10 Best Marketing Strategies for Online Business (Beginner’s Guide)

Last Updated on August 26, 2022 by Arif Chowdhury

Nowadays, online businesses are booming more than any existing physical business. It’s mainly because of digital technology advancement. People are used to staying active online more than they remain active in any other physical events.

They feel comfortable surfing online, for example, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. It’s much better and more comfortable to join a webinar session rather than a seminar. You can meet with your entire team from your bedroom while having a cup of coffee or spending time with your family.

Not only comfort but faster & accuracy are other reasons people move from physical to digital platforms. Handling sales and marketing tasks with hundreds of employees are hard to control & also expensive.

Besides, you can quickly do the same job with CRM software with little effort & cost. It became much faster and more accurate while easy to control the quality. People can be dishonest. However, a computerized system will never do that. Also, you need less marketing efforts in an online business. As it has many advanced opportunities, including marketing automation.

As you can see, because of thousands of reasons, digital is becoming much more popular than physical. And, of course, the recent outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis forced people to keep a social distance that inevitably hammers the physical business. While at the same time, online business is booming at an alarming rate as customers are started to purchase from online stores more than ever.

So, in this guide, I will walk you through how to market your online business effectively and efficiently. There are many methods people use. First, however, I will teach you the ten best marketing strategies for an online business that are very popular among big brands.

So, let’s get started.

What is an online marketing strategy?

Online marketing means driving more traffic (visitors) to your website from various sources. Here quality is everything because the internet is vast & without a proper strategy, you will not only waste a considerable amount of dollars on advertising budget but also jeopardize your marketing campaign.

Therefore, a proper marketing strategy must have to implement to get the most benefit out of it. Also, keep in mind that not only you are doing online business. Nowadays, almost all companies around the globe realize the importance of online business and rushing to take control of the online market. Therefore, competition is off the chart.

Now let me describe the major components of an online marketing campaign:

Brand awareness: by using advertisement, your target is to inform the audience about your brand. For example, Walmart and Amazon use brand awareness, and now globally, everyone knows their brand name.

Website growth: increase the popularity of your website domain name & reach a point where you will receive millions of visitors every month without doing any advertisements.

Lead generation: your audience subscribes to your newsletter or product update by signing up with their primary email. And you can send them important news, offers, discount, etc. through email.

Lead conversion: convince your leads and make them pay customers using different marketing tactics. More leads you can convert more sales you can make.

These are the four major components of an online marketing campaign. We will discuss this broadly later in this guide.

What types of online marketing strategies are there?

Many online marketing strategies exist. However, I will show you the ten best authentic and valuable techniques in the long term.

Quick Note: In your online marketing journey, you may encounter many forms of strategies that seem like very promising and easy. Giving you hopes to achieve your desired success within 10 to 30 days. A word of warning never falls into those traps. Remember, there is no easy & quick success in online marketing. It will take a reasonable amount of time to achieve your desired success.

Here are the top 10 online marketing strategies you can use to drive more traffic to your website, grow it, increase your brand awareness, and make more sales.

1. Pay Per Click (PPC).

PPC (Pay Per Click) is one of the oldest & renowned forms of advertising in online marketing history. The name declares itself; you pay when someone clicks on your ad. That’s it. Simple and clear. It’s an advertising format generally used in Google ads since the beginning.

When someone searches in Google & finds your ad, if they click on it, only then will you be charged. No cost for impression whatsoever. However, it is very cost-effective as you only pay when someone sees your ad by clicking it.

Though there is a bid system in Google advertisement, it’s simple; the highest bid ad will place on top & so on. However, in-depth, there is more. For example, if your website is not performing well, it won’t get the top spot even with the highest bid. It’s Google’s advertising policy; Google wants to show the highest quality website at the top.

Let me tell you how to use PPC advertisement in your online marketing campaign.

It is best to use only Google advertisements for your PPC campaign. However, many other advertisement services exist all over the internet. However, in my experience, if you want 100% legit & honest service, then Google is the best.

There are three types of advertisement options in Google.

Search Ads: It’s a common search type. When you type a keyword in the Google search box and hit the search button, a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) shows up with ten search results per page.

Display Ads: Whenever you visit a website, you may see banner ads on the sidebar or footer area. These are display ads.

Video Ads: Whenever you watch a YouTube video, a video ad appears for 15 seconds; this is called a video ad.

