A client of ours recently called in to us asking for assistance with digital marketing. They have been in business for a few years now, but wanted to grow their business further by taking advantage of the current technologies available to help them drive home some new sales. They also mentioned that they were on a tight budget and needed to maximize the resources out there to their full advantage. From a small business standpoint, we too struggle with the same issue. However, we have been able to overcome this by familiarizing ourselves with the following steps and marketing tools.
First, you will want to identify your budget. Do this by taking a look at annual income and using a minimum of 5% of that as an ear marker for where to start. The next thing you will want to do is decide how you want to portray your brand and its identity. What do you want to potential customers to know about your business? What sets you apart? Having a clear understanding of these things will allow you to paint a better picture as to what and where you want to take your marketing.
Tools of the trade
Now that you have set up a foundation as to where you want to take your marketing to, here are some tools that will help you along the way.
- Website – A high performing marketing asset, this will be the center of all your digital marketing. The criteria for an optimized website should be as follows:
- Fast loading
- Mobile-friendly (aka “responsive”)
- Since confidential info will be collected (contact info, credit card, etc.), you will want to make sure your website has an “SSL” (secure socket layer) certificate
- Search engine optimized. Make sure the appropriate keywords for your business appear on your site so they are easily to locate via web search
- Simple, yet modern design.
- Easy navigation for ease of use. Grouping like content together for easier access
- A “Contact Us” page that should include both contact info as well as a form the potential customer can fill in to be contacted
- A blog. This is a good tool to have as it provides tips and tools pertaining to your specific industry or business
- Social Media – Depending on your type of business, social media is a great asset to use as it provides exposure to current and potential clients on a media that they are using every day. The main forms of social media include:
- Facebook ( All around good ,as it lets you create a business page that you can provide clients information with as well as upload promotions, share information and is searchable via the entire platform),
- Instagram (A visual aid that could be geared more towards the sale of products, such as a floral shop or textile store, via posted pictures and informational text as a description),
- Twitter (information and news based site that people communicate with using short “tweets” to interact with their base)
- Linked-in (Think Facebook, but geared more towards business professionals and networking.
- Email Marketing – We are not talking about unwanted spam. We are focusing on adding value and being helpful as we proactively communicate with our customers and prospects. All companies have an email list that can be organized via a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) such as : Netsuite, Nimble, Salesforce or email marketing programs such as: Mailchimp or Constant Contact A quality mail piece vs. high quantity spam
- Links to Blog articles, Guides, white papers
- Notification of a change in relevant products, services or technologies that impact your customers
- Recommendations for timely events, such as holidays or inclement weather
- Offer something of value (Discounted product or service, Initial service call or consultation for free
- Invitation to a webinar or seminar
- Reinforce the strength of your brand This can be achieved through presence of your company logo and slogan in your signature
Timing plays a major role in the response to your emails, specifically in responses that lead to revenue. By sending high-quality emails consistently to your contact list, the probability of reaching someone when the timing is right increases substantially.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising- Your ad is displayed in front of the internet browsers and you get charged if your ad is clicked on. Good practices to remember when you select PPC advertising
- Your ads must appear in front of a relevant audience. Irrelevancy will kill your ad campaign and waste your money.
- There must be consistency between the message and branding on the ad and the message and branding on the page they land on after clicking on the ad (i.e. the landing page). A strong correlation between ad and landing pages will drive more conversions.
- Your ads and landing pages must contain a call to action (CTA) to invoke a response. The CTA on your landing page should provide an easy method to contact you.
- You must understand the cost per lead from your advertising. You can then calculate the cost per customer based on the close ratio for these leads. Compare cost per customer to the average value of your customer (average annual revenue generated per customer or average lifetime value). This will provide your return on advertising dollars and justify, or nullify its value.
- Google Ad words. You are bidding on keywords for your ad to display on page 1 of the search results. As you may have guessed, Google is the main player with Bing (includes Yahoo and AOL) as another option. In order for that to occur, your target market and the decision-makers or influencers within those companies must be performing commercial intent searches for your products and services. If they are, then you have the opportunity to bid on the most relevant search phrases so that your ad appears at the top of the search results.
Pros:
- You can appear at the top of the search results for relevant, high-intent search phrases.
- You can drive traffic to your website immediately.
- You can see the search phrases people used when they clicked on your ad. This is valuable information and you can refine how you target or exclude keywords and phrases.
- You can generate leads.
Cons:
- Your ads may appear for irrelevant search terms (if you are not staying on top of this) and you can waste significant money.
- Expense. Based on the competitive nature of the terms you are bidding on, the cost may be high in comparison to the average value of your customer.
- Most companies can benefit from a well-designed search-based advertising campaign. It must be proactively managed with an intent to optimize performance (maximize leads and minimize cost per lead).
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – content is arguably the most important aspect of SEO. Search engines look for content on websites (crawl the web) and pull that content into their databases index. The search engines look in their indexes for web pages that have a strong correlation to both the words used in your search and the intent of your search (What kind of information does the searcher want? What do they want to do?). Therefore, the content on your website is incredibly important. Depending on your budget an appropriate SEO marketing means, you are creating new content (i.e. for resource pages) more frequently. This could be once per week or more depending on resource and investment capacity. Additionally, you are actively promoting content on social media and performing outreach efforts to obtain *inbound links. SEO results do not occur immediately. You may start to see results within 3 months. It may take 6 months to 1 year to see significant results. Companies that consistently execute high-quality SEO can experience incredible long-term value.
By taking these six forms of on-line tech into your hands, you will be able to start honing in on the clients you are looking for, possibly generating a few leads along the way. The three factors of any kind of advertising are: Content (including the offers), frequency (how often) and consistency (how long).
About Us:
CEO Computers is a Los Angeles IT Support & Cloud Solutions company. Our solutions and services are designed to simplify your IT, protect your data and empower your staff. We are Microsoft silver competency partner. For over 31 years, CEO has assisted many small businesses located in the Los Angeles area in various industries to implement compliance policies, to secure their network and protect their data.
