Let’s talk about the Big Bang Theory of online marketing, and before we do that I want to take a step back and talk to you about traditional marketing now traditional marketing is anything that came before the online world, if you want to call it and this has to do with print ads, radio, ads, TV commercials, billboards magazine ads and so forth, what was traditional marketing all about, well marketing it all about getting customers and what are the things you want to keep in mind is that marketing is process, marketing is not something that you do once we have this idea that I put up, this website and I’ve done my marketing or I created a logo and I’ve done my marketing or I put up a Facebook page and that’s it, rather marketing is a process, it’s something that you have to keep doing day in and day out in order for you to get customers, just as a sales man has to knock on multiple doors every single day in order to make sure that he can get some sales for his company or form self, Similarly with online marketing or marketing in general you want to make sure that you’re doing it every day as a process, now what’s the process of traditional marketing anyways, well the process of traditional marketing begins with something called:
- Awareness: if you have a product, service, idea or something that you’re trying to market the first thing you want to know or do is make sure that people have awareness of it, they actually have to know about you in order for them to even consider purchasing your product or service.
- Interest: They should actually like your product or service; they should have heard something about it, they will kind of gauge their interest or pique their interest about that product.
- Make a decision: Now this decision doesn’t have to be something that’s physical that they’re going out buying a product but in their mind they’ve made a decision that you know and this is something that I would buy or something that I would like to buy, so this is the third step of traditional marketing
- Action: Right, and so the action that we’re interested in as marketers is that they actually have to go out and buy the product or service, and actually you know put down the money on the table.
Now in online marketing, we’re also interested in the same thing we’re interested in triggering action, now how do we do that in the online world when you don’t necessarily have print ads or radio ads and we can certainly just rely on banner ads that we see on web site which you know are only on a few websites now and only successful marketers don’t really rely on them, so in online marketing the process is also whole process to follow and this is what I’m going to be teaching in these series of posts under this category, this is what I think that every marketer should know inside and out, because once you know these five steps or this five step process you’ll know exactly where all the different marketing activities fall into:
- Make strangers into visitors: people who are just browsing online to become visitors to your website.
- Make these visitors and turn them into leads, and what I mean by leads is that they’ve actually given consent to you whether it be an email address whether it be a phone number anything that you do you can use to communicate with them and follow up with, this is also sometimes called Permission Marketing.
- Make prospects from these leads, now what’s prospects, is someone who’s given you permission to market to them but also they’ve given interest in your product or service or the thing that you’re trying to sell.
Next topics about this process:
- Turning Strangers into Visitors: The Key to Driving Quality Traffic
- Turning Visitors into Leads: Using Lead Magnets to Build Your List
- Turning Leads to Into Prospects: Using Email Marketing to Nurture your Audience
- Turning Prospects to Customers: How to Get Your Audience to Buy Your Products