By Paul Downey, Full Page Media, Inc, Oct 2, 2018
When it comes to digital marketing, few business owners have the time to research the best practices -- let alone develop solid marketing strategies. They're too busy running their businesses. If you fail to develop your online marketing strategy, though, you're at risk of falling behind your competition. When people want to make buying decisions, they search online. According to Hubspot, 90 percent of consumers search online because they haven't made up their minds about various brands yet. You need to be where those potential customers are -- and ready to deliver the message that they want.
You've built a great business, and now it's time to guide your company toward its first massive growth phase. These are our top 11 tips for generating your 2019 online marketing "big bang"!
Know Your Customer
1. Develop Customer Personas To Define Your Ideal Target Customer
Before you formulate your marketing strategy, write down the traits of your ideal customer.
Think about:
- Problems that your typical customer wants to solve
- What an ideal customer wants to see in a company like yours
- Potential income, education and demographic details that your ideal customer is likely to possess
By going through this process, you're creating a persona of the ideal customer you'd like to attract. Use the customer persona to inform your marketing efforts. You might also want to consider the qualities of potential customers you would not like to attract.
Content's "Big 5" Topics
-
How Much Does It Cost?
-
What Problems Does It Solve?
-
Compare Products Or Services
-
Best In Class
-
Product/Service Reviews
Commit To Content
2. Develop A Killer Content Strategy
You can summarize the ideal inbound marketing strategy in four words: "They Ask, You Answer." Consider the questions that your potential customers are likely to ask. When you create website content, try to create the most comprehensive and best organized answers for those topics available anywhere. The typical top result for a query on Google contains 1,890 words of content.
Building an effective website content creation strategy is really quite simple. Design your website strategy around these three principles.
- Use keyword research to determine what information your prospective customers are most likely to search for online.
- Create highly readable, well-organized articles addressing those topics honestly and comprehensively.
- Offer your services to the reader with a call to action designed to generate marketing conversions.
Most of the information that prospective buyers search for online falls into one of those five categories.
Remember that copywriting is only part of inbound marketing. You must also organize your content to make information easy for users to find and to help search engines determine what your website's most important topics are. Use topic clusters to categorize your content and anchor your topics with lengthy, authoritative pillar content.
Marcus Sheridan, famed author of "They Ask, You Answer" lists his "Big 5" topics that consumers are searching when researching buying decisions. Most of the information that prospective buyers search for online falls into one of those five categories listed here.
Remember that copywriting is only part of inbound marketing. You must also organize your content to make information easy for users to find and to help search engines determine what your website's most important topics are. Use topic clusters to categorize your content and anchor your topics with lengthy, authoritative pillar content.
Build Trust & Win!
Satisfy Searchers With Great Content
Nearly all modern consumers research even relatively mundane items online before making a purchase. With the vast amount of information available it's really no surprise. This is your opportunity to give them all of the info they will ever need about the products & services that will meet their specific needs. Including specific info on price and "secret sauce" that many others in your industry have been afraid to publish
Help them with unbiased info to help them satisfy their needs and they'll reward you with their purchases. Delight them and you'll have a loyal customer for life!
Prospects & customers crave video
3. Embrace Video Content
Referencing a study from Cisco, Inc. claims that more than 80 percent of all web traffic will be video content by 2019. To learn why that assertion makes sense, think about how you find information online.
Would you rather read a lengthy article or watch a two-minute video?
Google is well aware of how people prefer to get their information; that's why YouTube videos appear at the top of so many search results pages. Creating videos, therefore, serves two purposes. Videos can help your business appear more prominently on search engines, and they can also help you reach potential customers who prefer to watch content rather than reading it.
If you have trouble thinking of topics for your videos, use your website's text content as a starting point. You can base your first videos on some of your most successful text articles. Using the "Big 5" mentioned above can also be a good place to begin planning your first or next video.
Videos are perfect for awareness ads, embedding in e-mails during buyer consideration & in specific product offer messages to help get prospects across the finish line for sales.
Website health is critical for search engine rankings
4. Improve Your Technical SEO
Search engine optimization isn't just about what a website says; it's also about how the website works. Truly top-notch SEO means having a website that's fast and technically sound while providing a great user experience.
