Online Marketing 101 for Canadian Business Owners

Internet usage has continued to grow and online marketing has become one of the most important forms of sales and marketing. Marketing experts have turned their focus on digital channels to promote and grow their businesses. 

Of course, advertising plays an important role in building brands and influencing buyer decisions. Reports indicate that Canada is among the top ten countries in the world that spend the most advertising dollars. 

Here are the important points you need to know about online marketing that will help you to succeed in the Canadian business environment.

Why Digital Marketing? 

Online marketers use a variety of channels and platforms such as cell phones, computers, and other digital media to create, distribute, and track marketing messages through digital and social media.

Canadian consumers are spending more time online as they turn to digital platforms for news and entertainment. Therefore, having a strong online presence and a well defined digital marketing strategy will help to boost and grow your business.

With an increased internet penetration and more proliferation of digital content, there has never been a better time to turn your business’ focus to digital marketing if you want to stay ahead of your competition.

Digital Marketing in Canada

Traditional media such as print, broadcast, outdoor media, and direct advertising haven’t quite disappeared. But they’ve certainly taken a backseat and if your business hasn’t jumped onto the digital bandwagon, you are likely missing out on huge opportunities for growth and expansion.

Government Support for Digital Marketing

SMEs are the backbone of the Canadian economy and the government has laid out support for their digital transformations. The province of Ontario, for instance, is now helping small businesses, through the Digital Main Street Platform, to enhance their online presence and reach more customers. 

The platform features three main programs;

1. DMS shopHERE: powered by Google and aims to help young Canadians to build and launch online stores. It helps small businesses to compete and grow in an increasingly online business environment, both now and beyond the COVID-19 period.

2. DMS Grants: aims to provide grants to support businesses embrace digital marketing and to adopt new technologies that will make them become more digitally effective.

3. DMS Future-Proof: aims to provide support for in-depth digital transformations. It helps small businesses to develop new online business models and to implement digital marketing strategies.

Other government programs provide small businesses with all in one digital marketing programs to grow and expand their business online. The programs may be in the form of training or grants to fund different aspects of your business. 

Content Marketing as a Central Part of Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketing has been proven to help business grow and improve their performance. A solid online marketing strategy will help you keep your current customers and at the same time, help you bring in new ones.

Content marketing is particularly crucial in a digital marketing strategy. This is because a digital marketing strategy will most certainly go nowhere without content.

It gives value to your website and gives users a reason to visit in the first place. You can then guide those visitors along your marketing funnel and eventually convert them into sales.

When done right, digital content helps to engage your prospects and further your reach, it’s the most important component in a digital marketing strategy. Only by creating content can you ensure that your website ranks well in search engine results pages (SERPS) and enable you to reach those potential buyers. In fact, modern day customers now expect consistent and top-quality content from their favourite brands or businesses.

Develop Buyer’s Personas and Customer’s Journey

As with all forms of marketing, understanding who you are communicating with is often the difference between a successful marketing campaign and an unsuccessful one. The most basic rule of marketing stipulates that, it’s not about trying to sell to everyone or to reach as many people as you can. It’s about passing the right information to the right people at the right stage of their buying journey.

Therefore, digital marketing requires a good understanding of your target market, your buyer’s persona, and their customer journey. This will help you create and distribute the right kind of information and content to push them along the journey and eventually make a purchase.

If you would like to learn more about creating a buyer’s persona, check out our blog post here. For learning how to map out your customer’s journey, please click here.

Website and Your Landing Pages

Just like the internet, the value of your website increases exponentially year after year. A website provides a range of benefits for any type of business. A website will: 

• Help your business look more professional,
• Allow you to showcase your products and services
• Help you attract new customers through search engines
• Help you establish your place in your specific industry

A landing page is an important part of your website design and your digital marketing strategy. It’s a standalone webpage created for a specific marketing campaign. 

It’s super focused on increasing conversion rates in your marketing funnel since it has a call to action (CTA) specifically designed to convert a visitor into a buying customer.

