The entire scope of online marketing today can be reduced to three main stages.
In some ways, online marketing has become a tangled, gnarled mess of different strategies, different approaches, and different philosophies. There are so many best practices, tactics, and new developments to pay attention to that it’s easy to lose sight of the fundamentals.
That’s why I’ve taken the liberty to reduce the entirety of online marketing into three separate phases, which you can then use to better understand the broad goals of your campaign.
Phase One: Branding
The first phase is all about establishing who you are. It involves creating your own website, your social media presence, and your other online presences, all with consistent branding and interrelated tie-ins. Your website should link to your social media profiles, which should link back to your website, and so on. Only when this core identity and presence is in place can you start doing things with the other areas of your online marketing campaign.
Phase Two: Attraction
Your next job is to attract people to the point of sale, or the point of conversion (depending on your business). This destination will depend on your business model—it could be individual product pages within your e-Commerce site, a landing page for conversions, or just your main website. The point is to get more people to that location. You can do that through search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, targeted paid advertising, or any one of a number of other strategies. The goal is simple: get more traffic.
Phase Three: Conversion
Once you have a significant flow of traffic, you can focus on the third phase of successful marketing: conversion. This stage is probably the trickiest, as it’s the most complex and most significant user action you can influence. You’ll have to pay close attention to the design, wording, and positioning of your request in order to influence more conversions—otherwise all that traffic you generated in phase two will be worthless.
Use these three stages to help determine your main campaign goals and divide your individual strategies accordingly.
