10 Online Marketing Essentials
Key takeaways from a recent Korio Marketing session, shared by the Taupō Business Chamber
Marketing doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive to be effective. Here are ten practical reminders worth running your business past, whatever your budget.
- Get the basics right
You don’t need a 50 page strategy. A one page plan covering your objectives, your brand and key messages, your audience, the customer journey, and your touchpoints is totally fine, as long as you actually have one.
- Word of mouth and online presence work in tandem
What people say about your business and what they find when they search for it reinforce each other. Strong word of mouth means little if your online presence doesn’t back it up, and vice versa.
- Your website is your foundation
It’s the one place you fully control the message. To be found on Google, or increasingly through AI search, you need good content, and you need somewhere for that content to live. That’s your website.
- Sort your Google Business listing
Optimise it. It’s free, and it’s often the first thing people see when they search for you.
- Reviews and case studies
- Reviews are free social proof. Build asking for them into how you do business.
- Case studies work well for search and AI answer engines, and combine expert insight with real customer stories to build authority.
- Content is still king
Purposeful content based on what your audience actually needs and wants. Not ad hoc, and not just what’s comfortable for you to create. Good content is meaningful, useful, of value, and relatable.
- Email marketing
Probably the most underused, cost effective marketing tool available. Your email database is a business asset.
- Build it: collect addresses in person, at events, through your website, and at point of purchase or enquiry.
- Use it: send regularly and consistently, add value rather than just selling, repurpose content from your website or socials, and keep an eye on the analytics.
- SEO, and now AIO too
Optimising for search engines and for AI answer engines now go hand in hand. The fundamentals: publish original insights and real world expertise, get your technical structure right, build backlinks and referrals, create content that directly answers questions, and build topical authority and crawlability.
- Digital advertising
Paid ads across Google, Meta and LinkedIn each play a different role.
- Google ads reach people already searching, at the decision making stage, and are measured by conversions.
- Social ads build awareness with people who don’t yet know they want what you offer, and are measured by reach and impressions.
- Spend a little or a lot, but get expert help so the budget isn’t wasted.
- Measure and adjust
Good reporting on your digital advertising shows what’s working, so you can do more of that, and what’s not, so you can do less of it.
Bonus: AI is changing how people search
- AI is reshaping search, not replacing it. Google still gets roughly 26 times more traffic than ChatGPT.
- Search engines are embedding AI directly into results (Google AI Overviews), so the line between “search” and “AI assistant” is blurring.
- Mentions and references of your business matter more than ever for AI generated answers.
- Sponsored AI answers are coming. Worth keeping an eye on as this space develops.
The three big takeaways
- Whether your marketing budget is $100 or $100,000, your activity should be planned, precise and purposeful.
- Invest in your website first. It’s your homebase, but a website alone won’t do the whole job.
- Always check back against the basics, even if all you have is a one page plan.
Summary prepared by the Taupō Business Chamber from a presentation by Korio Marketing. You can find Korio Marketing here.