Now the question is, which form of ad should you use? Well, it depends on your advertising campaign needs. However, in my opinion, if you are looking for a severe audience who will buy your products right away, then “Search Ads” should be a perfect choice.

And if your target is to collect leads as much as possible, then “Display Ads” would be great. And video ads are for showcasing your products/brand on YouTube.

Recommended Reading: Website vs. Facebook Page: Which One Does Your Business Need and Why?

2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

SEO is the most lucrative and hardest online marketing method. Every business, from the smallest to the most significant, is racing for it. They want to bring their brand to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) to acquire new customers. Why is everyone so excited about it?

You may use Google ads (PPC) to get your desired results. However, it is costly. In search ads, for every click, you may have to spend from $0.10 to $10, depending on your target market. However, it is convenient yet costly. You may use display ads. It is less expensive but not free. And most businesses usually spend around $9,000 per month for their Google advertising campaign.

But what if I tell you that you will get thousands or even millions of visitors to your website from Google but do not have to spend a single penny for it? Yes, this is the sweetest thing you have ever heard. By doing SEO, your website will get millions of visitors without spending any dollars on advertising, which in turn will increase your profit margin significantly.

Okay, so it’s a very lucrative opportunity. However, it’s not that easy. SEO is highly complex work that normal computer users won’t be able to do unless they have extensive prior knowledge of SEO. Most of the time, big organizations have employees who deal with SEO in full-time jobs.

If you do not have any budgeting issues, then I suggest you hire an SEO expert to handle it for your website. However, if you want to do it yourself, embrace yourself. You have to spend a lot of time reading, learning & practicing.

Here are some major components of SEO you should know:

• High-quality & unique content.
• Consistent publishing frequency (fresh content).
• Regular updating old content.
• Keyword optimization (don’t do keyword stuffing).
• Article optimization (slug, title, headings, snippet, etc.)

Recommended Reading: How to Get on Google First Page for Free? (Beginner’s Guide)

3. Social Media Marketing.

We all know about social media platforms nowadays. Every one of us has an online presence through a Facebook account; some even have 2-3 accounts. A recent study has found that Facebook has 2.7 billion active users per month. And Twitter has 330 million users.

So, overall there are 3.2 billion audiences spent every day on social media. So, as you can see, there are lots of audiences in social media & for that reason, whenever we scroll through our news feed, we see lots of sponsored posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Social media has already become a gold mine for business and is the best marketing strategy for online businesses. It’s easy to catch the attention of the audience without doing annoying advertisements. However, we all feel annoyed when we see too many ads on a website, called banner ads (display ads).

However, we do not mind if we see many sponsored posts in our news feed or even in messenger. Yes, this is the beauty of social media. Here, people are relaxing, and the advertising format is smartly coping with social media.

Also, a small business or a large brand can easily open an official social media page to reach thousands of potential customers. After that showing them product news, promotional offers, discounts, coupons, and event news is just easy as a piece of cake. No more annoying ad blocking; your audience will happily read what you sent to them.

Therefore, as you may see, social media is a perfect platform for marketing content.

Let me show you some fundamental components of social media marketing:

• Highly engaging content (image & video).
• Regular publishing frequency.
• Interaction with the audience (as much as possible).
• Contest, giveaway & promotions.
• Regular events.

Let me tell you how you should use social media for your marketing campaign.

Facebook: build a business page & start promoting it to your target audience. If you have service, food, technology, clothes related products, then Facebook would be a great solution.

Twitter: build a business profile & start promoting your business. It is best for corporate-related business & communication. Regular products like food and clothes won’t get much benefit here.

Instagram: build a business profile & start promoting it. Image & video-related products will be a perfect suit for this platform—for example, clothes, furniture, food, etc.

LinkedIn: build a company profile and start building awareness. Best for corporate tasks like virtual meetings, document sharing, conferences, employee recruitment, etc.

Recommended Reading: Ultimate Guide: Social Media Marketing Strategy for Small Business

4. Email Marketing.

An email was one of the oldest forms of marketing before the computer or the internet. The organization used to send newsletters and magazines to their audiences. And now it has become even more digitalized & professional than before. However, though it is the oldest form of marketing, you could jeopardize your marketing without a proper strategy.

When your audience visits your website, they can subscribe to your newsletter by giving their email address and agreeing to receive emails from you. After that, your automated email sender will send them a regular newsletter into their inbox.

