3 Effective Strategies to Reach Your Online Target Audience This Year SEO, social media strategy and back links are all online elements you should be thinking about to meet your target customers online.
By Syed Balkhi Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
To run a fruitful online business, you first need a solid online target audience to cater to. Without those people, there's no one to see or care about your products and services, much less purchase them. That's why expanding your reach and visibility is essential to reach your growth objectives.
Related: 5 Digital Marketing Trends to Keep Your Audience Hooked
How do you achieve this? Let's assume you already know your target audience. You know their pain points, what problems they need solved and the questions they want answered. You're determined to get them to trust you as a brand. So, you create quality content you know they'll eat up. But ... there's a problem: You can't seem to get enough shares, likes or comments.
If this is your dilemma, it's likely you need a revamped online strategy to get the results you want.
Here are three essential strategies to put into practice to successfully reach your target audience this year.
1. Optimize for search.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is what webmasters use so that their website can rank higher in search engine result pages, or SERPs. SEO categorizes your content and investigates its value and other elements like engagement and unique visitors and ranks your website accordingly. The more steps you've taken to optimize your content, the greater the chance you'll have of reaching your target market.
Related: 5 Essentials for Connecting With Your Ideal Target Market on Social Media
There are several ways to optimize for SEO:
Optimize for mobile. Google prioritizes sites that use mobile-first indexing, meaning that their site is optimized across all devices, especially mobile. Statista found that in 2018, 52 percent of website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones. If you aren't optimizing for mobile, you're missing out on half of your potential traffic and leads.
Image Source: Backlinko
Use relevant keywords. Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every second. The only way your content is going to show up for users is if you conduct keyword research based on what your audience wants and center your content around it.
Build quality backlinks. You want authoritative, respected blogs linking to your content because it shows those bloggers trust you as a reliable, credible source of information. One strategy is to guest-post on others' blogs. When their readers see this, they'll view you in the same light and gain interest in your brand. This strategy takes effort and time since not just any popular site is going to give you backlinks, but it's possible to meet that goal, given enough persistence.
2. Engage on social media.
With Statista reporting more than three billion active social media users worldwide, it'd be a waste not to utilize social media to reach your target market. You know they're there; all you have to do is find them and interact.
Most social mediums let you set up polls, surveys and questionnaires to gather feedback from followers, which is a great way to get their opinion and form a personal connection. It shows that you care what your audience thinks and it encourages them to check you out.
Image source: Twitter.com
You should regularly post updates on your brand and its content through your social channels, using relevant hashtags so that people searching for those keywords can find your posts. Scour these hashtags to find out what questions they have that you can respond to. Add social sharing buttons on your website so your posts can be shared across multiple platforms.
3. Use visual content.
The Harvard Business Review has said that to improve your content marketing, you need to create visual content and avoid heavy blocks of text. Images, videos and other visual content spark and keep the interest of readers because they want skimmable content that's easy to digest.
A study by Nielsen found that users scan content in different patterns, one of them being a spotted pattern. This means they skip chunks of text and heavily scan the page, searching for something specific like links or keywords.
If you want to catch the attention of your audience, spruce up the content they're consuming by inserting images, videos and other media elements to make things more appealing and exciting. From there, use the same visual content to post to social media, and entice users to check out your brand.
Take customer stories, experiences and reviews and turn them into videos you can feature on your website and social platforms. Turn your blog posts into videos and infographics that make your content sparkle, and break the monotony. The more users who see this quality content, the more visibility it will attract through shares, likes and engagement.
Related: Is Digital Marketing a Key to Success For Growth of Your Business?
Wrapping up.
The hardest part about starting a business is getting your content into the right hands when there's so much competition out there. If you have a strategy, however, you'll be able to get the likes and interactions you want. Take into consideration how your audience could benefit from your brand and integrate those points into your strategy for improved lead generation.
How will you reach your audience in 2019?
