Here Are The Things To Consider Doing To Bring In More Business
Everyone wants more.
More leads. More phone calls. More sales and more money.
Digital marketing has quickly become the number one way for businesses to market their products and services as almost everyone uses the Internet and social media. The Internet can be accessed all around the world, which means that businesses are able to reach an impressive amount of people compared to the older methods of marketing. More people means more money- on paper at least.
Many years ago, businesses had to rely on print advertisements in newspapers, community flyers, the Yellow Pages, along with radio and television advertisements. Not only did these advertisements only reach a niche amount of people, but these campaigns were expensive.
Digital marketing allows businesses to easily reach new customers in a cost-effective manner. However, if you do have a budget allocated to marketing, you’re able to boost your digital marketing campaigns for optimal results and reach.
The use of social media and digital marketing also increases a business’s online presence, which makes it easier for people to find them through Google or other search engines. This is a natural extension of all your other marketing efforts.
Instead of allocating your business’s marketing budget to the old-fashioned ways of marketing, consider funneling the money into carefully curated and planned digital marketing strategies. Without a doubt, you’ll notice a better return on investment (ROI) and a greater reach at a lesser cost. It will also allow you to better control where and how your company is spending its money.
To help you excel in the realm of digital marketing, we’ve compiled a list of 10 tips that will ensure your business garners greater exposure to a wider audience, saves money, and increases revenue.
Create A User-Friendly Website
A bad website can actually chase business straight to your competitor.
In nearly 20 years of digital marketing, we’ve seen a lot of really bad mistakes, but one of the biggest is when businesses build their website for the boss instead of their target audience.
Remember, this is the digital front door of your business and first impressions are everything. The site should clearly & quickly communicate what you do for your customers. The key here is to have benefit-driven text with images that complement and maybe even tell your story.
The next thing your website has to do is to be easy to navigate and make it simple for customers to do business with you. We’ve seen countless examples of businesses that want more phone calls, then play hide and seek with the phone number.
Lastly, it’s 2021. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly by now, your site belongs in a museum somewhere. (and not in a good way.)
Create Content That Will Appeal To Customers
This is more than just a question of whether or not you’re going to blog. That’s a conversation for a whole other post.
When it comes to the content on your website, it’s important to remember that you have 2 audiences to write for: the people that write you checks and Google. You really want to make both happy.
Having creative, sought-after content available to customers on your website will increase the volume of visitors to your website while also raising awareness and generating meaningful leads.
It’s a cycle because your excellent content is exactly what Google says they want to rank well. So, the more good content your site has, the better your site will rank and the more people will see it.
And, then, there’s blogging.
It’s a great way to add keyword-rich content to your site that Google loves to see as well as those check writers (your customers).
The only problem with blogging is that you have to be consistent with it. Don’t be that company with a blog page on their site where the last post was October of 2014. Just no.
Call us and let’s talk about your content marketing strategies.
Improve Your Website’s SEO
Now that you have a great site with amazing content, the customers will just bust down the door, right?
Um…no.
Now, the real work begins. You have to market your site. Get it “out there”.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one way to do that.
But, there’s a secret about SEO that no everyone knows. Google hates SEO. If they ran the world (and believe us, they’re close), every business would run Google Ads. This would be ideal for them since more than 90% of their revenue comes from Google Ads. Plus, SEO nerds mess with their precious search results.
Despite that, you should always think about SEO since it’s a definitive way to bring targeted traffic. to your site. Whatever your business, you provide solutions to problems. People go to Google and type in their problems at the tune of 5.6 billion times a day. It only makes sense that having your site sitting right there on page one of the search results for relevant keywords will bring in more business.
The beautiful thing about SEO is that it puts your business in front of the very people who are looking for it at that moment in time. That is the proverbial touchdown/home run/goal (Insert your favorite sports analogy here) of all marketing.
Use Google My Business
Since Google really wants to be everything to everybody, you might as well go with that flow on Google My Business.
(Learn more about Google My Business in this post)
Having your business’s Google listing filled with positive client reviews will lead to a greater ROI and increased the number of calls you can get, which is why encouraging current and previous customers to leave a review can be very beneficial to your company.
When it comes to reviews, positive ones will help your business get more attention and the negative ones will show you where you might need to improve and what to change although, let’s face it, there are just some bad customers that you’ll never make happy.
Responding to reviews left on Google or through other platforms is a great way to show that your business engages with customers and values their feedback. Plus, responding to your reviews is part of the algorithm that helps your visibility.
Consider A Google Ads Campaign
Using the same logic that supports SEO, (wanting to be seen on the first page of Google), you might consider running some Google Ads.
But, be forewarned, no other marketing element has more data to consider than Google Ads. Just like looking at a craps table where you can make 1000 different bets (read: have 1000 different ways to lose money), we talk to a lot of businesses who ran ads themselves and lost money in the process.
Most of them made the same mistakes. They ran their ads to their homepage instead of an ad-specific landing page (i.e. run a water heater repair ad to a water heater repair page instead of your homepage where you talk about water heater repair, plumbing repairs, and all the other stuff you do.) Or, they let Google pick their keywords. Yikes.
