12.13.2019

How to improve online marketing and generate results



Online marketing is, on the one hand, a fairly understood field with so many experts and experienced marketers within the niche. 

On the other hand, it is a very saturated field and so taking your game to the next level to get ahead of the competitors can be very difficult.

Here, we will discuss some of the key ways to improve your online marketing performance and generate better results. 

1.Define Better Goals


One of the biggest mistakes you can do in implementing online marketing is pursuing the wrong goals/objectives—or don’t have any objectives at all—.

Not having proper marketing goals can produce many detrimental effects, but here are two main disadvantages: 

  1. Your marketing efforts might not go in the right direction—so you essentially waste time and money—
  2. If you don’t know your goals, you can’t measure the performance of your online marketing efforts, and can’t improve it.

Efforts without the right direction and purpose are more often than not, meaningless, so if you haven’t already, defining the right marketing goals is probably what’s missing in improving your digital marketing performance. From my experience with marketing this blog and other social media sites that I run, I have discovered that there are some great tools out there that you can use to boost your digital marketing efforts. For instance, some people find that using a CRM platform such as HubSpot can make it easier to monitor what is working well, and what can be improved from a marketing perspective. If you would like to learn more about the potential benefits of using HubSpot, you can find some useful onboarding resources on the Whitehat website here: https://www.whitehat-seo.co.uk/hubspot-onboarding


In general, our marketing goals should be specific, realistic, and measurable:

  • Specific: the objective(s) must be clear and specific, and easy enough to elaborate to your marketing team.
  • Realistic: the objective(s) must be attainable. This is important to maintain the morale of your team, giving them a sense of achievement. If necessary, break down big goals into smaller milestones.
  • Measurable: we can assign KPIs to evaluate the goals by measuring the right metrics.


2. Know Your Audience Better


Marketing, in many ways, is about knowing our audience’s needs and pain points, and address these needs. By providing value, we can trigger favorable emotional responses from our target audience and generate more conversions.

So, one of the best ways to improve digital marketing strategy—and any marketing efforts at all—, is to gain more insights into our audience’s needs, behaviors, and issues (both in quantity and quality). The idea is to align our marketing efforts and utilize marketing channels that can better address our audience’s needs.

There are various approaches we can use to know our audience better, but here are some common ones in this age of social media transparency:

  • Conduct interactive quizzes, interviews, and surveys. Interviews with your existing (real) customers are often the most valuable insights you can have
  • Monitor online conversations on mediums like Reddit, online forums, Quora, and other major social media platforms
  • Check online reviews of your product and your competitors’. This can be a useful approach to find out what they liked about the product and how the product can solve their problems
  • Develop a buyer persona, a classic, but still effective approach


3.Communicate Unique Value Proposition


It’s important to understand one key fact about marketing, sales, and business in general: people don’t actually buy your product or service, but they purchase the benefits tied to the product and/or service.

So, if you want to sell more products/services, communicate their unique benefits better.

This is the main idea behind the unique value proposition: which is essentially a description of how your audience can benefit from purchasing your product/service, and how your product/service is unique compared to your competitors’.

If you haven’t already, communicating your unique value proposition (UVP) can improve your online marketing performance. An ideal UVP should cover these areas:

  • Ideal audience: again, the key is understanding your ideal customers and their needs.
  • Specific needs: what is the need(s) your product/service is going to address and how you can provide a solution
  • Impact: rational and emotional values provided by solving these needs
  • Proof of concept: how you can communicate these benefits, how can we substantiate the claims
  • Uniqueness: how your offer is distinct compared to your competitors, is there anything special that is worth sharing?


4. Create a Sense of Urgency and Scarcity


Here’s the deal about human psychology: we need to realize that something is urgent. If not, we tend to procrastinate (we even still procrastinate after we understand it’s urgent, after all).

A prospect or customer might already understand the values and benefits of your products/services, but if there’s no perceived sense of urgency (or scarcity), they might not make the purchase. 

So, if you feel your product/service is already good enough and it’s already marketed well, probably communicating a sense of scarcity—and urgency— is the missing ingredient. 

There are various approaches you can use to create and communicate a sense of urgency, but it will depend on your product/service and provided benefits. Here are the common ones:

  • Offer: urgency is only as strong as how valuable the offer is in the audience’s perception.
  • Limited time offer: set a deadline, and show your audience how many days, hours, and minutes they have to make a decision. 
  • Limited stock: another common way to create urgency is to announce that you only have a limited number left in stock, or you can show that you get a certain number of buyers
  • Added value: for example, offer extra discounts for a limited time, or the first number of buyers may get a surprise bonus

5. Giving Something For Free


Last but not least, is that giving something valuable for free might be the most effective method to cut through all the noises of this saturated market. This is why the freemium business model is widely popular in the past decade or so. 

The main idea behind giving stuff away is fairly simple: capturing the audience’s attention and generate interest so they make a purchase for the real thing. And contrary to popular belief, free giveaways are virtually guaranteed to boost sales. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • People feel obligated to return a favor, the basic of the reciprocity principle in marketing.
  • We perceive getting more as superior to a discount. People prefer getting 33% more coffee than a 33% discount on the coffee’s regular price
  • People love mystery and will buy more when a mystery is involved. This is why offering a free (mysterious) gift with purchase is effective. 
  • People talk more about freebies, especially on social media. People tend to talk about a product 20% more when they get it for free.

In online marketing, we can, for example, offer something valuable for free in exchange for the visitor’s contact information, which is a common lead generation practice. 

End Words


The best way to improve your online digital marketing efforts is to first define your objectives, and assign KPIs to measure your performance according to these objectives. Evaluating your progress objectively is the key to achieving improvements. 

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