If you are seriously interested in online promotion, you’re in the right place.
This article-guide will help you find answers to the most common questions about online promotion. You’ll find out:
- What are the main methods and strategies for online promotion.
- How to do free online promotion (yes, you can).
- What are the main channels for online promotion.
- How to run a successful online promotion campaign.
- How to decide how much to invest in online promotion.
And much, much more.
This article is more of a table of contents, so save it and come back to it whenever you have a question about promoting your business online.
Ready? Here we go!
1. General aspects of online promotion
How to create a marketing strategy from 0
Simply put, a marketing strategy is a plan of action that aims to help a business grow.
One of the main mistakes I have encountered is equating strategy with other concepts such as tactics or ideas.
A strategy is broader, spans a longer period of time, and generally takes place at a higher level than tactics or ideas like “let’s promote ourselves on Facebook” or “let’s publish more often on the website for SEO”.
Marketing plan (with template included)
At unosoft we like to try new things. Classic concepts, like the marketing plan, have not gone unchallenged.
Template Model Plan Marketing Variant unosoft
In the article above you learn what the main components of a marketing plan are, you have a template you can copy, but most importantly, you understand what a marketing plan adapted to the realities of marketing today looks like.
How much to invest in business promotion?
An age-old question since marketing probably came into being, the simple answer is that it depends. 🙂 It depends on where the business is at, ambitions and what the marketing plan looks like.
The above article attempts to provide a semi-definitive answer to this question.
Growth Hacking: A complete guide for beginners
If you haven’t yet heard of this revolutionary concept behind the world’s most successful startups, I recommend you stop what you’re doing and read the guide above. It’s the first and only one in Romania that discusses this approach to marketing in detail.
You’ll understand what growth hacking is, how you can apply it to your business, find case studies, ideas and strategies and more.
2. Online promotion channels
Which marketing channel is right for me?
Before going into details about the main online promotion channels, I recommend you first identify the marketing channel that suits your business.
It depends both on your resources and the level of sophistication (development) of the market you are targeting: whether people are looking for your product or not.
When it comes to the main online promotion channels, the ones that work in Romania are these:
Online Promotion on Facebook
Without a doubt, Facebook is one of the main online promotion channels in Romania. In fact, together with Google, these platforms “swallow” more than 50% of all the money invested in online promotion in our country.
If you want to learn more about online promotion on Facebook we recommend:
Promoting on Facebook: a complete guide for beginners.
In this guide you’ll find all the information you need to get off to the right start using this online marketing channel to grow your business.
Promoting on Facebook: What I learned by spending 11,351.02 lei
I wrote this article when we passed the symbolic amount of 10,000 lei spent on our Facebook Ads account. It covers the lessons learned in the three years we’ve been promoting on Facebook (lessons learned spending much bigger budgets :D).
And if you’re already doing Facebook campaigns take this quiz and find out how well you know how to do Facebook Ads. At the end we’ll tell you the level you’re at and help you with materials to get to the next level.
How the Facebook algorithm works
If you’ve ever wondered why people don’t see your Facebook page posts, well, that’s “by design,” which is how it’s supposed to be. In this article you’ll get a better understanding of why this happens and how Facebook works.
How to increase the organic impact of Facebook page posts
If you still want your page posts to reach more people, in this article you learn 10 tactics to make it happen.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Simply put, search engine marketing refers to marketing through search engines – in Romania we are talking about 90% Google.
If Facebook promotion, and social media marketing in general, helps us to create demand for a product, search engine marketing in general helps us to meet demand.
For example, if you created a new wallet that generates electricity while you carry it in your pocket and can charge your phone, no one will know to Google it. Then you’ll have to create demand and use Facebook Ads or Google Display (see below).
Instead, if you have a product that people are already searching for, Search Engine Marketing is for you.
This includes both paid (Google Adwords Search Ads) and free (Search Engine Optimization – SEO) promotion methods. In this section we talk about the paid ones, namely:
Online promotion via Search Ads
This refers to the ads we see when we advertise on Google.
These are the first results that have a little green sign that says “Ad”.
With Google Search Ads we pay when someone does a search related to our products/services AND clicks on our ad.
This is the main advantage of these online promotion methods (besides helping us get in front of customers ready to buy): we only pay for results. Also, the competition is by industry/keyword, not by target audience.
Display Ads Promotion
You’ve probably noticed that most of the sites you go to have ads. Chances are good that, unless the site is a very large one (such as news), these ads are delivered through Google.
There are a lot of sites that are part of the Google Display Network. Basically, they have a partnership with Google where they allow ads to be shown in exchange for financial rewards.
So it’s very easy for us to display ads on these sites through Google.
We can show ads based on the content of web pages, we can choose certain sites to show ads on, or we can show ads based on demographics.
This method of online promotion works at a basic level like Facebook Ads and is primarily used for branding or remarketing (ads seen by site visitors).
Promotion via YouTube Ads
YouTube is one of the most impressive platforms today. It is one of the most visited sites in the world, is the second most popular search engine (after Google) and has over 1 billion active users.
That’s why for many marketers it’s an important part of their marketing strategy. Ads on YouTube are also created through Google Adwords.
If you’re curious about promoting on Google, we’ve created a guide to help you take the first steps in promoting online with this platform:
Promoting your business with Google Adwords
Email Marketing
Email is one of the best marketing channels for the bottom of the sales funnel, for conversions. It allows us to more easily connect with our audience and deliver marketing messages to them in a more controlled way.
That’s why we’ve created a detailed guide that covers the most common questions and challenges related to this method of online promotion:
Email Marketing: A complete guide for beginners