- Get A Technical SEO Audit. Find out what the experts say and fix it ASAP.
- Get an SSL certificate. A Hubspot marketing survey suggests that 84 percent of potential customers will not buy from a website that causes the browser to display a "Not Secure" warning.
- Enhance your website's loading speed. Do everything possible to increase you site's speed ASAP. Consider serving your static content from a Content Delivery Network. Cloudflare, for example, is free. Eliminate unnecessary JavaScript and other code from your pages. Optimize your images for smaller download sizes. If you have the room in your budget, consider moving your website to a high-performance dedicated server.
- Use sitemaps to ensure that search engines can find all of your content.
- Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to get as much information as possible about how people find your website and what Google's crawler sees when scanning your content.
- If you operate a local business, create an authoritative record of your location and contact information by creating pages on the most important local business directories such as Yelp and Google My Business.
- Keep your website's content management system and all plugins up to date.
- Monitor, optimize and test continuously.
Optimizing your website's on-page, content SEO & also your technical SEO will put your site in the best position to get noticed by the search engines and deliver excellent, free organic web traffic.
Important Measures
5. Use Google's Free Webmaster Tools
Google earns user loyalty by recommending the best possible results for search queries. So it only makes sense for the search giant to help website owners provide better online experiences. That's what Google Analytics and Google Search Console do. And Google Tag Manager is a great tracking tool. Use these tools to analyze your sales funnel, conduct keyword analysis, enhance your marketing research, reduce bounce rates,improve CTA performance & track ad ROI.
Marketing Funnel-ology
Optimizing Your Efforts To Reach Goals
MODERN TECHNOLOGY & TOOLS
Every day there are awesome new tools to help marketers do a better job of attracting the right customers. Early adopters of the right tools can gain a significant competitive advantage. Experiment....test, verify & scale!
SALES RESULTS
At the end of the day, month or quarter what still matters most is results. All the sizzle in the world doesn't matter if your operations are not sound, your products aren't refined and you're not committed to building a modern marketing process. Remember, you don't have to do everything yourself, get help!
Harnessing Martech
5. Employ Marketing Automation For Inbound Success
Your Marketing Plan Is Taking Shape.
You've finalized your customer personas and have really started cranking out great video & blog content. Your website is healthy & loads fast as lightning thanks to that technical SEO audit.
Here Come The Leads!
In the past you've manually responded to info requests or passed them off to sales. But some people aren't ready to buy and you've learned you need to nurture leads by answering questions and building trust.
Marketing Automation Makes Inbound Marketing Work
Today's inbound martech systems can automate processes to help with:
- Lead scoring - value of lead
- Nurturing - engaging leads by delivering helpful answers and information to the prospect at each step of the buyer's journey.
- Sales Integration: Converting a marketing qualified lead to a prospect, then closing them as a customer.
Applying Marketing Technology Tools
Awareness
Consideration
Decision
"Automate and optimize these process for amazing results & ROI."
Help clients get answers fast
7. Conversational Tools Add Value To Clients
In traditional marketing, information flows in one direction at a time. You use search engine marketing, social media advertising and website content to blast information to potential customers. They submit forms to blast information back to you. Information rarely flows in both directions simultaneously. Conversational marketing is about interacting with your customers on a one-to-one basis to nurture leads more effectively and improve marketing conversion rates. It can be executed via live chat or chatbot.
Chatbot marketing is one of the most important developments in this new age of bidirectional exchange between brands and customers. Using a chatbot makes it possible to engage with prospective customers in a more personal manner by providing quick answers to common questions. You can even add a human touch by having your chatbot automatically transfer qualified leads and people with difficult questions to human operators.
8. Unlock The Power of Programmatic Advertising
Drive quality, paid traffic to your website. The perfect compliment to your content strategy.
The selection of digital advertising channels available to companies today is virtually endless. There's SEM, banner advertising, e-mail marketing, retargeting and social media marketing. There's Google AdWords and the Google Display Network. You can market your brand on over-the-top streaming services like Roku & Netflix. With all of the different marketing channels available to your company, it's virtually impossible to construct one strategy that accounts for all of the channels where your potential customers are. Programmatic marketing takes the guesswork out of advertising by automating your ad spending to reach your potential customers where and when they'll be most receptive to your message. Plus you have the option of only paying when someone clicks your ad, known as pay-per-click or PPC.
