Digital marketing is a broad term for using websites, apps, blogs, and other online tools to reach customers and grow your business. Your digital strategy will be different from your competitors, so it’s essential to know how to create a plan that will work for you to grow your business. Read this article for expert advice on how to grow your business and successfully market your business digitally.
1. Create a marketing plan and stick to it
Create a marketing plan and decide on a realistic budget and set of goals. Then, be sure to stick to your plan. For example, if you decide your goal is to spend $500 on Facebook ads, don’t spend $1000 or more. If you do, you’re likely to burn out and feel discouraged. Set up the basics of your digital marketing campaign to grow your business.
Start with finding your goals. Mean what you say, put some time into it, and then measure what’s working for you. Then, assess the consequences if you don’t achieve your goal. Making real goals and sticking to them will help you garden more successfully. This will also make sure you don’t burn yourself out.
Ensure your team is well-trained and ready to respond to an emergency. This step should be covered by your CMO, who needs to be calm and composed during crises. Your project manager should be good at spotting emergencies and how to resolve them. And remember to keep an eye on costly decisions, especially if your contracts are worth a lot of money while you are focused to grow your business. If this happens to you, discuss it with your contractors first. Make sure to work with your SEO experts on both content creation and content promotion.
SEO is crucial for online success. If your content is good, people will find you, doing business will increase considerably and revenue will increase even more. SEO is about finding exactly what you want in the right places on the Internet and implementing it. To get high-quality links and make your site search engine-friendly, you will need to choose the right words, phrase them accurately in your writing, and include your targeted keywords. Then, you will be more likely to see what people are looking for on the Internet and to rank higher in search. Skilled SEO experts will also find opportunities to build links that will drive business to your website.
Does your business have or want a website? You should have a site that will answer customer needs in detail.
2. Have a presence on social media
It’s important to be active on social media to build your brand and grow your business. Social media is a great way to interact with your followers and customers and build trust. By being active on social media, you can interact with them and engage them in conversations about your products and services.
There are many ways to market your business on social media, and there are channels that work best for your customers.
For tips on how to effectively market yourself, read this article.
Your core customer groups will give you unique ideas on what content you should create. When you’re marketing digitally, it’s important to find out where your core target market is and what they want. This information will help you create content that will resonate with your core audience, and help grow your business.
This type of marketing is called a content-led digital marketing strategy, and it’s different from a paid search strategy. Paid search is when you send traffic to the paid version of a website, while content-led digital marketing focuses on what content your website offers to visitors. So when you work on content marketing, you talk about your website’s strengths (what people want) and the website’s weaknesses (what people can’t get or don’t see). By focusing on creating a product or service that your customers are interested in and meeting their needs, content marketing will help you grow your business.
It is a good idea to submit your business to local search marketing competitions. Although it took me a lot of time to get my business listed in the directories, local search marketing competitions will push you to maintain regular updates about active listings so that your business will be found.
Even in the last year, local search marketing initiatives are cleaner than they were a few years ago. The harder your business is competing and the bigger your competition is, the better the chances are that your competition will have internal processes and assistance. In competitive industries, the difference between winning and losing is slight.
3. Be honest and transparent with your customers
If you have a customer service issue or a problem with your product, be honest about what you did and didn’t do to solve the problem and be transparent about the steps you’re taking to resolve the issue. Transparency is key to building trust with your customers and a big step to grow your business.
If you have a salesperson, have they gone above and beyond in serving a serious problem? People trust salespeople. This is why Salesforce recently purchased AllInOneContact to better serve the needs of the business community. Author and expert Jen Lopez says, “Dependent on your organization, the salesperson is one of the most important relationships in your business. Salespeople are key to the sales process, communication, and ultimately sales.” Don’t be shy when asking for help.
At Better Marketing much of our best content comes from our community members. With a community of over 3 million users, Conversations is one of the largest Slack communities on the web. Don’t be shy about asking a question. Better still, offer to help and get someone else to answer. And, if you don’t have a conversation piece on your site, you have my permission to use this tagline: “Too Busy to Talk to Your Customers. Talk to Someone Else.”
Be consistent when posting updates for your social media. Commit to posting updates about the same thing on all your social platforms and do not make it about you. Instead, post updates about regions, products, and services where you can continue to deepen relationships with customers.
Have a system for keeping track of customer questions? This will make your social strategy easier and your customers will be more likely to be satisfied with your brand. Don’t provide generic answers for social media questions, but instead use your specific knowledge of social media and tools to accurately and briefly answer your customer’s questions.
Over the years thousands of marketing blogs have been published. Different regions of the country have their own unique set of blogs that will help your community grow. Don’t be limited by the general industry web.
4. Use e-mail marketing to reach customers who don’t use social media
While social media platforms are great for reaching customers or potential customers, some people are simply not on social media. If you’re in a niche that doesn’t have a lot of social media users, then you can use e-mail marketing to reach those customers. To determine your audience, you can use tools such as HARO, Whitespark’s Exact Target Tool, or Followerwonk. Then, plug their emails into Gmail or Your Business Name + Email Address for Gmail or BOFU for Gmail. We’re going to link some resources at the bottom to some of the more popular email marketing tools.
- Prepare for your campaign
Don’t have a Google+ or Facebook page? You still might want to create a profile for your business. You can do that in this blog post. In the future, I also recommend setting up Google Alerts as it allows you to receive emails about your business instead of just seeing them in Google search.
- Know your search queries and answer these four important questions to spark an instant conversation with targeted prospects
Sales funnels or conversion pages are parts of your website performance. Knowing these can help you change the conversation when it comes to qualified leads you’re targeting with your marketing.
- Know your unique value proposition
Don’t just sell. Be nice and share things about your business that makes people like you. People love to be thought of as likeable. Have a reason that makes people want to tell their friends about you. Even if you sell lawnmowers, you can still make them happy. Tell people why gardening is so cool or how close your farm is to where they live.
- Set up email resources
Let’s face it: Email is a broken industry and continues to be one of the top complaint areas for customers. There’s a reason why Google filters email suggestions. Make sure customers know where to find the right resources.
5. Use SEO tactics to get your site ranked highly in search engines
There are many SEO tactics that you can use to get your site ranked highly in search engines and grow your business. The most important thing to remember, when it comes to SEO, is that you need to do it over the long term. SEO doesn’t work overnight, nor does it stop once your site has been optimized. SEO is all-consuming because it’s all about consistent results over time (in both rankings and traffic). By now you’ve heard of all the online marketing strategies out there. But which ones are best for your business? Do you even need all of them? Versus using all online strategies at the same time.
Before we look at the different scenarios, let’s check if we need to have all of these web strategies in order. To determine this we need to take a step back. The purpose of SEO isn’t to rank for the most competitive keywords you can get. The purpose is to grow your brand so you can attain long-term traffic — and therefore more long-term customers. If people are searching for the ones you’re trying to rank for, it means your SEO strategy works and if they click on it, you score a conversion. Who cares about the bonus points if people click on your ad to see what you offer?
To make all of the different integrated digital strategies work for you, you’ll need to define your business goals from the beginning. To further define the goals of your business, you need to have something to measure. For example, to measure the impact on traffic and conversions, you need a goal analyzed and a set of action steps taken to show the results. A scenario to illustrate the point above would be:
You want to improve your organic ranking and get more qualified traffic and also to grow your business. But to do this you need to measure goals such as organic search conversions and organic search rankings.
