For many business owners the prospect of marketing online can be a daunting one. Especially when many of the elements that actually make a difference aren’t the whizzy graphics and cool new logos that we all get excited about.
Knowing what to do with limit time and resources can be overwhelming, so much so that sometimes we end up dabbling in lots of things and don’t actually achieve anything. If this happens too often, then we convince ourselves that it just doesn’t work, and we give up completely.
What Element of Digital Marketing Should I Focus on First?
This is the question we hear a lot, but it’s probably the wrong question. I would turn it on its head and first ask “How much time are you willing to commit?” Once you understand this, set aside time first thing in the morning, before you look at your email. In fact, don’t even turn your laptop on. Grab a coffee, sit at a table or desk without distractions (sit on your phone if you have to!) and do the following exercise:
- Take a blank piece of paper and work out what your end goal is. It should be aligned with your overall business goals.
If you are an online business this might be reaching X number of customers or increasing e-commerce sales by 25%. Whatever it is write it down.
- Next, write down all the steps you need to take to get to your goal. Start at the end and work backwards. Reverse engineering your goal will help to cement not only how much work is required, but it will also help to understand how long it will take.
Be realistic with your numbers, if you currently have 100 visitors to your website and your conversion rate is 2% for example, you can work out how many more visitors you need to gain the growth you desire.
- Work out your budget, if you are starting with £0, then you will need to do a lot of this work in-house. If you have some budget available then assign it to different tasks. For example, you might hate writing content, but you also have absolutely no hope of managing development work. So, your budget may be better spent on development.
If you are a business that has a larger budget, you may well hand the whole piece over to a Digital Marketing company to handle on your behalf.
However, you manage it, it will require some form of investment whether time or money or more likely a bit of both.
- Whether or not you are outsourcing work you will need to keep involved. So, diarise time at least once a week to do whatever task it is that you need to complete next. Use your reverse engineered list and amend it as you go along if necessary.
What Would Digital Marketing Look Like in an Ideal World?
If budget was available then we would recommend the following steps:
1. Research, research and research some more.
Look at your customers behaviours, your suppliers, competition, read about the industry, whatever information you can find to help you.
2. Start with your website
A well designed but functional website with quality content, easy navigation and strong call to actions. It needs to be technically sound, fast and any functionality updated as new plugins, upgrades are introduced.
3. Optimisation (SEO)
The backbone of any successful digital marketing work is to make sure that whatever you do, search engines will rank you for relevant phrases so that new, potential customers can find you. It is always better to be there when someone looks, rather than place an advert in the hope that they may be interested (although this can work well for impulse buys).
4. Keeping it fresh
Once you have your website it needs to be updated regularly. Add new content, case studies, testimonials, blogs, refresh existing pages, video, images. It keeps people and search engines interested in visiting your website time and time again.
5. Off Page
Once you become known as a good resource in your industry, you will find that other sites start linking to you. A bit like a thumbs up on Facebook, this sends a message to search engines to say – hey! These guys know what they are talking about. This in turn helps you to get found for more phrases, higher up the page.
6. PPC/Advertising
PPC is advertising within the search results and it can be a great way to gain traffic from interested prospects, they are far more likely to convert into leads. It can also be relevant to advertise across social media website or relevant websites. But be careful about spending lots of budget on this, it depends heavily on which type of business you are.
7. Social Media
Social Media can be fantastic, and some businesses gain a lot of their customers this way. Using your own channels on relevant platforms, using influencers and advertising are all ways to leverage social media. Again, it depends on your business your customers base and what you are trying to achieve.
8. Analysis
Measuring results and adjusting your activity is something that you should be doing consistently. Once a month with your sales figures and analytics data in front of you. It is the only way to see what is and isn’t working well.
This work takes time and needs to be done consistently on an ongoing basis. You can’t just ‘do it’ once and then ignore it, any success that you enjoyed will quickly dissipate.
If you need help with your Digital Marketing Strategy or are looking for an Agency to work with, then please get in touch today to see if we are a good fit for each other.