This article centres around formulating a digital marketing strategy and implementing a digital marketing plan for a business.
In this digital age, businesses cannot afford not to have a digital marketing plan has technology is increasingly influencing our business and social lives. As a matter of fact, a business without a digital marketing plan is a business planning to fail.
Quite frankly, some business owners are still struggling to understand the need to have a digital marketing plan for their business. Though, the case is quite different for other business owners who already have a digital marketing strategy, but are unhappy and frustrated with the results, of which fall far short of their expectations.
Digital Marketing Planning Process
Whether you have developed a digital marketing plan that is currently active or you have developed a digital marketing plan that is not yet active or you are in the process of developing a digital marketing plan for your business, Follow the process outlined below to help your business grow and succeed online. This process has proven very successful for so many businesses. Having said that, it is very important that the process is followed judiciously in other to get positive results.
You are just a sentence away from growing your business successfully online.
Establish A Web presence
Having a website, a blog or social media page, or listing your business on local business directory websites are some of the ways you can establish a web presence. These days businesses take advantage of these channels to boost their web presence. Without a doubt, it is highly recommended having these digital marketing assets in your arsenal to increase your search visibility. You want to make sure that you utilise every channel possible to boost your online presence. The more your business is established online, the better.
Domain name registration
When choosing a domain name for your business, you want to make sure that your domain name contains keywords relevant to your niche and city, not just your business name. For example, you offer plumbing services in Toronto, the ideal domain name should be abcplumbingservicestoronto.com.
Content Creation
After choosing your domain name, the next step is to develop great contents for your website, contents that would attract qualified leads (prospects that would end up converting), the ideal thing to do in other to develop great contents is to first conduct a research on niche keywords and include these keywords throughout your text, especially in the headings/subheadings, title and meta description on your web pages. Also, it’s a good practice to add the location of your business in the areas mentioned above. Bear in mind, it takes quite some time to rank for your niche keywords – It not as simple as ABC. It’s a clever idea to hire a content developer if you don’t have the technical expertise to create engaging contents –
Content is king!
Optimising your Website
As soon as you have your content ready, the next thing you want to do is hire a professional website developer who is also skilled in (on-page and off-page search engine optimisation SEO), to develop a user and mobile friendly high converting website for your business. Notice how I laid emphasis on “user” and mobile friendly” – You want to make sure that your website has a good user experience, it is said that humans have a short attention span of about seven seconds, in other words you have seven seconds to grab the attention of your website visitors. That being said, It is cheaper to hire a professional website developer with SEO skills than separately hiring a website developer and SEO specialist. If you want to rank on search engine result pages (SERPs), then ensure that your website is fully optimised (on-page and off-page) for search engines A fully optimised website has a 90% possibility of showing up on SERPs.
What is on page and off page SEO? In a lay man’s terminology, on-page SEO is when a website understands and speaks the language of search algorithm and off page SEO Is when other websites send signals (by a way of votes) to search engines that your website has credibility. As soon as your other websites starts sending positive signals to search engines about your website, Chances are your website will show up on SERPs.
Check the performance of your website online and your website SEO when your website is ready to go live, there are free tools online you can use to check the performance of your website as well as SEO. Ensure that you follow up and resolve any issues with your website, especially issues like: loading time of your landing pages, browser caching issues, heading, alt-tags etc. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of having your website fully optimised for search engines.
Link Building
You have chosen a proper domain, created a highly converting website with great contents and your website is fully optimised, at this point, you should start building links. Link building is a technique used in (off page SEO). It is a process whereby you get external web pages with authority, link to your webpages. The following are some of the ways you can build links: submit your website to business directory websites (citations), create social media accounts and distributing content across social media platforms and other across other websites with high authority, optimise press releases, social bookmarking etc. These efforts are geared towards acquiring “link juice”, which increases your website authority (assuming the links are quality backlinks). Outreach (link building) is quite a daunting task. You are better off assigning the task to your website developer, except you are comfortable doing it yourself. Furthermore, list your business on Google my business and Bing places for business and ensure it is optimised.
Search Engine and Social Media Marketing
At this stage, creating a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign on Google AdWords and Facebook is certainly a clever way to strengthen your online marketing campaigns. It is essential to explore means to drive quality traffic to your website, this would help to improve your ranking on search engines (if done properly). You can start with as little as $50 advertising budget per month if you are on a tight budget. Trust me, it worth your every penny, because as you drive quality traffic to your website for your “focus keywords”, your keywords quality score improves, and if done consistently, chances are your webpages will rank high on search engines. Anyway, creating an ad is one aspect of it, optimising the ad copy is another aspect which is very crucial. You want to make sure that your focus keywords are relevant to their target webpages. If your focus keywords are not relevant to the target webpages, search engines i.e. Google would dock your website as a result. Simply put, avoid attracting visitors that would end up bouncing from your website, hence why it is necessary to create relevant ads. I can’t stress enough the importance of creating relevant ads. Furthermore, utilise social media platforms to promote your business. Create an ad on Facebook to promote your business webpages. The amount of time people spend on social media platforms these days is overwhelming, hence why you need to utilise this medium as an opportunity to grow your business.
Google Search Console
Sign in to Google search console and get familiar with the basics. Follow the instruction on how to improve your search presence. If this is too technical for you, ask your website developer or digital marketing specialist to assist you in setting it up. This tool will not only give you insights in regards to your site’s performance, but will also guide you through on how to resolve any issue that would affect the performance of your website.
Google Analytics
Sign in to Google analytics and follow the set-up process. This tool would help you track important metrics such as conversion, customer engagement, page views etc. You can monitor the effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns, contents on your websites and user experience with this tool. Basically, you want to know which areas you need to improve on, once you identify the areas, you can apply a solution.
Closing Thoughts
Don’t be overwhelmed by the process outlined above, remember Rome was not built in a day. Begin now, apply this result-driven digital marketing plan to your business, be consistent and follow the process judiciously – I guarantee your business will grow and succeed online.
All the best!