When Do I Start Marketing For My Online Business

When Do I Start Marketing For My Online Business? A very crucial question with very ambiguous answers and one with very few todo actions on this leaves all startup owners flabbergasted and directionless. And Mind You this is one of the most important areas of your business that can and will make or break your business. I have launched many online businesses in the past few years and know the sweet spot from where you can get the maximum advantage from marketing your online business.

First lets discuss the various types of online marketing. Basically there are 7 types of online marketing and they are:-

EMAIL MARKETING:- Costs Low to Average Email marketing is the oldest form of online marketing. This is simply sending email with your promotions to your customers and potential customers.

PUSH NOTIFICATIONS MARKETING:- Costs low – Push Notifications is the latest form of marketing and the best part is that it is very low cost and very effective form of marketing.

AFFILIATE MARKETING – Costs Low – This is again very old form of marketing. You ask other people who either have following or space to place your advertisement to promote your product and you pay them a commission if a sale is made through their referral.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) & PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING (PPC) – Costs Very High – This is a paid form of marketing where you pay google or other ads provider for each click or each sale that is done through the ads placed on their properties.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – Costs Low to Average – Search Engine Optmization or SEO is process of ranking your website high on google and other search engine by making it comply with the search engine rules and providing good content related to the keyword inputted in the search engines.

CONTENT MARKETING – Costs Low to High – Content marketing in simple terms is writing about the domain/niche that your business is in so that you can provide valuable inputs about that domain/niche so that you attract people from that domain/niche to your business.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM) – Costs Low to High – SMM is basically the process of using social media to influence buyers or social media users to use your business.

When to Start Your Marketing:-

After Your Business Launch:– You should start EMAIL MARKETING, PUSH NOTIFICATIONS MARKETING, SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) & PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING (PPC) Marketing, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM) methods AFTER you launch your business.
The most mandatory is Organic SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM) it is important that you build branding for your business and another advantage of social media marketing is you can do this locally i.e. you can just target your core locality at very micro level and build local branding and following. This is for organic social media marketing – in SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING (SMM) there is also a paid form where you pay for making your posts and ads go viral and display ads to potential customers. For paid form of social media marketing my experience says that its better to keep it on low priority unless you are seed funded.
You can start with EMAIL MARKETING and PUSH NOTIFICATIONS MARKETING as soon as you start getting customers on board. Even 10 customers are ok to start with. These both are the most low cost form of marketing and yet the most effective form of marketing specially push notifications. Today it has become habit of customers to keep checking their phones for messages and your messages are always on a flick of their hands encouraging them to buy from you.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM) & PAY-PER-CLICK ADVERTISING (PPC) Marketing are the least priority form of marketing for me. I use these only when I have very specific short term agenda in mind for business and yes a good chunk of money to spend on that agenda. This is the most expensive form of marketing and adwords and other paid platfrom burn money like forest fire. And most the cost of customer acquisition has been much higher than the ROI we could realise from that customer in 1 years time.You should not ideally for go paid marketing unless you are seed funded and preferable form of paid marketing would be social media marketing where you could atleast gain branding and long term buyers from the money spent.

Start Atleast 1-3 Months Before You Launch Your Business:- You should start AFFILIATE MARKETING, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and CONTENT MARKETING atleast 1-3 months before you launch your business. The reason being that these form of marketing take longer time to show results and you can start on them even you your assets are half ready.
For AFFILIATE MARKETING you would need to build a good network to see desirable results and that takes time and does not need a fully working system or all assets in place to start on this. You can start getting agreements on terms and conditions during this period and letting people know of the launch date.
For SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and CONTENT MARKETING it takes time for your pages to show up in search engine results and even a longer time to rank for the keyword searches that would send the right traffic to your business. It generally takes 3-6 months of consistent efforts to have your business rank for right keywords that sends the right buying traffic to your business. but this is the highest ROI form of marketing and once you start ranking for the right keywords the success of your business is literally assured.
So how do you start on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and CONTENT MARKETING 1-3 months before you launch your business

  • So when your site and system development is going on you would have your domain ready and atleast a rough landing page.
  • You should decide on your main keywords that you would want to your business to rank on search engines for.
  • Then you should have basic onpage SEO factors in place for your homepage for your keywords like meta title, meta tags and descriptions and write content on your homepage related to that keywords. You can write About US or About the Business content here and put the content on homepage even when the design is not ready as search engines do not rank based on design – they only look at content.
  • Then you should start posting PR articles about your business launch with link to your business in these articles on different PR sites. This builds authority for your business in eyes of search engines and you will soon start ranking on them when you have good number of links.

This same applies to content marketing – it would take time for your content to start displaying and ranking on search engines so post your content as soon as possible even when your page designs are not ready just get your on page seo items in place and one important factor to keep in mind for content is that the page URL should always stay the same before or after your business launch.

We provide guaranteed rankings for your keywords for eDeliveryApp clients check out our pricing here.