative that you are clear on who your customer is and where will you find them.

Here are a few more questions to consider:

• What does your ideal customer look like? And are they individuals or businesses?
• What are the demographics of your typical customer (gender, age group, income etc?)
• What are the needs and problems of this ideal customer?
• What is the biggest problem you can solve for them?
• What’s most important to your best customers?  What’s least important to them?
• What is the #1 reason people buy from you?

Marketing online successfully is more than throwing up a website and hoping people will find it. To make an online presence effective you now need to be more proactive. Start with including a subscriber box where you capture the name and email of your prospects. This gives you the opportunity to communicate on your terms with those people interested in your products or services through a newsletter, or notification of a new product or sale. Your website developer can help you with this.

Many successful businesses use a blog in conjunction with their website to talk about their industry or niche; it is another way to draw people to you. You can also integrate that blog into your emails and social sites pushing out your content to the channels where your prospects spent their time.

Social media is not a fad, rather it is a revolution! Facebook alone boasts more than 800 million active users and are expected to reach the milestone of one billion users by August of 2012.

The new Timeline design which Facebook implemented March 30, 2012 offer a tremendous opportunity for branding through visual images with the large banner graphic on the top of every page. This is a homerun for those in the arts! This image can be changed and often as you like showing off your work to your followers.

Timeline also offers clickable tabs directly under the banner image that can be linked back to a website or other online sale page that you want to direct your audience to.

Pinterest is another platform that lends itself perfectly to the arts because in simplest of terms it is an online bulletin board to share graphic images. Pinterest joined the social scene in August of 2011 and is quickly moving up in popularity and considered a serious lead generator for many businesses. It is no longer just for the weekend scrap booker or crafter.

I would caution artists about posting their work on sites such as Pinterest as it seems intellectual property laws are not well enforced online leaving you wide open to image theft.

The fastest growing segment of the internet is mobile marketing which had its first big year in 2009. With 425 million mobile users, it is a platform to be considered going forward by formatting your website for mobile viewing and creating a mobile strategy to connect with your prospects just as you via email marketing except you need to gather mobile numbers versus email addresses.

Mobile marketing tends to attract a younger demographic because they conduct their lives via mobile devices, but as mobile technology grows and becomes more mainstream, mobile marketing will as well.

Online marketing can offer you great rewards as a business owner but before you sign up for every social site simply because someone told you to be there, remember to find out what social platforms your target market utilizes because if they are not – you are simply wasting your time.

JoAnne Funch is owner of GIR-Graphics & Innovative Resources, providing creative marketing solutions to small business owners and non-profits who want to gain visibility off-line or on-line through strategic marketing ideas and consistent branding messages  For free marketing tips visit her website www.girpromotions.com. Or, connect with JoAnne on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn