What does “having a digital marketing strategy” even mean? Digital Marketing is a MUST these days, but many businesses don’t know what it is and how it can bring in more customers. We’re going to strip it down to the basics and show you how to build a winning digital marketing strategy from the ground up.
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Glyna: Good morning!
Sarah: Well, hello everybody! Good morning! Today we are covering Digital Marketing 101. It’s interesting because when you sometimes ask people, “What is digital marketing? What does that even mean to have a digital marketing strategy? What are you talking about?” I think it’s a common question, but one thing for sure is that it’s extremely important and every business needs it. The bottom line is, a lot of businesses don’t know “what do I need and where do I start? And what do I need or not need?” So we thought it would be really valuable for everyone today to just give you some one-on-one basics of what is digital marketing, and exactly what you need to build the right foundation for your business. So, let’s get going!
Glyna: Welcome, everybody to Marketing Mix. Every week, we mix up what we’re going to talk about. That’s where we get the Marketing Mix. We’re really just here talking about digital marketing. We can do some Q and A, some trends, just cover some really important information, and just kind of change it up week to week.
Sarah: Yep, we are. Okay. So before we get started, don’t forget that we go live every week on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, and you can catch the replay on LinkedIn and Instagram. As always, please check out our podcast Marketing and a Mic. We’re really proud of that. The show is broadcast on our own podcast. It’s awesome, good information. As always, subscribe to our YouTube channel, Fusion One Marketing. It’s another free resource where you can get good information on digital marketing because that’s really what this is all about. We’re not asking you to master digital marketing. That’s what we’re here for. But we’re certainly here to help you understand why it’s so valuable for your business because really, it’s all about getting more business for all of us, right?
Glyna: Yeah, exactly! It looks like we’ve got some people joining us. But on StreamYard, we don’t know you’re there unless you comment. So throw us a comment so we could say good morning to you.
Sarah: Don’t be shy. Yes, here we go. Digital Marketing 101. You’ve got to laugh, it’s like a buzzword and sometimes I’ll ask people, “What is digital marketing? What do you think it means?” I even want to ask the viewer is, “If you could define what digital marketing is, what would it be in the most simple form?” Because it’s sort of hard for people to understand what it is. Really the bottom line is it’s getting you more calls and more business.
Glyna: Yep. Exactly. We talk about it all the time. So we take it for granted that people know what in the world we’re talking about.
Sarah: Right.
Glyna: And then you see a little glaze over their eyes. It’s like, okay, they have no clue what I’m talking about. Yeah. So we’re going to break it down. I mean really, there’s a lot to it and that’s just the bottom line. It can be really overwhelming if you let it be. But what the big thing about digital marketing is, is to make sure you’re visible and people can find you anywhere they’re looking on the internet.
Sarah: Isn’t that key? That’s what it comes down to is people, when they’re looking for products and services, if you’re not using digital marketing in some shape or form, it’s very hard for you to get found.
Glyna: Well, yeah. You’re losing your piece of the pie and guess who’s getting it? Your competitors, the guy down the street, because they’re going to find him instead of you. You’re not going to get that business.
Sarah: Absolutely. So if you’re a little on the fence about digital marketing and you’re thinking, why is it important to me? I wanted to give you just kind of a few quick facts about it. It reaches people where they’re spending their money and their time. So, they’re on the internet. That’s where digital marketing makes the connection, is it’s reaching those people exactly where they spend their time and money. It helps level the playing field for small businesses.
Sarah: I love the example that Rob uses, as that we can make you look like a Chick-fil-A, meaning we can make you look like you’re everywhere. Isn’t that so important? It’s more targeted. So, digital marketing is so brilliant in the way that you can reach your key customers and there’s so many techniques to do that. It’s so great at finding your exact target audience and placing your business right in front of them. Also analytics, that’s another crazy great tool of, you have the ability to just figure out what’s working and what’s not. Digital marketing gives you that ability too, to give you those kinds of analytics.
Glyna: Yeah, exactly. And we do have a few people saying hi this morning. Melissa Keck with Keck Drones and 3D Imaging. And we have Shawn, Shawn Troughton, good morning! And there’s Steve Johnson. Good morning, Steve! Alrighty. Okay, to continue on of why digital marketing is important. It’s easy to scale. The cool thing I love about it is, you may have your business in one city and you’re going to get that business, sometimes organically. But if you’re in a big area and you want to branch out, as you said, digital marketing can make you look like you are all over the city and that you have all of these different locations covered; and not just in the city, different States, all over the place! So, it’s really easy to scale. It brings you the best ROI. Once you get it going, you’re going to have those leads coming in every month. You’re going to have more and more calls coming in, more and more business. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen people start with just a few people and then after a year or two, their business has just exploded because they’ve got all those calls coming in. People are shopping on the internet for anything they need. So, they’ll find you there if you’re doing this digital marketing. And the competition! It helps you beat out the competition. If you have a good digital marketing company, you don’t even worry about competition. All you’re worried about is answering that phone.
