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If you offer a service that you sell online, you might be thinking about offering a course or a portfolio of courses. These courses can help you sell your other products and services, as well as offer a somewhat passive source of incremental income. There is a lot of upfront work that goes into creating your course. However, once you do that work, your course should only need to be updated when some piece of information changes or if your want to introduce a new concept or module.
Whether you have an online business or a brick and mortar location, digital marketing can help drive revenue for your company. Digital marketing can help put your business in front of customers who would not otherwise find you. I typically recommend that clients spread out their marketing budget across various digital channels, but you can leverage digital in whatever ways make the most sense for your business. Detailed below are some of the options available as digital marketing channels. This is a quick guide to help you make decisions about where you spend your digital dollars.
If you have a visual brand, it's hard to overstate the importance of Instagram. No other platform gives you the same opportunity to highlight the intricate details of your product's high-quality stitching or the atmosphere in your physical location. Even if you have a service brand, Instagram can be a powerful tool to interact directly with your audience. You can use short videos to capture the customer experience or quotes and inspirational phrases to motivate your audience to action.
Like most social media platforms, Instagram works best when you know how your audience uses it and create consistent images and messages that speak directly to them.
For the next few weeks, we'll run a series of posts that offer some basics for your social media marketing. If you follow along, you should be able to build a basic strategy for your overall social media marketing and pick up a few best practices and tactics for each of the platforms that we cover. This week, we cover how to choose the right platforms for your business. Starting next week, we'll go through a few of the platforms one-by-one and provide a few tips that will help you get the most out of each of your social accounts.
When you're selecting social media platforms for your account, it's important to consider three major factors.
Your customer should be at the center of your business and your marketing messages. If you take the time to identify your customer and create a customer profile (also called an avatar) that embodies your ideal customers or clients, you can create more directed messages that speak to that specific customer group.
Nowadays, everyone is online. Whether you do business online or not, your customers are looking (searching) for you there. They want to know as much about you and their potential experience as possible before they walk in your door or pick up the phone. They want to interact with you via social media or email or another platform. Your customers are also looking for information, sometimes even from the front door or parking lot of your shop. If you don't provide that information, it will come from either generic search results or your competitor.
If you create a strong website that provides information about your business and your industry at large, you'll gain greater access to your audience and the ability to communicate with them directly. Your website should educate your clients about the experience they will have with you and the products and services that you offer. Whether you sell online or not, a website is always an opportunity for education.
A digital marketing strategy is a plan to increase brand awareness or grow sales using digital channels. Digital channels include everything from your own website and email campaigns to social media and blogs. A good digital marketing strategy helps you reach your customers wherever they want to interact with you by providing several opportunities to learn about, interact with, and possibly even purchase from your business. You can hire a marketing pro to create your digital marketing strategy as part of a larger marketing plan or on its own. Either way, your professional will most likely provide you with a comprehensive plan that leverages your website, email list, social media, and outreach.
Good content can help your website to become search engine optimization (SEO) friendly. Your content should reflect the products or services your business offers, articles or tips that are helpful to your audience, and information your customers use make a purchase decision.
Simply put, Google (and other search engines) aims to return the most helpful results for each search. Google wants each person conducting a search to find results that are helpful so that they go back to Google for their future searches. Each Google update changes their algorithm slightly to ensure that the best results are returned for each search.
Promoting pins on Pinterest can be very beneficial for your business, particularly if your product categories are already popular on Pinterest. Pinterest Ads are still fairly inexpensive compared to other online advertising. Pinterest users are among the most likely to make a purchase of all social media users since they are 'shopping' among the pins already. Pinterest users also spend about twice as much as Facebook and Twitter users. (Digiday)
Perhaps as a marketer I am biased, but I think the most important thing to know when you are launching your business is your customer. Without a solid understanding of your customer, your business probably will not survive. With a good understanding of your customer, you can meet and even exceed their expectations at every touch point.
