So you’ve been following Signal’s blog and loving our tweets and you think you might have a crush on us (we get it), which means you’re seeing the very real potential for your brand on digital platforms like Facebook, Google, and Linkedin. It’s true, there’s an enormous upside to developing your digital presence as a business of any size. You want all that traffic hitting your website, you want to dominate the search engines for your industry, you can’t wait for fans to be eating out of your hand on social media channels, and you want people manically hitting refresh on their inbox awaiting the arrival of your emails!
Or something like that, right?
Right. So how do you get started? What do you tackle first? There’s so much to do!
Easy, tiger, the first thing you need to accept is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. We’re not looking for overnight success because we all know there is no such thing. Baby steps before you fly.
To win online, you have to do three things;
- You have to be patient.
- You have to be consistent.
- You have to start.
Getting Started with Digital Marketing
That’s what it’s all about, you just have to start. Once you start putting out those blog posts and sharing those tweets, the momentum builds behind you and, gradually, you begin to see results pile up. In the beginning, there’s some foundational stuff to take care but overall you want to start slow. Get the simple things fixed before you start trying to plan a content calendar to rival BuzzFeed.
Start by publishing one new blog article per week and sharing it to your social media accounts, just Facebook and Twitter to start. Do this for a few weeks and you’ll develop a steady rhythm that becomes a good habit. The key is to keep putting out content and engaging anyone that interacts with it.
Likewise, come up with one special offer per month. So many ambitious entrepreneurs try to throw a thousand offers at the wall to see which one sticks and what you end up with is, well… a wall of sticky stuff no one wants. One offer per month that has real value for your customer; that’s all you need. It can be a discount on product or an information ebook with “insider secrets” and cheat sheets. Whatever it is, one per month.
Promote this offer on your blog and social media accounts, send an email to your customer list, and warmly engage anyone who takes you up on it with gratitude and kindness. It’s amazing how far those things go. After a while of consistently putting out your weekly blog and monthly promotion, people will expect this from you and actually come looking for it. That’s where you want to be. Position yourself as a thought leader and influencer within your industry so that each new piece of content is noticed, shared, and engaged.
Taking it up to Eleven
When you’ve finally laid down some consistent patterns for your online content, it’s time to kick it up a notch. How this happens really depends on what you’re doing and how it’s working, which is why the main thing you do after you get the hang of digital marketing is measure your results.
Take a look at which pieces of content have gotten the most interaction with your audience. Which pages of your website get the most traffic? Are there any particular audience segments that respond more favorably than others? This is where you start to fine tune your marketing to meet the needs of your audience. Many business owners think they know who their market is but they actually get it wrong pretty often, which means they end up pitching the wrong content to the wrong audience.
Take a good hard look at your metrics and determine a strategic approach based on what the data tells you. Then you can get a little fancy with your imagery, video, banner ads, and special offers because you know who you’re targeting and can expect to hit certain numbers. Before that, you’re shooting in the dark. But we have to shoot a few arrows into the dark before we can see. Right? Because… they’re flaming arrows. Or something. You get the point.
So here’s the part where we tell you that it’s silly to try and compete with professional marketers who do this every day. We’re just too entrenched in content, metrics, and optimization to let business owners like you compete with our clients.
Which is why you need to be one of our clients!
(See what we did there?)
Okay enough… give us a call to chat.
We’re friendly. Promise.
