Although we began as a freelance writing company turned SEO copywriting which now focuses on developing full online marketing campaigns, it is very important to brainstorm ideas before putting them into action. Whether you have a team you work with or if you are an individual working alone to create a full campaign, we have learned a few tricks which can help you on your way to creating a strong campaign as well as get exposure for your product or service.
1) Decide on how you want to be viewed online. Whether by the Website name, a product name or your individual name. Of course this depends on what you are selling. For example if you are an artist selling original art, most likely you want to create a brand centered around your name. From your Website domain name to your logo through all the social media networks, this name and brand will be how you stand out from the crowd as well as be recognized from the competition.
2) Decide what type of strategy you want to use in grabbing a visitor’s attention. Do you want your campaign to be focused on “scandal” type headlines or do you want visitors to view your site as a clean, wholesome, family friendly place to visit while online. An example is say you’re a well known pizza chain who wants to target the college scene.
What type of approach would you want to use to grab this particular crowd? We would suggest not only blogging daily but to incorporate social media into your online marketing campaign. Whether on Twitter you give away coupons or free soft drinks to hitting the college crowd on MySpace and Facebook and creating a Fan page where you can post multiple sales for all fans to receive, this is only one idea toward targeting the crowd of your choice.
3) Do you want to target specific locales or target the global population and if so how do you want to approach it? Do you want separate efforts made toward locales as state, cities, basically following the same plan for each but just using targeted keywords and/or sub-domains focused on, for example, West Palm Beach, Florida or generalized areas like Southeast Florida. And then take it one step further to where you not only target a specific locale but then a specific population of consumers ranging from mothers to fathers or singles.
4) Are you a hotel looking to give visitors an option to search points of interests within a certain radius from your hotel like beaches or theme parks? This is another idea when brainstorming for your online marketing campaign. If you are a one building hotel located on the beach in Southeast Florida or a big corporate chain of hotels, mapping out a plan of action for hotel SEO is a highly suggested idea.
5) Free local listing sites is another option. It doesn’t take that long to write up an ad and confirm it. If you have multiple locations and again, looking for local business, listing yourself in the local directory is another easy option.
6) Setting up an analytics program on your Website so you can see where the traffic is coming from as well as measure which online marketing techniques seem to work best for your site is a must! As I repeatly say during our radio show, if you don’t know where your traffic is coming from and don’t know which is converting, then how do you know what techniques are working!
Although you may know many of these techniques, and these are just the beginning, it is always good to remind ourselves that we need a plan of action when approaching an online marketing strategy.Testing and tracking is a must and doing your keyword research of course needs to be incorporated into your strategy decisions.