Step 3

Online Business Strategy

Creating a business strategy involves Identifying your business goals, then deciding on actions to help you meet those goals

• Step 1: Clearly define your goals, and then 
• Step 2: Identify the actions you want to take to achieve those goals

Here are some common goals and popular strategies to achieve them

• Goal 1: Increase visits to your website by 20%
  • Possible actions:
    • Drive more traffic to your site
      • There are many actions you can take to achieve this, including:
        • Paid advertising
        • Content marketing

• Goal 2: Increase and shape brand awareness. Shape your brand in the minds of your customers based on the personality of you and your business.
  • Social media is a popular way to increase brand awareness to both new and existing customers. It provides a platform to express your values, personality, and engage with your audience.

• Goal 3: Grow your email marketing list
  • Try clearly communicating what your audience can expect to receive in their email

Side notes

• Create a mission statement as a sentence to articulate what your business stands for
• Identify your unique selling point (USP), what makes you different from competitors, what sets you apart

1. Marketing campaign

The term ‘marketing campaign’ is a little fuzzy, like the term ‘record’ in music. It can be used for many different marketing efforts.

2. Psychology of a new user

Customer Acquisition Journey

See, Think, Do, Care, Revisit

1. See – They see a link or advertisement for your website
   1. (What initiated your interest in the website? Was it an advertisement? A Google search? A social media post)
2. Think – Then think about whether to click on it
   1. (What exactly about what you saw made you interested enough to click the link and visit the website?)
3. Do – They click on it
4. Care – They decide whether they care about your site or not
5. Revisit – The next step in the user acquisition journey is to get them to revisit the site on their own. You need to think about how they will get to your site the next time they want to visit. Will they directly type your URL in the address bar or do a Google search? Most of the time people use a search engine to reach a site, even if they know the URL for it. You need to make sure your website appears number one in the SERP for your brand name keyword. The SERP for your brand name should also be all about your site.

This process of See, Think, Do, Care is known as showrooming. It gets a new user to your site for the first time.

You need to think, what types of content could you use as the See (Ads, organic search results for a keyword, social media post, a blog post), Care (the landing page they hit when the click the link), and Revisit (SERP result for your brand name)

Try putting yourself in the shoes of your users.

Ask yourself:

• Where do I go when I need answers?
• Where do I normally spot new brands or businesses?
• What helps me make a purchase decision?
• And do I see the brand again after I make a purchase?

Or, think about the journey you take when you find a new website you like. Use this information in building the customer journey maps for your own site.

You can literally draw out Customer Journey Maps.

3. Pre-marketing

When marketing, you need to decide who you should talk to, what channel you should use to reach them, when you should talk to them, and what you should say.

This is called audience segmentation. You can segment customers in many ways, from basic demographics like age and gender, to specific interests. Most channels allow you to target paid advertising to specific audiences based on information like what an audience likes and dislikes.

4. Customer touchpoints

A customer touchpoint is any stage that a customer, or a potential customer, comes in contact with a business.

When a customer encounters a touchpoint multiple times, such as online ads, this provides consistent value, builds the strength of your brand in their mind, and creates on-going positive associations with your brand.

One takeaway here is that there is value in advertising even if you don’t get a lot of clicks. Potential users will encounter your ads, which builds brand awareness and creates an on-going positive association with your brand. It makes your brand seem established and authoritative, almost like a government organization.

It is important to run advertising campaigns periodically to keep that on-going positive association with your brand. Instead of being in a constant state of advertising, you can pause and play your campaigns periodically. You don’t necessarily need to create new campaigns. This depends on the content in your ads. For evergreen content, like the content for a Google search ad, the ad might never need to change. You can just pause and play the same ad periodically. However for time sensitive content, like a social media ad with a link to an article, you will need to run different ad content for each campaign because the article will become stale and obsolete in a few days. However, you can also have evergreen ad content on social media as well that you can pause and play periodically.

5. Competition and your USP

When we identify what makes us different from our competition, we identify our unique selling point, or USP. The USP is a clear statement that describes the benefits you offer, how you might solve your customer’s needs, and what distinguishes you from the competition.

5 key questions to ask yourself when defining your USP:

• Who is my target audience?
• Who are my competitors?
• What problems do my target audience have?
• How can I solve them?
• How is my solution different from my competitors?

Then piece together a concise statement that incorporates the answers.

Speak in a human voice, and be as natural and relatable as possible.

Your USP should be displayed on your website, social media, and other marketing materials.

A good USP won’t appeal to everyone, and that’s okay. Create a USP that speaks to your target audience.

6. Competitor analysis

Use can use free tools online to do competitor analysis:

• Google search engine
  • Search for keywords related to your site that you’re thinking of targeting for SEO and see what pages appear on the first SERP.
  • Check out the pages and see which keywords they’re using on their website, especially in the web pages title, meta description, headings, and body copy.
• Setup to receive Google Alerts to see what your competition is doing online. Setup an alert for your own business too.

Competitors you should research include:

• Websites that rank above you in a keyword search for your brand name. Do a keyword search for your business name. Websites listed on the front page of SERP when you type in your business name are something like brand competitors. You should be ranking at the top of the SERP for your business name.
• Do a keyword search for your product or service to find websites that offer similar types of products.
  • Long tail, low volume keywords that are very specific to what you offer- Check for websites that rank above you for the long tail keywords you’re targeting for SEO. See what you can do on page to rank above these sites in the search results.
  • Short tail, high volume keywords that concisely match what you offer – These will be high authority websites that will be hard to compete with, but that you should be aware of

7. Setting and tracking goals/KPIs

KPIs are quantifiable measurements meant to focus on the most important metrics to meet business goals.

Common examples of KPIs include:

• 50 new unique visitors per month
• 50 new social media followers per month
• 10 social media posts per month
• Email newsletter sign ups per month

Your goals should be set up as SMART KPIs and should be relative to the metrics that were achieved in the previous period. SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Use KPIs to measure things that bring you closer to your primary goal, which is your Northstar metric, like visits per month. These secondary KPIs can include social media posts, new social media followers, email newsletter sign ups, etc.

You should review your progress on KPIs periodically (weekly or monthly) and adjust your marketing and product strategy accordingly.

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