How to market your website in 2024: Step-by-step guide

Marketing your online business is vital if you want to stand out from your competition and hit your goals and targets, whether those are sales targets or advertising goals. Knowing how to market your website, then, is a must.

With a whole range of online platforms to choose from – and even more strategies – it can be overwhelming when you first think about getting into the online advertising game, but that shouldn’t put you off.

As difficult as it might seem at first, by planning out and implementing a well-thought-out marketing strategy and making use of the right tools, you can position your business for success.

In this article, we will explore some of the key tools, strategies and best practices to help you market your online business successfully.

Define your target audience

Before you start thinking about what marketing strategies to deploy, it’s important that you first define your target audience. You need to understand who your ideal customer is, what they need, what their preferences are, and what sorts of behaviour they exhibit. Knowing this can help you to understand what you’re offering, how you deliver the message, and where you can deliver that message to get the best results.

Many businesses create buyer personas when they first begin their marketing activity. They do this by using the data they have access to, from Google Analytics (GA) or social media, for example, to create a representation of their preferred customer. For example, using GA data, you can find information on the average age of your users, their location and gender, as well as information about their interests.

These might inform a few personas for you to consider – for example, if you know your audience is more likely to be over 50, you can craft a persona to reflect that; from that point, you can then better understand what sort of marketing you should carry out. On the other hand, if the data suggests that your audience is mostly in their early 20s, then you’ll likely want to deploy a different strategy altogether.

When defining your target audience, you can start by thinking about the following factors:

Where are your audience based?
What sort of age is your audience?
What shared interests or hobbies might your audience have?
What sort of media does your audience access most?
What type of device will your audience use to access your website?

Of course, you might not have a huge amount of data to hand yet. In that case, then competitor analysis is vital, along with good market research to try and understand what sort of audience you’re likely to have. In the same way that a buyer persona will inform your marketing activities, so can good customer research.

Whatever stage you’re at, and whatever data you have access to, there are a range of tools and sites that you can find online to provide insight on how to proceed. The most important thing about this stage in the marketing process is that you do everything you can to build a clear picture of your audience. This is vital if you want to make sure that you’re using the right platforms and forms of advert, and if you want to be certain that your marketing spend is returning value to you.

For more advice, you can visit our page on how to create an online business plan.

Build a compelling online presence

Establishing a strong online premise can be crucial for marketing your business effectively, whether that business is a brick-and-mortar high street store or a purely online operation.

The first step to building a strong online presence is to create a business website that works. This site should showcase your brand, products and services in the best way possible to match your audience’s needs.

You should also consider search engine optimisation (SEO) as one of the most important strategies for driving brand exposure and hitting your goals. Writing compelling content with engaging visuals, intuitive navigation and well-designed features is the best way to provide a strong experience for your audience.

A compelling online presence should also be linked up with other platforms, including social media and email if you want it to have as wide a reach as possible.

Leverage social media marketing

Social media platforms have changed the way that businesses in every sector and industry connect with their audiences.

If you know enough about your audience, with help from the section above, then your business can identify which of the available platforms is going to be best for your marketing activity. This might be because you know that your target customer users that specific platform most, but may also be because you know that the return on investment (ROI) is better on one than the other.

Engage with your audience by sharing valuable, relevant content in the way that they prefer; you can run contests or giveaways to build brand awareness, but you can also respond to comments and messages on social media platforms to show that you run an engaged operation that takes feedback seriously.

Many businesses will run a combination of organic social media activity – that isn’t paid for, except in time spent – and paid social activity – where you pay to present adverts to your audience. Understanding which of these works best for you, and what sort of results you might expect, is an important step in optimising your advertising efforts.

For example, you might consider your organic social media activity to be all about building a presence, and getting people to remember your name; your paid activity, on the other hand, may be all about selling specific products and services. Whatever the case may be, knowing what your goals are for each marketing campaign is crucial if you want to know if it’s been successful or not.

The good news is that, if you are interested in social media marketing, then there’s a very good chance that your target audience is using at least one platform. Datareportal reported that were around 57.1 million social media users in the UK in January 2023, around 84% of the total population. If you’re interested in more facts and figures, take a look at our UK website statistics page.

Take a look at our what is social media marketing page to find out more.

Use search engine marketing (SEM)

Not to be confused with search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the type of campaigns where businesses pay to appear in search results for specific keywords and queries. This form of advertising is commonly known as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Search engines, such as Google and Bing, provide services to marketers that allow them to operate adverts. Google Ads, for example, will let businesses display their adverts to users who search for specific keywords. You will also be able to add key demographics to your targeting; for example, you might want users to see your ad if they search a specific keyword, but you might also want to define the location they need to be in.

Beyond making sure that your adverts are reaching the right people on the search results, you will also need to make sure that you are creating those adverts in the right way. SEM professionals will often spend a great deal of their time trialling a range of adverts to see what works best; this can include making changes to headlines and content or trying out different images and calls-to-action (CTAs).

If you begin marketing, you must monitor your campaigns regularly and get as much data as you can to analyse what is and isn’t working. With paid activity, it can be much easier to calculate your ROI than with organic channels, so many businesses will find that they can quite quickly test and iterate to find the strategies that are most effective for them.

You can visit our what is search engine marketing page if you want to find out more about SEM.

Thought leadership and content marketing

Thought leadership is a form of marketing where your expertise is used to attract users to your website, products or services. Often, thought leadership will mean having a specific person within your business who might act as the ‘face of the company’, but it can also be that your brand name generally is considered to be authoritative and, therefore, worth paying attention to.

