Expertise
Our approachCasesCareersContactSEA
SEO
CRO
Social
Data
AI Marketing
WHAT WE SPECIALISE IN
SEO
Social
Online marketing is a broad concept, which can sometimes make it difficult to determine your focus. One reason for this is that there are multiple online marketing channels, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. To draw up a good plan, it is important to distinguish for yourself between online marketing tactics, strategies and your organisation’s objectives. First you set your objectives, then you determine how you want to achieve them, and finally you draw up specific tactics to deliver your strategy.
To carry out a thorough online marketing plan, it is important to determine in advance who these campaigns will be aimed at. Nowadays, consumers online are bombarded with marketing campaigns almost constantly. That is why it is essential to approach the right people in the right way. To do this, you need to find out who the right people online are for your product or service. Once you know this, you can tailor your tactics accordingly. The ideal way to understand your target audience is to create a buyer persona. Here you answer questions such as: Who are my customers? What do they find interesting (lifestyle)? What does their online behaviour look like? Read more about mapping out your target audience here and use the free template (including explanation). By keeping your target audience in mind when devising, setting up and running your online marketing campaigns, you ensure that all your campaigns stay relevant to your target audience.
A logical next step is to map out the online marketing channels you could use. For each channel, specify the following: how much time does it take to set up, run, implement and evaluate this channel? What are the possible results of this campaign? Will I achieve these results in the short or the long term? Do I have the (technical) knowledge to set this up and run it myself? And of course the most important question: do I reach my target audience through this channel?
If you are just starting out with online marketing, it helps your overview and focus to begin with two channels. Over time you can expand to more online marketing channels. A good moment to expand is when you see positive results and steady growth in your current channels. It is also important that maintaining these channels is a process your organisation has firmly under control. The channels you start with naturally depend on the type of business you are in. In this article we focus on search engine marketing. We will therefore look at search engine optimisation (SEO) and using Google AdWords as an online advertising option.
Studying and learning from your competitors is essential, because it gives you insight into the online tactics that do and don’t work in your niche. To gain insight into the Google AdWords activities of key players in your market, you can use SpyFu. This tool shows the keywords they bid on and, broadly, what those bids look like. Based on this, you learn which keywords are interesting for your campaigns and which ones your target audience focuses on. You then also apply this information when writing your ads.
To gain insight into how your competitors use search engine optimisation (SEO) as a channel, it is worth looking at the keywords that bring your competitors the most visits. This also shows you the keywords your competitors ignore. You can carry out this analysis with a tool such as SEMrush. Use SEMrush’s SEO Keyword Magic Tool to find interesting keywords, filtered by high and low competition on these terms.
Create specific objectives that give insight into your ‘performance’, for example:
You can track the results of your campaigns, such as traffic and conversions, in Google Analytics. You can track the number of impressions, your positions in Google and your click-through rate with Google Search Console. We also recommend consulting Google AdWords for this, mainly for your conversion rates, number of conversions and impressions. If the figures alone are not enough, it is always worth using heatmaps to gain visual insight into how your target audience uses your website. A heatmap shows you where people click on your website and how they navigate through your pages. A handy tool for heatmaps is Hotjar.
Would you like free insights into how you can generate more revenue online?
