Digital marketing is vital for entrepreneurs to use at every stage of their business. It’s important to remember that your competitors will be actively looking for ways of utilizing digital marketing to help their business stay ahead. This means you’ll have to be doing the same.
The main issue is that if you’re a small business owner digital marketing can seem intimidating, even prohibitive. Below, I’ve listed of six steps you can take to help simplify the digital marketing process for you.
With practice, the ability to adapt and a willingness to change, you’ll see growth, success and the attainment of your goals.
1. Setting The Right Goal
Digital marketing works effectively with the right goals. Understanding the right goal to choose is the most important aspect of starting your campaign. Ask yourself a series of questions: What you you looking to accomplish with the campaign? Are you seeking more clients, brand awareness, crowd funding, social media connections? Whatever you decide is your goal, your entire digital marketing campaign will be built around it. This is why your initial goal will set the tone and probability of success. Digital marketing is a powerful tool for small businesses to prosper, but seeing a goal that is at odds with the design of the campaign will spell disinter and prove a waste of your resources. Spend time researching, understanding and choosing the right goal for your business, it’ll be the best way to spend those resources.2. Design a Marketing Funnel
Successful digital marketing campaigns are built around a well understood and researched marketing funnel. A marketing funnel is when you design a road map of your target’s journey from start to finish. The start is when the target receives the initial message and call-to-action, tracing the actions taken through the ‘funnel’, knowing what steps are being taken and where those actions lead to. You can think of a marketing funnel in five parts: Awareness, Interest, Action, Follow Through and Closure.
Awareness:
The first stage is the method used to gain the attention of your target. They may be a stranger, established client or someone in your social media network. The ‘awareness’ method used could be anything from email to social media posts to a Youtube video. At this stage your goal is to grab the target’s attention and compels them to participate in the medium being presented. A powerful message helps cut through the massive amount of noise they encounter on the intent and helps ensure you’ve intrigued them to your product or service.
Interest:
This is where many digital marketing funnels fall flat. If your target isn’t interested in your product or service, then why would they interact with it beyond the initial awareness stage? At this crucial stage your awareness stage has given the target a choice to go further or not. It’s really that binary and simple. Will the target continue or stop? At the stage your goal should be to provide more information and further incentives for continuing along the funnel. What can you offer them beyond the basic awareness pitch?
Action:
This stage is when you’re able going to turn your target into a lead or conversion. You’ve attracted their attention, given them valuable information, touched on their needs, and shown them that you are worth their effort and energy . Now is the big moment you’ve wanted them to be in, the moment they click the button, fill out the form or otherwise perform the ever crucial call-to-action.
Follow Through:
This stage follows quickly on the heels of the ‘action’ stage. Once they’;ev completed the call-to-action, you still run the risk that they stop interacting and move onto something else that interests them. This stage provides you the opportunity to send them a thank you message or additional prompt towards something more meaningful, like a video, phone call or email. Don’t waste this stage, let them know you care and truly value them as a client.
Closure:
Here you are. Now you’ve got them, so what do you do? Don’t hesitate to send your new client an email thanking them again, keep them informed and treat them with respect. Push the idea of your value and why they will benefit from connecting with you. This stage has no end, it is ongoing and requires constant updates follow up and care to maintain. Your ability to close is the difference between success and failure.
3. Developing A Call-To-Action (CTA)
The third part of the funnel is referred to as a call-to-action. A call-to-action (CTA) is a strong component of your campaign and can be an image, button, phrase or video… even a combination of these can be effective. CTAs could direct people to landing pages, encourage the press of a button, fill out a form or click a link. The best way to figure out what the CTA should be is to ask yourself this: Why would someone do this action and does the awareness stage fit with the CTA?
4. Creating Awareness
When you produce content such as blogs, social media posts, or videos, you are creating something that can be consumed and interacted with. Sometimes this happens through organic search queries and sometimes through paid advertising. The key for creating awareness falls to a few simple ideas: Consistency, Production, and Knowledge.Consistency:
Posting once a month or less is not consistent enough to ensure a stable following or high engagement rates. You must be creating awareness as much as possible on as a regular basis as possible. Start with as much as you can and increase from there. Dedicate time and resources and you will see more awareness.
Production:
Nothing is free in this world, especially with digital marketing. You will need to put a degree of production value into your awareness campaigns. This means finding something that fits with your budget and skills. As an alternative, you may want to seek out services that can supply content for you.
Knowledge:
Talk about what you know, not about what you don’t know. Anyone can make up nonsense. Don’t be that person. Express what you know and people will listen. Be genuine and focused. If you know sports, then talk sports, not carpentry. Basically, your knowledge should be connected with your service or product, that’s why anyone is listening to you in the first place.
5. Driving Traffic
In order for there to be people to drive into your marketing funnel, there first has to be traffic on your website. There a variety of ways you can drive traffic to your website. Here are a few of the ones I recommend:
Quality Content:
Quality content can fall under one of several types; video, articles, tweets, stories, or video, with video being the best of the best. A great video will catapult your brand into outer space. Content strategy is how you catch the attention of your potential clients in today’s digital world. Focus on quality and the message will be clear.
Keyword Strategy:
Using keywords to gain traction from people using search engines is vital to driving traffic. The complexities of keyword usage isn’t something to be taken lightly. I recommend finding books, websites and agencies that can deliver keyword services so you get the most for your efforts. Without proper keywords, your website will be buried in the endless nature of the internet, never to be found by anyone.
Website Optimization:
Optimizing your content for search engines is a powerful practice. There are a few key areas to make sure are optimized; images, titles, labels and meta data. You’ll need to refresh your knowledge on these or find someone who understands how to do this toy your website. It’s a potent tool in driving traffic to your website.
Social Media:
It’s not enough to simply post content on your various social media accounts, you must be social. One of the most powerful ways to increase traffic to your website is to use social media channels as your brand, not just as yourself. Each platform has it’s own methods for proper usage. It will be important to find the platforms that are best suited for your brand and to use them relentlessly.
6. Analyze, Adapt/Change, Re-Engage.
Digital marketing is the most measurable form of marketing on today’s marketing arena. Proper review of the analytics data that will pour in from your campaigns will ensure you are adapting to your target audience. You’ll quickly find out if the funnel you’ve designed is working or not and the areas where it fell short. Use this data well and you’ll soon be gathering the attention of everyone you set out to make aware of your product or service.Failure to look at the data will be the downfall of your goals and ideas.
Would you like help to adopt a more adaptable digital marketing strategy for your business? Then get in touch with me. I’ve been helping client for over 10 years grow their businesses. Now it’s your turn. Contact Jason here