How to Stand Out From Your Competitors
If you are an online marketer, you are essentially an entrepreneur. There are no guarantees; you may crack it and make millions or you may fall to the side like the majority unfortunately does. The marketers that do succeed are usually the ones that think outside of the box.
Here are a few proven strategies in online marketing that can help you stay ahead of your competition.
Have A Bulletproof Business Plan
When starting anything, the first thing you need to do is come up with a plan of attack. If you don’t, then you are basically going in blind. Preparing a business plan can save you a lot of time, money, and emotional heartache. Furthermore you won’t be going back and forth readjusting tasks (because everything is already set out in front of you).
With the proper plan, you will have a lot more time to focus on growing your business instead of fixing problems that should not have been there in the first place.
Become A Master Of Your Marketing Medium
There are lots of ways to market a product online including Pay Per Click (PPC), Facebook Marketing, Blogs, and YouTube to name a few. Focus on 1 and become a master at it. It’s disastrous to try multiple methods simultaneously. Focus on just 1 and make sure you know the ins and outs of your chosen method 100%, or at least until you are comfortable to implement it and it is converting for you. Only then should you learn another technique.
From personal experience, if you decide to pursue more than 1 method you can get confused and mix processes up, as well as easily forget the tasks involved (resulting in missed steps and improper execution). You will essentially become a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
Constantly Brainstorm
For this strategy, all you need to do is think. Be creative and never let things go stale. For example, if you are promoting physical goods and there is a certain product that is hard to sell, offer another product free with it (or vice versa). This way you’re disposing of an item that was once unmarketable.
Automating Your Online Processes
Once your online business starts to grow, you will realize that there are more and more tasks you need to accomplish – and unfortunately the days do not get longer to accommodate this.
Eventually you will need to either:
- Hire staff to assist
- Automate your processes.
Automating tasks can make life that much easier and will give you more time to focus on the more important aspects of your business. For example, creating your own customer funnel and auto-responder. When you start to consistently gain more customers daily, the process of adding each email to your list then emailing each individual can take up some serious time. You do not want to be doing a mundane task like this 50+ times a day. If you have your own funnel/squeeze page set up as well as a auto-responder then you do not need to do it at all. It will literally add the emails and email the customers automatically, saving you a lot of time.
Customer Incentives
Customers are much more likely to return of you offer then an incentive. For example, offering 10% off for a limited time on certain products. Consumers will be hastier to buy as they do not want to miss the opportunity of a discount. Another example is to offer free postage if the customer spends x amount. Doing this will also increase the traffic to your site as customers will constantly be looking out for any new promotions.
On a final note, regardless of how many competitors you have, being different and approaching your customers from a different angle can make all the difference in making a sale.
© OBM Resource
