For small businesses, digital marketing is often placed on the backburner or shuffled from desk to desk. This often leads to a disjointed message or worse, no message at all. So, first thing is first, decide on your company’s message and communicate that message to all employees responsible for marketing. Second, delegate tasks based on projects: Website, Facebook, Blogs and Email Campaigns. If it is just you, delegate them out by priority. Work your way through this list and you will have increased your digital marketing presence.
Your website is the virtual front door to your business and just like your actual front door you need to have one, it needs to be welcoming, and it needs to be functional.
With so many website building software options available these days, some people feel building a website can be as easy as signing up for a social media account. Besides needing to know about appealing aesthetics, your software developer needs to have a good understanding of how people tend to navigate sites. More importantly they need to know how to improve your SEO and make it easy for your users to find what they are looking for. Here are some simple things you can do to make sure your website developer has everything they need.
If your website is the front door, then your Facebook page is the welcome mat, and no one is going to knock on your door if your mat says go away. Facebook should draw people to your website or location. Here are some simple things you can do right now to make sure your business says “come on in” instead of “no soliciting.”
Focus on creating posts which add value to your customer rather than just pummeling them with promotions. If your digital marketing presence consists of 70% promotion and 30% content, flip it. Draw people in rather than pushing. As the proverbial ‘they’ say. content is king.
Fun fact, the word ‘blog’ is the shortened form of the phrase ‘web log’ and the practice has been around since the mid-nineties. It may have started with people simply journaling online about their daily lives, but now creating blogs is a way to drive people to your website and offer value to your customer for engaging with your brand. If you’re a car company write blogs about how to change your own oil or top five simple and cheap things to update your car. If you’re a marketing company, write about how to improve your digital marketing presence. Which reminds me, Kingston Webworks has already created a simple template for you to learn more about how to blog found here.
Now that you have everything set up and increased your digital marketing presence, let people know about it! Email Campaigns are a great way to let users know what is going on within your company and help them along the sales funnel. Here are some steps to help get you started:
Congratulations! You have made your business more welcoming and approachable online by improving your digital marketing presence. Now sit back and watch your campaigns, crunch the numbers, and make adjustments. How is your website performing? What was the amount of likes on your latest post? How many people read your email and more importantly did it drive them to your website and lead to sales? Answering these questions will help you improve your outcomes.
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