One of the best ways to incorporate thought leadership into your content marketing strategy is to create high-quality content that educates and engages your audience, ideally in an entertaining way. This can be anything from blog posts or articles to videos and podcasts; which of these works best will depend on your audience, as well as on the opportunities that present themself to you.

The benefit of a great number of these forms of content marketing is that, if they are hosted on your site, as articles and blog posts often will be, then you can use SEO to try and gain search rankings and, in turn, traffic from them. If the content is hosted elsewhere, on the site of the podcast owner, for example, then it may still be beneficial to you if they provide a link – often known as a backlink – to your domain from theirs. Search engines, such as Google, recognise these backlinks as an important ranking factor, and users will also see them as a sign of authority.

Email marketing and CRM

Email marketing may seem slightly old-fashioned now compared to some of the modern options, such as social media marketing, but it is still a very powerful tool when it’s used well.

Many businesses will try to build email lists by creating incentives, such as exclusive content and discounts to get people to sign up. While these incentives can be beneficial to users in the short-term, they can also be very valuable for businesses, as they provide an additional platform to market from. While a business with just a website will rely entirely on that website for traffic and revenue, a business with a website and a sold email database will be able to rely on both simultaneously.

Successful email marketers will be able to segment their list based on a range of factors. For example, if you know what content brought a user to your site then you might be able to make assumptions about what sorts of products or services will be most useful to them. Likewise, by linking your analytics in the right way, you may also be able to work more about their demographic data and their interests, both of which can provide clear guidance for how you go about marketing.

If you want more information, you can visit our what is email marketing page.

Email databases and CRM systems

Beyond the more obvious forms of marketing, email databases also provide a great opportunity for customer relationship management (CRM). This is where a brand uses positive brand experiences to stay in their customer’s minds, in a good way.

For example, many brands will send regular emails to their database that are designed, primarily, to inform rather than to sell; the idea is that this sort of content, which is less overtly sales-based, will drive retention as customers begin to rely on you for reliable updates and information.

However you want to approach email marketing and CRM, one of the key things to bear in mind is that quality is important. You should always aim to craft compelling email subject lines, create engaging content, and also to optimise your campaigns for different sorts of devices. You should then be monitoring open rates, click-through rates and conversions to understand how successful your email marketing has been and also to identify ways to improve it even more.

You can take a look at our best CRM platforms page if you want to find out more about providers.

Partner with influencers and affiliate networks

Influence marketing can be an excellent way for businesses to boost visibility and credibility. Working with influencers who are well-known and aligned with your brand values can help to drive engagement with your existing audience, as well as with the influencers’ audience.

You can forge partnerships through content on your website, such as blog posts, reviews or videos, as well as through content on social media. Deciding on which option to choose will depend on your market, as well as on the influencer you are working with.

Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, is where you work with partners to drive clicks or visits to one site from another. For example, if you have a product that you are selling, you can work with other publishers who might review that product and then send traffic to your page via an affiliate link.

Typically, these affiliate partnerships will be commission-based, with either a set price per click or a percentage of total sales value being provided by the product seller to the publisher who advertised the product. Review websites are a common form of media to look for if you’re considering influencers or affiliate partnerships.

Monitor, analyse and iterate

The best way to ensure that your business is marketed effectively online is to learn from your successes and mistakes.

Monitor your campaigns using all of the data you can analyse your key performance indicators (KPIs) as often as possible. You can use analysis tools across a range of platforms, from site traffic analysis to social media insight and email database results. Combining this information will help to create a clear picture of your users, as well as provide insight as to how they behave, what sorts of campaigns work best, and which platforms are most valuable to you.

As most marketing professionals know, testing is key. Running tests across all of your platforms, and learning what works and what doesn’t, will help you in the long-term to create compelling and engaging advertisements that, most importantly, contribute value back to your business.

As your business grows and as your marketing results improve, you can continue investing in the things that do work. This may be in the form of new staff to run campaigns, or in new platforms to help run them yourself. In either case, one of the most important things to remember is that, in an online world that changes all the time, you need to keep your business strategies evolving to keep up.

The pages below provide more information on common tools and processes when it comes to monitoring your results.

What is Google Search Console? Definition, features & benefits

What is Google Analytics? Definition, features and benefits

What is keyword tracking? Definition & tips on how to do it

Best CRM software 2024: Compare top business picks

What is CRM? Definition, benefits & tips

How to market your website: Final thoughts

Marketing your online business is not just one process that you need to complete one time, it is an ongoing series of processes that rely on creativity, strategy and data in equal measure.

The first and most important rule is that you need to understand your audience. If you know who you are targeting then you can understand what forms of marketing will work best. From this point, you can select the right forms of marketing – from SEO to CRM – and then engage users with the best possible content.

Last, but not least, remember to keep testing and collecting data. You might never know when you’ll find your next big campaign, and you might not know exactly what the right headline is to hit every KPI you set, but by testing and learning you stand a better chance of finding out.

Bryn Glover

Bryn is the founder and editor of WebsiteJumpStart. He has worked in the digital field for over a decade and was editor for Startups.co.uk - the UK's leading small business website - and for NerdWallet UK before launching WebsiteJumpStart to help people and businesses get online with ease.

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Table of Contents

Define your target audience

Build a compelling online presence

Leverage social media marketing

Use search engine marketing (SEM)

Thought leadership and content marketing

Email marketing and CRM

Email databases and CRM systems

Partner with influencers and affiliate networks

Monitor, analyse and iterate

How to market your website: Final thoughts

Bryn Glover