Has transitioning to the world of digital marketing been a slow process for you? It has been for a lot of businesses, and that’s largely due to a lack of understanding. With so many new tools at your disposal, how do you know where to start?
Recently, Media Shower spoke with Rebecca Caroe, CEO of Creative Agency Secrets, who laid out some very simple examples that will help you feel more comfortable with the idea of driving sales through digital.
What are 3-5 mistakes most businesses make in their digital marketing?
Most businesses try to sell too much, too fast. You need to create a clear pathway through your website to make it easy for guests. For instance, ask yourself:
1. What is the first thing I want a visitor to do?
2. What is the second?
3. What is the third (and so on)?
Ensure that each page is focused on enabling those few things. Take a look at my website for an example. On the home page, there are four bullet points asking the reader if they would like:
1. Free Marketing Advice
2. Outsourced Marketing
3. Training in Marketing
It also asks the reader if they are a subcontractor. It offers four choices, and each leads to a landing page with specific answers and next steps.
How can a business on a budget still be an effective marketer?
Focus, focus, focus. Be clear about what you want and budget carefully to achieve it. Keep track of your spending and analytics so you can work out which efforts give you the greatest payback.
For example, one of our clients, Rowperfect.co.uk, changes their home page image and offer each week. Because they are testing out new products and their customers mostly come from search engines and land on their home page, they push one product at a time. The promotion they ran in August of 2015 sold out three times during a one week campaign. That’s success!
How can businesses use their digital resources to land new leads/customers?
Build a community around your niche and “always be serving.” One of our collaborators is BloggingConcentrated.com. Their team uses a private Facebook group for daily questions and answers, they host live educational events in cities around the U.S., and they also hold webinars for paid members.
If you only want a casual relationship with them, you can read their blog and listen to the Amplify podcast. However, if you step up and pay to attend a course, you get into their Facebook group where they answer questions free of charge. If you join their paid membership BC Prime, you get free downloads, website plugins, how to guides, webinars, and all their archive material going back to January 2013.
They have a clear hierarchy of need for prospects, small customers, and loyal customers. Each gets something special, and you have to step up to the next level to get more goodies. Any firm can copy this template, whether it’s an online or real-world business.
Think about your biggest success story. Why did your conversations with that client have a meaningful and lasting impact on them?
Our biggest (recent) success story was for an accounting firm in Auckland, New Zealand. We helped them start marketing online beginning with inbound content marketing and moving on to seminars and training videos on YouTube. They are now doing outbound promotion and AdWords. The partner in charge of marketing had confidence in our methods and uses a combination of her team and ours to do the work.
Now the firm is showing up in natural search for the phrase “Accountant Auckland.” That’s huge, especially since we did it in only 14 months and they are a small player both in terms of budget and the size of their practice.
The meaningful, lasting impact came from our marketing partner persuading her colleagues to follow our advice and then sticking to it month by month. Our outline strategy template has had minor changes; but because we set it up with the end goal in mind, every piece of marketing collateral has been following our mantra “Write once; use three times.” This saves time and money and makes things super-effective as you can place them in front of different audiences and different channels without over-tiring the readership.
If I could pass one thing along to your readers it would be this: invest in careful planning and budgeting using an expert advisor. Then, save money by executing yourself and “checking back” with the expert once a month for an hour’s consult. That will get you the BEST results for the lowest amount of dollars.