How to Market your Business Online in 2024 – 7 easy steps

There are so many options available to business owners to market their business online today – so how do you decide where to start?

Technology has allowed us to communicate directly with customers and tailor our messaging to connect with them on a much more personal level than ever before.

But with so many options available, how do we decide where to spend our valuable time, effort and money?

Let’s take a look at 7 easy steps to design a marketing strategy that works

1. Decide who you’re trying to reach – your target audience

Open a new document, or get our a pen and paper and write down characteristics about the people you’re trying to target, such as:

• Where they live
• How old they are
• What they enjoy doing
• Lifestyle preferences

Personas are a great way to visualise different types of customers and who they are.

Hubspot offer some great templates like this one:

Take a look at their guide and templates here.

2. Understand where those customers are likely to make decisions

Many guides will say ‘do SEO’, ‘do Google Ads’… But is that the right option for you?

It’s important to think more strategically about where your customers make decisions relating to a purchase.

They might be browsing for ideas on Pinterest, they might be looking for answers from a community on Reddit. If you work in B2B, they might want to find expert advice on LinkedIn, or via Google.

And it’s this thought process that should inform your marketing strategy.

3. Deliver expertise

Ultimately most customers want expertise in some form or another. If you sell a great product, customers want to know why it’s great. If you sell a service, customers or clients want to know their working with the best people for the job, so they’ll do their research somewhere before making that crucial decision.

So create content. By content we don’t just mean blogs, but also video, podcasts, interviews to demonstrate your expertise in that space.

Refer back to the previous point about platforms to understand how to frame that expertise and where to deliver it.

4. Decide on a budget

It’s important to remember that marketing requires you to spend money to make money and often there is a degree of trial and error. So how do you know how much to spend?

Instead of thinking purely about cost, start by deciding how much a customer is worth to your business.

If they’re likely to sign up to a subscription worth £120 per year, you might decide that it’s worth spending £20 acquiring that new customer – perhaps even more if they’re likely to remain for multiple years.

Then decide how many new customers you’d like to bring on per month.

5. Create a Google My Business Account

This is a great way to not only verify your existence as a legitimate business, but also to grow your business in your local area.

A lot of companies rely on this local support, even as they grow into large, nationwide providers.

6. Create a mission statement

It’s important to have a vision. A vision about what your business is and what you’re trying to achieve. It could be to make the best bread ever tasted, or to create the most sustainable logistics company!

Whatever it is it’s important to ensure you’re messaging, adverts, service and activity stays true to that. Because if you believe in it, other people will too.

7. Build communities

Whether it’s through social media, newsletters, events or webinars, communities help people to feel part of something bigger than just being a customer or a service user. It encourages debate, provides a sense of belonging, and lets you provide answers to questions or requests they may have.

Communities encourage long term loyalty and while you’re helping customers, they will also help you to improve your product or service and become a better company.

The important thing to remember is that your community should offer value. It’s not just an advert, it’s useful, meaningful and insightful. And it’s up to you to uphold that.

In Summary

It’s very difficult to summarise these steps in such a short article, but hopefully these points will help you on your journey to market your business online successfully.

It’ll be a long road to achieve true success but it’s important to remember some of the fundamentals that help to separate your business from some of the others out there.