However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Average email open rate is 17.8% & CTR (Click-through Rate) is 2.6%. It means if you send an email newsletter to your 100 subscribers, then only 18 people will open your newsletter and read it, while the rest, 82 people, won’t open it. And only three people will become interested in your newsletter and click on links.

It is the average rate from professional organizations that are masters of email marketing. If you do not know how to create a professional-looking email and send them at the right time of the day, then your campaign result could be much less effective than this.

Some significant components of email marketing campaigns:

• Promotional offers, discounts, coupons.
• Regular products update (newsletter).
• Bring the entire shop/product page to email (direct shopping from email).

You shouldn’t send raw emails to your audience with simple text and images as those are ancient formats, and your business competitors are probably already using advanced email marketing templates. Thus, I suggest you choose a professional email marketing service for your campaign.

Recommended Reading: An Ultimate 6 Steps Guide to Become Successful in Email Marketing

5. eCommerce platform.

As this is a digital era, people of earth found a new way to shop from their homes. That is an online shop or eCommerce platform. So you do not need to visit brick & mortar stores to collect groceries, or shop for clothes, shoes, bags, accessories, etc.

Just visit an online store and order them with your credit/debit card. That’s it; within an hour or two, a delivery man will bring your products right in front of your doorstep.

It is a lucrative business option for all types of businesses. And eCommerce business booming every year. In 2014 total global sales made by eCommerce business was $1.3 trillion. In 2020, it reached $4.2 trillion, and experts predict it will hit the $6.5 trillion mark by the end of 2023.

In the recent COVID-19 pandemic crisis, people tend to stay home. However, this social distancing devastates all types of physical business; however, opposite things happen in eCommerce business as it is rising at an alarming rate. According to U.S Census Bureau, in Q2 2020, U.S eCommerce sales increased to 31.8% from the first quarter & 44.5% year over year.

It is just the beginning experts believe eCommerce will take over in the post-pandemic world. It is time you should move into the eCommerce business if you haven’t yet. If your business is physical, convert it to digital as soon as possible.

How should you convert your physical business to eCommerce?

• Choose an eCommerce platform that suits your business the most.
• Choose a dedicated server from an outstanding hosting service.
• Add all products to the eCommerce website with details.
• Optimize for SEO.
• Set up all available payment options.
• Start promoting by PPC ads, SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, etc.

Do not choose a shared hosting service as an eCommerce platform requires a reasonable amount of resources that a shared hosting won’t be able to provide. And try to optimize your site SEO as soon as possible & also use PPC social media marketing. Remember, eCommerce businesses do not require massive traffic to make a consistent profit.   

Recommended Reading: Which Is the Best Ecommerce Platform for Beginners? Top 10 Reviewed

6. Interactive content marketing.

It is an intelligent way of content marketing to increase audience engagement. However, if you create content with only a wall of text and few images, no bullet points, no quotes, no exciting facts, no tips, and no guidelines, it will be a dull experience for your audience.

Your target should be to keep them entertaining by providing helpful & exciting facts, information, and videos so they will keep coming back.

Here are some vital components of interactive content:

• Bullet points (short out critical issues).
• Quotes (from famous people).
• Facts (with source link).
• Quizzes (to challenge them).
• Infographic (visual information).
• Ebooks (handy pdf guide).
• Various tools (i.e., broken link finder, keyword rank checker, etc.).

For example, I have used various bullet points in this guide to make it more exciting and visually appealing to you (the audience). In addition, I have placed a few tips in the form of quotes in the middle of the article so it will be helpful to my audience and they won’t get bored. Finally, I have given you some facts about eCommerce business with a source link so you can justify my logic and why I strongly suggest you start this business.

Though I didn’t put any infographic in this article, I have it in my other blog post. And shortly, I am planning to make a nice infographic for this blog post too. Finally, in every section of this blog post, I recommend you to read a guide that could be tremendously helpful for you & some of my audience may feel grateful for this & share this blog post with their friends & colleagues.

You see how interactive content marketing can make a huge difference.

Recommended Reading: 10 Effective Methods to Get More Valuable Subscribers for Your Blog

7. Live streaming.

You should call it an already emerged new trend in the digital era. May you have already noticed on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, that almost every social media people tend to do live streaming rather than broadcasting pre-recorded video. It’s because live streaming is becoming more popular day by day.

