What is your digital marketing plan? More and more entrepreneurs are starting to place a greater focus on their digital marketing compared to more traditional methods of marketing. This is for good reason too, since most of the civilized world focus their attention on their mobile devices. These people make up potential customers and clients for entrepreneurs. Once someone decides to get serious about going digital with their marketing, they often times get instantly overwhelmed.
Has this happened to you?
There is so much information and misinformation out there that it immediately becomes too much to digest. Everyone wants a marketing funnel (good), but most people do not understand the bigger picture surrounding them (bad). They know that want it, but….they really don’t know what that means. This is nothing to be ashamed of because it requires an investment of time and money to become comfortable building, split testing and optimizing a funnel.
Before I go any deeper with this, let’s call marketing what it is. You are simply letting the world that you exist and/or you are trying to sell a product or a service. The first is a slower approach is called brand awareness and this can lead to customers to seek you out over time. This is super popular in modern, American culture and I believe everyone should be doing this. This blog post falls into the content marketing category and it creates brand awareness for Intentionally Inspirational, as an example. The other side of marketing is better known as direct response marketing. You are bringing light to a pain point and giving people a call to action or instructions on what to do next to fix their problem.
When most people think about digital marketing, their minds go straight to Facebook ads or a marketing funnel. All businesses can certainly benefit from both of these, but having more depth and presence in an online world is achievable through an intentional brand awareness focus. Let’s take a look at some of the most distinctive areas of digital marketing, from a really high level, to help you wrap your minds around them effectively. I am even ranking them in the order that you should focus on them. Start at the top and work your way down the list.
Social Media
Every business should be posting daily on social media channels, specifically Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn if you are B2B. If you have a visual product that you sell like clothing or even food, Pinterest is very important too. If this isn’t your area of expertise, hire someone. Social gives you the brand awareness coverage through your daily content and better positions you to run ads on any of the same channels when you want to. Ads always perform better when the social accounts are already active with daily postings.
Content
Every business should be writing blogs, recorded videos or producing a podcast. A combination of two or more is even better. Content gives you a platform where you can gain the credentials of being an expert over time and you are giving away real value to help others. It also can become a significant source of inbound traffic for you from SEO, if you stay consistent. Blogging or podcasting for six months isn’t good enough here. Do it right or don’t even start at all. Seriously. I will never understand why some many companies struggle with this.
Email Marketing
Email is nothing new at all, but it continues to have a significant impact on businesses who use it correctly. I have several clients who make significant sales every week from their email lists. There is no theory here my friends, only actual first-hand experience and results. It’s interesting because some of my clients, send out a manual broadcast email every week and others rely only on automation. Both work, so it really comes down to how you want to set it all up. When it comes to your email list, no one wants to read your newsletter. How many newsletters do you honestly read every week? There must be real value in the information or some kind of savings to the reader.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is the magic that is a stand-alone system of its own that also makes everything else that I talked about work together. ClickFunnels is an example of a popular marketing automation platform that ties in email marketing, automated responses and integrated payment options that allow you to sell products and services 24/7. They are a lot of marketing automation options, tools and integrations on the market that make really amazing things possible, but there is a steep learning curve to all of this to do it well. You can either invest several hundred hours into learning it for yourself or again, hire someone. This is often a significant investment up front, but the ROI can be massive.
My hope is that this captures some of the popular buzzwords in the industry and helps you understand how they all tie together. If you are spending money on tv commercials, radio ads, magazine ads and direct mail please reallocate some of that money into the digital space. Everyone stares at their phones all day long, including you. Don’t you want your brand represented where the attention is at?