Online marketing offers you a huge range of tools to reach new customers and clients, with the benefit of letting you segment the market and focus on speaking to your target audience specifically. By narrowing down your audience, you can focus on the most compelling benefits of your product and service, generating leads more effectively and for a lower cost.

What type of online marketing does my business need?

There are dozens of different online marketing mixes you could use to grow your business – though some will be more cost-effective than others. As every business and marketplace is unique, you will benefit from discussing your online marketing with a professional – whether they are an online marketer, a marketing strategist or a marketing agency. It is likely that they will need to conduct market research before they will be able to recommend what mix of tools and techniques are appropriate for your strategy.

What are the most commonly used online marketing tools?

• A website
• Online display advertising (PPC)
• Social media marketing
• Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation

This common combination of techniques and tools achieves a few things: it establishes an online presence and a place in the online community (through your website and social media pages), and it pushes people towards them through paid and organic means. While it is not the most comprehensive or tailored strategy, this combination is a great start for a new business looking to leverage the internet and make more sales.

How do I know if my online marketing is effective?

Unlike other forms of marketing, online marketing is very easy to track and is considered a data-driven marketing platform. Most online marketing tools collect data on how businesses use them and how audiences interact with their ads - you can assist this by installing Google analytics on your website to track visitors behaviour once they arrive on your website. This combination means you can gain incredibly valuable information about your marketplace including:

• How compelling your ads are
• How large your audience is
• How you compare to competitors
• Your cost-per-transaction (especially if you offer online sales)
• Your performance over time
• Your click-through-rate
• Your bounce rate (how many visitors leave your website after the first page)
• How competitive your marketplace is

How do I utilise this information to my advantage?

While this data is valuable, it generally requires a professional’s expertise to interpret it in a meaningful way. Certain trends in your data might make a clear message - for example, if you have a very high click-through-rate compared to your competitors, but you have a very high bounce rate, that would indicate that people are highly interested in what your ad offers but do not feel like your website delivers. You would have to assess whether or not your ad was somehow misleading or your website was just confusing and hard to use.

Online marketers specialise in pulling this information together into meaningful conclusions that can inform better business decisions. They will often engage in practices like split testing, which allows them to determine which parts of your marketing strategy are producing results by a process of elimination.