The hyper-competitive online environment is a lot like the wild, wild west of marketing. Businesses in industries across the board are struggling to compete and establish a sustainable web business or presence. At HATHWAY, we understand how difficult it can be so we have established the following 6 essential steps to establishing a sustainable business online.

1. Reaching your target audience consistently through highly focused digital media campaigns.
In order to reach your target audience, determine where they spend their time while surfing the web. Keep in mind that not everyone is on Twitter or Facebook, so you need to be creative. Try to find other channels to get your brand in front of your target audience. Just a few examples: Digg an article, purchase Pandora ads, answer a question on Quora, post a comment on an industry news article, develop a strategic partnership. Once you identify where your target audience resides online, now your job is to engage them.

2. Motivating consumers to get involved with your brand.

The beauty of the social web is that brands can engage and interact with consumers rather than talking at them with traditional advertising. At the core of all engagements, your brand message should communicate and compel consumers to interact and become involved with your brand. Social media channels as well as your company’s web site are the perfect digital mediums to accomplish this.

If your goal is to gain Facebook Fans, provide incentives for “liking” your page. If you want to increase your newsletter subscribers, offer a coupon code for subscribing. There are many ways to motivate consumers to get involved with your brand — you just need to be creative.

3. Converting consumers into committed brand evangelist.

This is a concept that is lost sometimes when brands serve a large audience, making consumers fickle and willing to turn away at the drop of a hat. Converting them into committed brand customers is accomplished by providing a superior product and most importantly through personalized customer service. When you have fostered a consumer into a committed brand customer, there is no limit to the additional sales that could lead to.

4. Sustaining brand involvement consistently over time.

With social channels like Facebook, Twitter and newsletters this is a no-brainer. However, be careful not to become a nuisance. The best way to sustain brand involvement is to give your target audience what they want, when they want it. Don’t become a Facebook spammer.

If your content is appropriate, and your followers are engaging with it, then keep it up. If not, back to the drawing board.

5. Leveraging brand loyalty to create an army of brand ambassadors.

Throughout history, word-of-mouth marketing has always been the most effective way to market a brand or product. The social web makes this concept easier than ever.

Try offering an incentive for Tweeting about your product or for writing a review that is posted back to their FB profile using Facebook Connect. When you have a committed brand evangelist, just take it one step further and give them a reason to spread the word to create more.

6. Refining your digital marketing to generate continuous growth.

While executing a campaign it is always important to circle back and make sure that your efforts are reaching your target audience and accomplishing your campaign objectives. This is true when your campaign wraps up as well. Using your metrics that you created in the strategy of your digital media campaign, analyze what worked and what didn’t. When it comes time for the next campaign, make sure you incorporate what you learned from the past one.

Building a business is hard work and there are no simple solutions to success. Along the path of building your business, keep these six steps in mind as a guideline and they will take you where you want to go. As always, if you need help, HATHWAY is here!