Building a Smart Online Marketing Strategy
The internet is filled with advice about growing your business.
Do this; don’t do that.
Email is dead.
Wait! Email is alive and well.
What? You don’t have an Instagram account?
If you’re not careful, you might find yourself joining the herd as they clamber on to the Next Big Thing.
The truth is building a smart online marketing strategy for your small business has absolutely nothing to do with what everyone else is doing.
Sure, some of what your competitors are doing might also work for you, but before getting hung up on what everyone else is doing, it’s important to put that aside for the time being and focus on you – your business and your priorities.
Here’s where to start.
3 Simple Steps to Building Your Online Marketing Presence
A small business doesn’t just magically grow overnight. One of the first things you have to do after getting established is spread the news. A great place to start? Online.
Setting aside all the “it” strategies of the hour, here are three things you can do to grow your online presence and build your business.
Though we’ve said it before, it bears repeating – you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. And there’s no either/or solution. You need to build your own strategy based on your business and your goals. So what does that mean?
1. Define your goal
Entrepreneurs and small business owners live and breathe their business, but sometimes being so entrenched in the inner workings of a company can cause you to fall prey to certain assumptions about the best ways to market your business.
By taking a first principles approach to defining your goals, you can strip away any preconceived notions or assumptions about what you think you should be doing and instead start from the ground up.
As you think about your goals and the best ways to get someone interested in your products or services, it’s important to identify exactly how you want your digital marketing strategies to augment your business. Is it to generate more leads? Rank higher in SEO? Grow the number of followers you have on social media?
2. Define Your Audience
In tandem with defining your goal, you must also define your audience as specifically as possible. Being able to create a marketing persona – an image of your ideal customer – helps you zero in on the content you need to create and where you should most actively be engaging with your ideal customers.
3. Talk to them
Now that you know your audience and your goal, it’s time to implement a strategy. For example, let’s say your business is in interior design and your goal is to generate more leads through your website. Your target audience is new homeowners.
Nurturing prospective clients and turning them into leads is a process that takes time, but it is not herculean. To get more traffic to your site you have to improve your Google ranking, and you do this by having an active blog, providing answers to your ideal customer’s most pressing questions, and finding new ways to engage with them and be useful to them.
Over time, these people who occasionally come to your site looking for answers or inspiration will turn to you for their next project – and voila, your online marketing strategy generated a lead and now you have a new customer.
Breaking down your digital marketing strategy to the very basics enables you to strip away assumptions about what you should or shouldn’t be doing. Once who know what your goals are and who your audience is, the options for engaging with them will crystalize.
Bottom line: Start here with the basics. Fine-tune your processes. And then lather, rinse, repeat.
