Member Article

6 Tasks Online Marketers Wish Weren’t Such a Pain

Online Marketers are considered to know what’s trending and everything about it at any given point of time. While it is quite exciting and keeps the person on his/her toes, it is probably the toughest task in hand.

Online marketing can make or break a brand’s reputation and that makes it a demanding job. If the competition was not enough to drive the online marketers to go berserk over creating and rolling out an astounding strategy, technology comes up with something new every other day to test their wits.

Online marketing is best targeted at a specific audience. The idea is to bring leads to the website or business in large numbers. Quality leads also matter as that’s what ultimately shows up in the conversions.

The online marketers cannot simply fire into the open sky expecting miracles to happen. Their job requires meticulous research, analysis, planning and executing crisp marketing strategies that are trending and will help to bring in leads with good potentials.

Here are some essential tasks that get the online marketers go crazy, while they remain the most important in their job:

1. Understanding the market

Online marketing can be targeted towards the specific audience as well as a large market too. Since social media and the internet are the main media for online marketing, reaching out to different people is not difficult. But reaching out to the right audience is what makes sense and that’s exactly the most difficult part too.

Identifying the target market, location, and audience based on various aspects such as the current market saturation levels, and geographical position needs to be done. The target audience needs to be identified based on their buying patterns, behavioral patterns, and purchase history. Such information is available online from various resources.

The marketer has to first research on the reliable resource for such market information and then extract the relevant information based on which the online marketing strategy and the target audience can be finalized.

2. Data Analysis

Marketing research comes up with a large amount of data which needs to be processed according to the requirements and analyzed. Data analytic is very difficult to perform because of the vastness of data and various methods that can be adopted, each which may result in a different set of target audience.

So the next important decision becomes the methods used for data analytic. Data analytic is a very trending buzzword and deciding on the technology and method to be adopted can be tricky. Because of the vastness of data, the online marketers end up compromising on some of the aspects to be analyzed while concentrating on some others.

3. Content Strategy

Once the market and the target audience are finalized, the next step is to form a content strategy as content is what forms the basis for online marketing. The online marketer has to finalize the types of content required, the topics to cover, the social media coverage to be handled and other nuances of content strategy.

Depending on the target market and audience, the content strategy is drawn. This is very tricky as what clicks at the time of creating the strategy may not work tomorrow. Customer behavior is changing rapidly and your competitors are also always on the lookout for what you and other competitors are up to.

By the time the content is finalized, the competitor may come up with something more striking which will overpower your strategy. This creative hazard is the biggest challenge in online marketing. At any given point of time, the online marketer should be ready with a Plan B and even Plan C to roll out a counter-marketing campaign if needed.

4. What’s Trending?

This is the next tricky part of online marketing. Every day, the internet is bombarded with millions of new pages, articles, blogs, images, videos and audio. No one can predict how a particular content goes viral at a particular time.

But as something goes viral, and seems to be attracting a lot of attention, the online marketer should be ready with a similar campaign that also gets attention equally. This is a big challenge as the client only wants a viral content or campaign that will boost the brand’s image considerably.

And what will go viral is something the marketer cannot decide on! So the online marketer has to keep track of what’s trending in all fronts – from politics and education to sports and entertainment and be ready to come up with something similar or better than that.

5. User Experience

Though the UX or User experience is not determined by the online marketer, it makes a huge difference to the quantity and quality of leads that the marketer tries to bring onto the page. Top SEO and SERP ranks are major requirements of any online marketer.

While there are specific ways to reach the top ranking positions, retaining it over a long period of time gets very tricky. An outstanding UX plays an important role in retaining customers longer and keep them coming back.

Since the marketer has the data or customer feedback regarding the UX, he/she can influence the designers to improve the same with specific pointers. This makes a huge difference to SEO ranking services and that’s why it impacts the online marketer. Since there are many technical and creative aspects of building the right UX, the marketer finds it very complex.

6. Out-of-the-Box Marketing Ideas

Every marketer is expected to come up with ‘Original’, out-of-the-box, ‘Creative’ ideas that work. Both the parts are tricky here – coming up with an original creative idea and expecting it to work. If it is a totally new un-experimented idea, no one can guarantee that it will work positively.

In fact, there’s a huge risk of backfiring too since the competitors will be ever ready to pull your brand down! If it is not original, people may be already familiar with it and hence it may not click as well among the target audience. So it is clearly a paradox to come up with an original creative idea that’s guaranteed to work.

Conclusion:

These tasks are the basics for any online marketing professional. Experience, creativity, analytic and decision-making skills and technical know-how of the internet and social media trends are key to succeed as an online marketer.

There’s a lot of information on how to accomplish these tasks and quite a few pointers to what approaches have been proven successful. But it helps to know that your competitor also has access to these which poses higher competition.

Recognizing the brand’s specialties, engaging positively with the customer, maintaining good customer relations and constantly improving the products and services can prove to be extremely helpful to succeed and sustain in a competitive market.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Maulik Patel .