Consider what your average customer spends. If it’s more than $1000 then Google Ads may be worth running for that specific service. If you set a budget for $1000, then you only need one client that month to break even, two to start seeing a profit, etc.
While SEO is a marathon to climb the rankings in the search results (allow 3-6 months for delivery), Google Ads can put your business there the day the campaign is live.
We do recommend talking to a Google Certified Partner before jumping into this. If you call us, we can arrange a training session or a consult for you with our Google Ads expert.
Utilize Social Media
When using social media accounts like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to market your business, it’s important to do two things before you even begin. First, you need to define your target audience and your overall goals for social media.
After you’ve figured out those two aspects of your campaign, create a content calendar so that your posting is consistent. Like other methods of advertising, social media marketing is a lot of trial and error, and it will take some time until you figure out which content and posts are a hit and what ones are a miss.
Through your business’s social media accounts, you’re able to connect with potential customers, humanize your brand, drive website traffic, and if you’re lucky, increase sales. On many social media accounts, you can pay to boost your posts to reach a targeted demographic or you can post for free.
While we have mixed opinions about paying to boost your posts, paying to advertise on Facebook can be very lucrative for many types of businesses. Again, it’s money well spent to talk to our social media expert to help you develop a winning set of strategies.
When it comes to social media marketing, partnering with micro-influencers has become a recent trend. These influencers, with around 10,000 to 50,000 followers, are naturally great storytellers and are able to promote products or services to their demographic. If you’re wanting to market your business’s services to females between the ages of 30 and 50, source out a micro-influencer who has a following that falls in that specific demographic. Using micro-influencers as a form of digital marketing can be relatively cost-effective as you can do a product or services exchange (with a discount code for followers) instead of paying them.
Consider Paid Social Media Marketing
Using paid Facebook ads can drive traffic and increase your business’s online presence and visibility.
Instead of getting the attention of potential customers organically, you’re able to pay for it. Paid advertisements can help your business gain momentum much quicker and will bring in revenue faster than simply posting regularly or boosting posts.
Since your advertisements will be getting noticed by more people, the algorithm will push your content, which results in increased visibility and hopefully increased website traffic.
When it comes to deciding on a budget for paid ads, the general rule of thumb is that the higher budget you set, the more leads you’ll likely get. It’s definitely a pay-to-play model.
Video Marketing
Since most of us walk around with a computer in our pocket more powerful than the ones that helped get the first 3 men into space, there’s really no excuse for not including video marketing in your marketing mix.
Yes, your iPhone is a powerful video marketing tool. There have been movies shot with iPhones, so quality isn’t an issue. The only other thing you have to determine is what to shoot.
Naturally, it depends upon what your business does, but there’s no shortage of ideas there. From the iconic Dollar Shave video to simple introductory videos about your business. You and your staff are creative enough to develop useful video content for your customers that you can put on your website or post on social media.
The bottom line here is to stop putting it off and start using video into your marketing mix. Google loves it and your customers will too.
Automate As Much As Possible
This falls under the category of working smarter.
These days, there are so many resources and tools out there that can help you automate much of what you do. From outsourcing your writing, scheduling tools, and more, there are ways to save time and provide a much more interactive customer experience.
For example, Mail Chimp (the email marketing tool) has some email automation tools that are inexpensive and can help you wow your customers with your responsiveness and ability to follow up without lifting a finger. All you have to do is set up the process for customers beforehand.
Rather than reinvent the wheel for every customer, work toward standardizing your processes. Use customizable templates where possible so that you only need to change a few lines to make things more personal.
It’s worth the time to explore marketing automation tools.
Pay Attention To The Numbers
Before starting a digital marketing campaign, clearly define your goals and develop performance metrics that would reflect a successful campaign. It’s also important to define a start and end date for each campaign. Determining success factors is also a great idea. Success to your company could look much different than success to another.
Once a campaign comes to an end, use Google Analytics or the analytics features on the software platform that you used to run the ads to access the statistics. These can also be pulled from your website.
Be sure to track the numbers so that you can compare future campaigns. If a digital marketing initiative was unsuccessful, reflect on what could have gone wrong and how it can be improved so that the next one delivers. When it comes to digital marketing, there is most certainly a learning curve so be patient and do your research. Tracking your results will make sure that your campaigns are always improving instead of staying stagnant.
Customer Service
One of our staff members has recently moved and been in contractor hell. He recently made a point that it seems like contractors who answer their phone, return calls, show up on time, and actually do what he or she says they’ll going to do has a leading competitive edge. Sad but true.
It’s not much different in the rest of the business world.
We hate to admit it, but we’ve had customers we’ve driven traffic to their sites, gotten them calls and they dropped the ball from there.
Years ago, we had a plumber who specialized in water heater repair that we were doing SEO for. All the data we had said the campaign was going well, but he said he wasn’t getting calls. We discovered the problem when one of our staff members had a water heater problem in his home and called our client. That call still hasn’t been returned.
The old saying goes, “You’re never too important to be kind to people”. We’d say returning phone calls falls under the definition of “kind”.
In a (hopefully) post COVID business world, it’s important to provide service the way that the customer wants as much as possible, but we should never get too far away from the basics.
Make It Loud is a digital marketing firm that’s located in the Atlanta area with one goal. We want to help put more money in your pocket.
