Picking Marketing Tactics to Grow Your Online Business
When it comes to picking marketing tactics to grow your online business, the options are vast.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of marketing tactics you can try.
So, the question becomes: which marketing tactics work best for your business?
The answer is going to be different for everyone. What works for a travel blogger will be different from what works for a dentist, for example.
That said, there are some common trends that have been proven to work across businesses.
You’ll first want to think back to your marketing strategy and the goals of your business.
Big picture, what are you trying to accomplish? Likely, it’s to grow your online business.
To do that, you need people to visit your website. Your website is where you will build trust, show your expertise, highlight your products, and make sales.
Yes, social media is a great platform, but ultimately the money is going to come from your website – not from your social posts. So, your goal will be to get traffic to your website.
Now that we’ve established that, let’s look at the P-E-S-O Marketing Model. It stands for:
- Paid
- Earned
- Shared
- Owned
P-E-S-O: Paid Marketing
Paid Marketing = any paid media channel. The tools and platforms where you have to part with your hard-earned money in order to get results.
- Advertising
- Social Media Ads
- Boosted Content
- Google Search Ads
- Google Display Ads
- YouTube Ads
- Paid Publishing
- Events
- Influencer Marketing
- Experiential Marketing
P-E-S-O: Earned Marketing
Earned Marketing= where you earn media mentions, through activities like PR. This can often cross over into paid (e.g., paying to do a press release on a news release platform), but in its essence, it started as earned media. This includes:
- Press releases
- Media relations
- Blogger relations
- Influencer relations
- Link Building
- Word of Mouth
P-E-S-O: Shared Marketing
Shared Marketing = social media accounts. The reason it’s called shared is because you don’t technically own the platform, nor the contacts. Instagram could block you, Pinterest could change is algorithm at any time, and all of those followers could go away in a flash. This can also overlap with paid media, when you boost posts, or do social ads.
That said, shared channels have become an important part of the marketing mix. They can build trust, deepen relationships with users, and spread awareness of your brand.
- Forums & Groups
- Threads
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Snapchat
- Wechat / Weibo
- User Generated Content
- + all the new platforms that pop up every day
P-E-S-O: Owned Marketing
Owned Marketing = any platforms you have complete control over.
They’re also ones that you aren’t at the mercy of the all-mighty algorithm that could change at a moment’s notice.
Owned platforms can include:
- Website
- Blog
- Email Marketing
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Video
- Podcast
- Contests
How to Pick the Right Marketing Tactics to Grow Your Business
So, you know the different tactics. But you don’t have the time or energy to do all of them. How do you pick the right marketing tactics to grow your online business?
Again, come back to your core goal: growing traffic to your website.
Think through which marketing tactics can make the biggest impact, and which connect most to your brand.
Typically, I recommend this mix to start:
- Blogging on your website
- 1-2 social media platforms
- SEO
- Google Search ads (only when you have a product ready to launch)
Let’s walk through each one.
Recommended Marketing Tactic 1: Blogging
Is blogging dead? Far from it!
Blogging in its old form might be dead – journaling about your day.
But writing articles to help your target audience solve problems? That’s never been more popular OR more powerful for SEO. You probably found this page through my SEO efforts, in fact!
Simply put, Google loves websites that blog.
When determining where to place your website in its search results, Google tracks literally hundreds of factors. But the frequency you post to your website and how catered your content is to one target audience are huge factors.
Take this website. Writing articles like “marketing tactics to grow your online business”, “how to master SEO”, or “picking tools to grow your online business” – these all help answer direct questions that thousands of aspiring side hustlers have every day.
Find a subject you’re passionate about and can write in length at, and simply start.
Write 1-2 articles a week (more is better, but don’t burn yourself out), and start proving to Google that you know what you’re talking about.
In time, usually a few months, search engines will start taking notice. And if you’re doing SEO correctly, you’ll likely see your hard work showing up in search results.
Which brings us to tactic #2: SEO.
Recommended Marketing Tactic 2: SEO
If you can’t tell by now, blogging is a powerful way to drive traffic to your website. However – and this a big one – you have to add SEO to blogging for it to work.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, it’s optimizing your website for search engines, helping the bots understand what your content is about.
There are a bunch of ways to do this – so many, in fact, that this website has dedicated articles on SEO. But here are some of the top things to keep in mind in SEO.
To start, it’s bucketed into two main sections: On page SEO are any SEO efforts that happen directly on your website; in most cases, it happens in your writing itself. Off page SEO are things that happen elsewhere on the internet talking/linking to your website. Technical SEO are any SEO efforts that happen behind the scenes of your site. Let’s explore examples from each.
- On page SEO
- Your main topic is mentioned a few times throughout the article (but not too much)
- Unique images with alt tags relating to your topic
- Bold, highlighted, and italicized words relate to your topic, like this: marketing tactics that grow your online business
- Headlines relate to your topic
- Content is organized to make it easy to read (no huge blocks to text)
- Inbound & outbound links that relate to your topic
- Good readability (not too complex, active vs. passive voice, etc.)
- Etc.
- Off page SEO
- Backlinks (other websites directing to your website
- Reviews
- Social media
- Podcasts
- Etc.
- Technical SEO
- Ensuring fast website speed
- No broken links
- Low bounce rate
- Higher number of pages viewed per website session
- No major website errors
- Website site maps
- Etc.
You can see why Google takes each of these seriously.
On page SEO shows search engines that you’re talking about things that matter and they can match your articles with specific Google searches.
Off page SEO shows search engines that other websites find your content useful / inspiring. That clues it in to rank it higher, as others are likely to find its helpful as well.
Technical SEO shows Google that you’re a solid website, that is going to give the reader a great experience, with no annoying delays, lags, or errors.