Landing pages are markedly different from homepages in that, they are where your visitors “land” immediately they click on a link in an email or a search engine ad or link. Therefore, you’ll need great content and a good content marketing strategy to get visitors in the first place.

To learn how to drive traffic to your website, please feel free to check out our blog post here.

Social Media

Social media has quickly become one of the core components of digital marketing. It’s now almost unthinkable to succeed in digital marketing without using social media. It has enabled businesses expand their reach by making it easier to spread word about their products and services to millions of customers worldwide.

Therefore, a good content marketing strategy will always include a social media strategy as part of the overall digital marketing strategy. It will provide a cost effective way to improve your visibility, brand recognition, brand loyalty, brand authority, and SEO rankings. Your brand will connect, engage, and convey the brand message which ultimately helps your conversion rates.

Paid Online Advertising

As the name suggests, paid online advertising typically has a cost implication associated with it. Examples include PPC (pay per click) campaigns, website takeover, and online partnerships such as influencer marketing.

Despite the cost aspect, paid advertising can help you generate more business and grow your customer base. It can also help to significantly improve the perception of your business as well as brand awareness.

Paid online advertising guarantees reach. With specific or granular targeting, it can also help you get more qualified leads, i.e., relevant website visitors who are already interested in your products and who fit your buyer personas. 

When carefully planned, paid advertising can bring in more high-quality traffic to your website, and with a lot less effort than it would take using SEO. However, to reap the potential benefits of paid advertising, you will need a great content marketing strategy to ensure you have the right content at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

For more information about online paid advertising, check out our blog post here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

One of the most popular ways to find more information about anything on the internet is to enter the question or the search term on a search engine. Internet users are now looking for specific answers to their queries rather than just browsing through news channels or social media platforms looking for information.

More and more customers are using search engines to find out more about a brand or a product before making any purchasing decision. Therefore, it’s important that your brand shows up in the first few pages of their search terms. 

Both you and the search engines have the same goal: to provide valuable information to visitors. You will require a good content marketing strategy to ensure you have the kind of content that addresses users’ queries and eventually boost your conversion rates

You will also need to understand SEO and how it works as you create your content. SEO is always evolving and what worked three, five, or even one year ago may be obsolete before you consider executing it as part of your digital marketing strategy. It will also be beneficial to have an understanding of what the future SEO trends are so that you can position yourself ahead of your competition.

If you are interested in learning about the history of SEO, please check out our blog post here.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the potent ways to connect and build relationships with your customers and your leads. Because email marketing is permission-based, everyone on your mailing list is already interested in your brand. They want to get more information about your business, your products and services, and any promotions, discounts, and offerings. 

Email is convenient, personal, relevant, and instant. It’s not only quite affordable, but it allows you to use the full range of HTML features since it’s more interactive and doesn’t have some of the media limitations of some social media platforms (word count, file size/type, etc).

You can effectively use email marketing to invite both potential and existing customers to your website through relevant links and CTAs.  A great content marketing strategy will ensure that they consume the right content depending on where they are on the buyer’s journey.

To learn about getting started on email marketing, please feel free to read our blog post here. To learn about its dos and don’ts, check out our blog post here.

Conclusion

From a digital perspective, reports indicate that Canadian businesses are generally considered to be around two years behind their U.S. peers. Therefore, to reach the kind of standards showed by the US and other countries, they’ll need to prepare to compete by implementing digital marketing and e-commerce strategies and maximizing the use of digital tools, platforms and content.

It’s content that gives true value to your website and all your digital platforms. Without it, nobody would visit your digital platforms in the first place. Only a solid content marketing strategy can position your business for growth and expansion in the digital market place.

While content marketing may cost time and money, the rewards are more than justify even the smallest of efforts. Always be on the lookout for the latest trends and local government initiatives and other federal programs that support digital transformations to maximize your efforts and results.

For more information on why content marketing should be central to your digital marketing efforts, please feel free to check out our blog post here.

 

What is your experience with digital marketing as a Canadian business owner? Comment below and let us know!

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