The most effective online marketing strategies

The growth of the internet over the past decade has made opening an online shop easier and cheaper than it has ever been, and it remains one of the better bets for increasing sales. The sector grows every year, and it removes the geographic limits a physical shop lives with. Three in ten people now say they buy something online at least once a month, helped along by phones and tablets that let people browse from anywhere.

But the design of the shop is not everything. Succeeding requires a strategy that sets out what you want and how you intend to get there. So which strategies actually work?

Search engine optimisation

The set of techniques aimed at making your site more visible and better understood by search engines. It works locally too: ranking above your competitors in your own city is often worth more than ranking nationally for something generic.

Content marketing

Another of the foundations. Search engines rank pages largely on the text they contain, so having substantial content increases your traffic. It has to be good, though: relevance and originality carry far more weight than volume.

Social media

Useful for reach and for staying present, less so for direct sales. Treat it as the top of the funnel and judge it accordingly, rather than expecting every post to sell something.

Email marketing

Still the highest return per euro spent of any digital channel, because you own the list. Segmentation is what separates a campaign that works from one that gets deleted.

Paid search

Immediate visibility while the slower channels build up. It stops the moment you stop paying, which makes it a complement to organic work rather than a replacement for it.

How they fit together

None of these works well in isolation. Paid search buys you time while SEO matures, content feeds both search and social, and email turns the traffic all of them generate into repeat customers.