Again, SEO is a major topic and we dive deep into it that I also recommend you check out (hey, look at that, a relevant internal link!). But for now, ensure you have the basics above covered.
Recommended Marketing Tactic 3: Email
If there’s one tip I can recommend relating to email marketing, it’s to start it immediately after you launch your website. Why?
You want to capture as many people visiting your website as possible and convert them into contacts that you own and can communicate with. What you don’t want is thousands of people visiting your website and then forgetting about you.
How do you do this?
By offering lead magnets and email marketing.
What are lead magnets? Lead magnets are freebies that you give people who visit your website in exchange for their email address.
Lead magnets can take the form of:
- Free downloads
- Quizzes
- PDFs
- eBooks
- Printables
- Guides
- Infographics
- And more
Basically, you’re giving readers of your website something really valuable. To get it, they simply have to enter their email (and any other info you require) and the freebie is emailed directly to them.
This one does take a little upfront work – but it’s really not that hard. You’ll need to create 2-3 freebies, set up an email tool, and create automations so that when they input their email address, the freebie is sent to them and their contact is created in your email tool automatically.
Don’t worry – it sounds more complex than it is.
Email tools nowadays are super user-friendly. They’re made so easy to use, for marketers of all shapes and sizes – like you!
Email marketing in a nutshell:
- Choose an email tool: I usually go with a free one to start (as of this writing, Mailchimp and Sender.net both have free options up to a certain number of users).
- Create your freebies: A 3-5 page PDF or printable, like checklists, templates, or guides is a great place to start.
- Create your welcome email series: 1-5 emails that get sent when someone clicks to download your freebie. The first email includes the freebie, the others deepen the relationship with the reader, talking about things like why you started this website, top blog posts, and other things to help them.
- Set up the automation: This means when someone enters their email address, they get the welcome emails. You’ll need to integrate it with your website, but luckily email platforms offer instructions to do so. Just ensure that the email tool works with your website CMS (e.g., MailChimp has a WordPress.org plugin).
After you have your lead magnets set up and you start getting traffic to those sites, your email list can literally start growing while you sleep. And those contacts are people you can eventually monetize.
The earlier you get this set up, the happier you will be in the long run.
It’s like investing in the stock market: the number #1 comment people say is that they wish they started sooner.
After you have your lead magnets up and running, don’t forget to stay in touch with those wonderful contacts you’ve now captured.
You’ll want to email them anywhere from once a week to once a month, depending on your content, blogging frequency, and upcoming launches.
Recommended Marketing Tactic 4: Social Media
Social is all about going directly to your target audience, creating content that appeals to them, and encouraging them to engage with your brand.
We’ve written articles about social media, which can help you determine which social platform to go with.
A word of caution: you’ll be tempted to go heavy on more than 1-2 social media platforms.
Social media lures you in. It shows immediate gratification as you see that little heart button light up. But I’m telling you this: that heart button does not pay the bills.
I’m talking about vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics are results (usually from social media) that look good on the surface and make you feel all warm and fuzzy – but don’t actually move the needle on your business growth or monetization.
Think: likes, follows, shares, follower count, views, etc.
Don’t get me wrong – they’re great. And in huge numbers, these actually can generate revenue your business!
But chasing likes and follows – especially from people who are not your target audience – is not going to do much at the end of the day.
In one brand I ran, I had grown our Instagram account to thousands of followers. Meanwhile on Pinterest, I had less than a thousand. But because of how the Pinterest algorithm works, I ended up getting more than 10,000 website hits a month from Pinterest alone. When I compared that to Instagram (where I was spending roughly the same amount of time), I had…27 website hits.
10,000 vs. 27: which would you prefer?
The moral of the lesson is use social media cautiously, and always, always keep coming back to your core marketing strategy and goal.
Recommended Marketing Tactic 5: Google Search Ads
The last of the marketing tactics to grow your online business is a paid one.
Yes, it’s scary to spend money when you’re not making much yet. So if you want to take this one with a grain of salt, that’s okay.
But when done right, Google Search Ads can get you great, qualified traffic to your website.
Not only that, the traffic is usually super interested in your content and fits pretty closely to your target customers.
However, I recommend waiting to run ads (whether they be Google ads, social ads, or otherwise), until you have a product to monetize.
That way, you’ll start seeing an immediate ROI on your spend.
Marketing Tactics to Grow Your Business
There you have it – a complete guide to picking the marketing tactics to grow your online business in a nutshell.
Does it seem like a lot?
It can be. But the incredible thing about online businesses is that while yes, there is a fair amount of upfront work, it can also be very little work after a while. At one point you’ll have dozens of blog posts written, a page full of social media posts, and a healthy email list that grows by the day automatically.
At this point, things can relax a little. You can take some time off, and your traffic won’t necessarily drop – it might even grow!
One brand I was running I literally left it on autopilot for two years and traffic remained steady throughout that time, due to the SEO clout built up on Google and Pinterest.
Now the more you put in, the more you grow. I’m guessing you won’t want to leave it stagnant for two years, and in many cases you’d see traffic starting to drop within that time frame. But what I’m saying is that if it feels like a lot of work in the beginning for very little reward, just know that the reward in building an online business is a long term reward.
You’re playing the long game, and any effort you put in now can reap rewards come harvest time.
So, get those tactics running, my friend!
Put one foot in front of the other, break it down into small chunks, and just get the first thing written.
I can bet you you’ll be proud you did.
And after you’ve got your marketing tactics trucking along and you’re seeing steady growth on your website traffic and email list?
You’ll be ready to move onto the next step: MONETIZE. Here, you’ll develop a product, launch that product, and find extra ways to monetize. This is where the results from all your hard work come together and you start seeing real money in your account. But it can’t happen until you have steady traffic on your website and email list – so get cracking, friend!
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