Gamers are no longer broadcasting gameplay video but rather playing it live & streaming it everywhere. As a result, live webinars are becoming more popular & every organization (online business) reveals a live webinar every week. The expert predicted that almost 82% of all internet traffic would be pulled by live-streaming video by the end of 2020.

Why is live streaming becoming popular? First, it’s simple; the audience can interact live. And most importantly, it is far easy to watch rather than read. Besides, reading consumes a reasonable amount of time & concentration while a person can watch and relax simultaneously, just like a movie.

However, it does not mean traditional article, blog posts, and website content will lose their audience. Because words can be documented and later read & research while a live video cannot. Therefore, I think you could use this live-streaming marketing technique for your campaign to attract more visitors to your website.

8. Content Marketing.

Content is the King. Perhaps you have already heard it many times over. Nevertheless, what is contained in digital marketing? Well, content is everything from articles to videos. It is a piece of information you can describe in many ways, i.e., words, audio, image & video. This blog post is a piece of content consisting of words, pictures & links. By using this content, I am giving you information.

No matter where you look everywhere is content. If you watched a video, then that is video content. If you purchased a magazine, then it is content. Even if you buy an Xbox game DVD, that game is content. So everyone is giving, selling & buying content.

Now, what is content marketing? When you become a blogger, you are writing blog content and making profits from your audience. When you start an eCommerce business, you are selling product content to your customer & making a profit. When you become a podcaster, you produce audio episode content and make a profit from subscriptions. As you can see, every time you provide some value to your audience, that is useful to them & this is how you are making a profit.

So, we can say that Content marketing is selling value to your audience.

Recommended Reading: 11 Content Creation Hacks that Convert Visitors to Paid Customers

9. Influencer marketing.

If you are a YouTuber and have 10,000 subscribers & getting 20K views per month, then you are an influencer. It does not necessarily have to have that many subscribers or ideas, but when you have a mass audience following you, that makes you an influencer. You may be a podcaster, YouTuber, Game streamer, blogger, singer, etc.

Let’s say Bethesda published a new game & they want to promote it worldwide. So they will give you the offer to play their game and stream it live. Let’s say you have 1 million subscribers. If you live stream Bethesda’s new game, then it will get at least 1 million views from your audience. And this is called the influencer marketing method.

If you have a product and want to showcase it to millions of audiences worldwide, then search for an influencer related to your niche. Possibly, you will get millions of audience within the 1st month of the start. It’s a very effective marketing method. Because audiences usually do not trust 3rd party advertisements, listening to their favorite star is way sweeter and more trustworthy.

For example, if Tom Cruise advertises your brand, millions of people will trust it before they even try it themselves. It’s because they trust the influencer who is marketing your brand.

10. User-Generated Content (UGC).

When someone comments on a blog or website, writes a product review, writes a guest post, etc. These are all user/audience-generated content. It is beneficial to gain the trust of the audience. Why? Simple, we all seek a positive review when downloading a new app from the Google App store. Or when purchasing a product from Amazon.

You see, we usually do not trust the product/brand & that’s why we always look for audience thought. Unless we already know about that product/brand. For example, iPhone. Though most case, the audience thought always win over reputation.

If you have an eCommerce business and hundreds of positive reviews on most of your products, then consider it a winning game, as your user-generated content will win the hearts of new audiences. And your conversion rate will increase significantly. However, the opposite may happen if you get negative customer reviews.

Some vital components of User/audience generated content:

• Comments.
• Reviews.
• Article/blog post written & published by the audience (broad reviews).
• Video created & broadcast by the audience (comprehensive reviews).
• Conversation in social media using #hashtags.

Smartly utilize your audience content to your advantage.

Executive Summary.

There are many forms of online marketing strategies nowadays. I have discussed the top 10, which are the best among the big brands. But, of course, getting a result will take time and effort. However, I am saying again, “Do not fall into traps,” as you may find many lucrative opportunities to grow your business overnight.

For example, buying backlinks and getting ranked #1 in Google SERP within just 7-days, or 30-days, or 60-days. These are impossible and also totally scams. You will not only lose your hard-earned money but also be permanently blacklisted from most search engines.

Remember, there is no shortcut to getting success. Every big brand had its history of suffering & struggle. If you follow in their footstep, then sooner or later, you will grow your business. Always be honest in your way. Thus success will come eventually.