"Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals." – Jim Rohn, author and motivational speaker
Happy spring, !
No matter what size your business is, there are a few digital marketing basics that you need to follow to generate more customer activity.
When I talk with prospective clients, I take them through a process that evaluates their existing digital marketing, starting with their online marketing foundation. In that foundation, you communicate what your business does and begin to build the trust required to create customer activity and attract customers.
Marketing Foundation
Here are the elements I look at when evaluating your marketing foundation:
Your website
Your Google Business Profile
Your online reviews
Most of your marketing efforts will send potential customers to your website, making it the keystone of your foundation. Does the site have an up-to-date design? Are there clear, easy-to-find calls to action?
Is it built on a standard, supported framework like WordPress, Squarespace or Wix? Does it look good and work well on mobile devices? Does it have lots of content – text, images, video – that both tell your story and engage your potential customers?
Google Business Profile
A free Google Business Profile is the next brick in a strong foundation. Like it or not, Google’s digital marketing tools are going to be with us for a while. Completing a business profile (go to business.google.com if you don’t have one) provides key information about your business, its products and services.
Your profile will include some basics, like address, phone number, and business hours. You can also enhance it with photos and short articles similar to social media posts.
Reviews and Reputation
Of course, your Google Business Profile leads to the third foundational element – your online reviews and reputation. Good reviews (and your responses to negative reviews) let prospective customers know whether they can trust you.
You should also stay aware of reviews on websites like Trustpilot, the Better Business Bureau, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.
How important are online reviews? Half of all online searchers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends, and in one survey, 77 percent of respondents said reviews older than three months were no longer relevant.
Once your marketing foundation is stable, you’ll want to start looking at ways to attract active searchers and passive prospects. I’ll write more about active searchers next time.
Jargon Review: Landing Pages
Well-executed landing pages help your prospective customers transition from the promise of your online marketing campaigns to taking the next step toward purchase. Often, however, landing pages are the weak link in a campaign.
When people click on your ads or links in your emails and social media posts, they should end up (land) on a page encouraging them to take action, like registering for a course or buying a widget. These landing pages, or conversion pages, are critical to the success of any online marketing campaign. They should fulfill the promise of the ad or link.
Your landing pages should be clear about what you want the customer to do next, and you should give them more than one option. Many digital marketers build landing pages without any other navigation so visitors stay on the conversion path you’ve laid out for them.
Although landing pages should focus on a single action, they don’t have to be short. Many successful landing pages lead prospective customers through a series of problems they face and then describe how those problems are solved.
It doesn’t matter how many clicks you get; if people don’t find what they expect or don't know what to do once they arrive on your website, you won’t get the business.
Until next time
The next newsletter arrives April 8 (APRIL!!). By then, the Major League Baseball season will be in full swing and the NCAA will have new men’s and women’s basketball champions.
Friday, March 28, is National Weed Appreciation Day, which reminds us that one person’s yard nuisance is another person’s salad ingredient. April 1, of course, is April Fool’s Day. April 5 is First Contact Day, a celebration of a fictional day in the future (April 5, 2063) when Vulcans arrive on Earth to say hello. It’s a Star Trek thing.
Until next time, be grateful. Be generous. Be patient. Love.
Thanks for spending some of your time with me, . I appreciate you.
Mark
P.S. - This newsletter was 100 percent created by me, a human.
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