While "programmatic" can deliver amazing results it can be complicated to master with it's dizzying array of settings & options. Using a simple Test, Verify & Scale approach to running campaigns can help improve efficiency & success.
Programmatic Advertising Options
Search & Display Ads
Retargeting Ads
Over-The-Top Ads
9. Engage Your Customers on Social Media
Build A Community They Love & They'll Never Leave!
Social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools in existence, but creating and executing a comprehensive social media strategy isn't easy. Think about all of the different things that social media can do for your company.
- Content posted on social media stimulates sharing and promotes viral awareness while keeping your brand at the forefront of customers' minds.
- Social media provides a venue through which you can increase customer satisfaction by answering questions and responding to concerns.
- Retargeting, display advertising and promoted content on social media can help you reach new prospects and target the customer segments most likely to buy from you.
Engage prospects & delight customers
Optimize Your Social Media Strategy
Considering everything that social media can do for you, having a solid strategy for social media promotion is essential for almost any company. Formulating a social media strategy becomes incredibly complicated, though, when you consider that there isn't just one social media platform. At minimum, your brand should have a presence on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter -- but there are many other platforms that could also be relevant to your customer base.
The challenges of social media marketing have led many companies to begin using third-party platforms for social media management. A social media management solution gives you one platform from which to post content on any social network, advertise on any social network, respond to messages from customers and scan for mentions of your brand.
10. Leverage E-Mail Marketing
Move prospects down the funnel & sell to customers...now!
E-Mail is now the most preferred method of communication by customers. If you aren't regularly e-mailing your loyal customers you may be missing an opportunity to engage & share exciting company news. And an opportunity to convert more sales with one of the highest ROI marketing tools today.
Other awesome uses/features for e-mail marketing include:
- Nurturing prospects on their buyer's journey. E-mail is a powerful tool when integrated into your marketing automation to send "just in time" messages with pertinent information to prospects.
- Notifying customers about upgrades or changes to their products & services.
- Creating frequency with messaging across multiple channels.
- Low-cost A/B testing allows for direct competition for e-mail message verification.
Test
Experimenting with your marketing campaigns allows you to see how different messages & offers resonate with each persona. Don't be afraid to start multiple small campaigns while tinkering.
Verify
When your campaigns start to get traction eliminate components that aren't working & fine tune for the final leg of testing. Move to the final step once you've verified you have the right formula.
Scale
You've done your due diligence and you have a great campaign. Scale it up and watch your hard work pay you back with quality leads and sales. Be ready to make changes as ad fatigue can slow your ROI.
11. Build A Modern Marketing Strategy For Your Business
Create A New Recipe For Success With These Delicious New Tools
There is no single marketing channel -- and no one strategy -- that works for every company. Building a comprehensive strategy for marketing, therefore, requires constant testing and optimization. Use your customer personas to guide your experiments. On what channels do you believe you are most likely to find your ideal customers? Experiment with those channels and prove or disprove your hypothesis. Don't become complacent about your successes; strive for constant improvement. Over time, you'll build a solid strategy that works for your company -- but don't stop there. As long as the digital world evolves, your strategy must continue to evolve.
Harness technology
Keep Learning About Existing & Emerging Digital Marketing Tools
Digital marketing is a field that never stops evolving. There is no simple comprehensive marketing solution and no silver bullet that's going to sustain your company forever. Twitter didn't exist until 2006. The iPhone didn't exist until 2007. Instagram didn't exist until 2010. Each of those releases created entirely new marketing avenues that are now essential to the survival of many companies. If you don't spend at least a bit of time following the latest marketing strategies and trends, a new trend will emerge and pass you by. Can't-miss marketing tactics all have one thing in common: They fade in effectiveness over time. Only by keeping your finger on the marketing pulse can you capitalize on new trends when they emerge.
You don't have to do everything
We're Here To Help
If you're determined and dedicated, there is no aspect of online promotion that you can't master on your own. The fact is, though, that running your business is probably a far more effective use of your time -- and that's why marketing consultants exist.
Are you ready to experience your company's first marketing big bang?
We can help.
Allow us to show you how quickly our services can begin to pay for themselves.