Digital Marketing 101: Google My Business
Sarah: That’s right. Because there’s so much to digital marketing, it’s hard to know where to start. So we’re going to build it step by step. Start with the foundation and piece by piece, build a digital marketing strategy that is just a winning, winning strategy for your business. Number one, the very first step; if you’re going to do anything, make sure you have a Google My Business listing. Every business. I repeat every business at the very least should have a Google My Business listing, and it’s free! This is something that you set up, you get a Google account, G-mail account. You set it up and you piece together your entire business profile so that when somebody goes and searches online and they type in your business, your information will show up. It’s important that you do that because that’s going to be what they’re going to see. That’s your business profile. You can add pictures, videos, or description, all that kind of stuff. Besides all that, just setting it up, that’s proof to the customer that you’re a legitimate business, right? It builds that trust because if they’re searching and they can’t get your name and they can’t link up your name anywhere, it’s a red flag. So, it increases your visibility in that regard, too. You get the Google analytics. That’s something that will allow you to gain insight on your audience, your local search performance, how things are working. This is, it’s a really nice tool. It’s just the basics of where you should start. Don’t you think?
Glyna: Yeah. And it’s very important. We call it, “bling it out”. Make sure you bling it out. In other words, fill it out completely and follow every little rule that they tell you to do. They’ll talk you through it. Now, it’s going to take you some time to do it, but that’s very, very important. I think I saw somebody else jumping in, Cindy Edmunds. Good morning! All right. So you have your Google My Business listing and people are like, “Well, where do I even find it?” And this sounds kind of stupid, but Google “Google My Business listing”. Just type that in and it’ll come up and you just click on it. It’ll walk you right through it. So you have that.
Digital Marketing 101: Company Website
Glyna: The second thing we always tell people, if we were going in order of things, getting everything together, you have to have a website. All right. Now, not just any website, and we’ll get to that in just a second. But a website is very crucial for your business. We always talk about that first impression. You only get one chance to make a first impression and people are going to come and look at your website. Really, they’re wanting to find out everything about your products and services. So, make sure that it reflects that. Make sure it reflects your business with the color, the design, the way it looks, and even the content. We preach content. You have to have some stuff on it because if they are doing a little bit of research and they can’t find anything on your website, guess where they’re going? They’re just hopping off and going somewhere else. So, don’t just slap up a pretty website. You need to have a very good website that has a lot of other key components. That’s going to make it worth your time and money. Yeah. We’ll get a little bit more into that.
Sarah: Yeah, it could not be more true. I think there’s a common misconception that websites just need to look good. Actually, it has to be functional and organized, and not just appealing to the eye. Many may not know this, but search engines are looking for a lot of other stuff, too. That’s where the connection has to come in. You can’t just have a good-looking website, that doesn’t have a lot of that backend stuff that the search engines are looking for, because that’s how they (search engines) are going to determine the quality of your website. So, it’s got to be functional and it could be the prettiest little website you’ve ever seen, but if it’s taking 10 seconds to load, then it’s like, no, no, no, no! It’s not a sign of a great website. You just don’t want it to look cheap and pieced together. The visitor’s going to start questioning, what kind of a business is this? So, functionality is so key. We’re so impatient, we really are. If there’s anything that we can’t navigate to, we’re like, I’m out of here!
Glyna: You’re exactly right. People do not have a lot of patience these days. They want instant. They want it to load. They want their information. We build beautiful websites. We absolutely do. But if nobody can find it, that’s just a beautiful website just sitting out there on the internet. You have to make it easy to use. Again, it can be beautiful and obviously, we want it to look very, very nice. But you have to have a good user experience. We’ve talked about this before. It needs to be structured in a way, especially on your mobile phone, to where people can find stuff easily. They don’t have to search a lot and they don’t have to scroll a lot. Make sure that you have the important information right at their fingertips.
Sarah: That’s so true. And another key thing is having a responsive website. What does that mean?
Glyna: Please, please, please.
Sarah: Oh, my gosh. What does that mean? Okay. The design of your website has to display well on every screen, no matter what device it is.
Glyna: Yep.
Sarah: It’s so important. This happened last week. I wanted to throw my phone. I was on a website and all the words and everything blended together. I was trying to click on a tab, but I couldn’t because all the content and everything was merging. And I’m like, oh my gosh. I mean, I almost wanted to just call them and say, “Listen, I can help you with this. Let me help you with this. This is a real problem.” So, just make sure of that. Don’t just look at it on one screen. Don’t just look on your laptop. It has to be responsive across all devices. That is something as you’re building it, you have to make sure you pay attention to. Good content is very important, too. Fresh content keeps visitors returning. If they know you’ve got updated information on your website, that’ll keep them returning, and it helps with your SEO. Your content has to be relevant to your target audience. We talk about blogs a lot and we may seem like a broken record, but blogs are really great for SEO because you’re keeping fresh content up there. You’re keeping relevant stuff up there. You get to use the keywords. All that stuff helps search engines position users to your website.
Glyna: Exactly right, and that responsive thing drives me crazy. Again, people need to be able to get to something fast. So, make sure that you can navigate it easily. Keep in mind, you need to have fresh content for the visitors and users, but you also need to have fresh content for the search engines. The website can be pretty, have content, all this stuff, but if it’s not able to be optimized and really take advantage of SEO, which is search engine optimization, you’re going to be missing out on so much. We use WordPress. We always talk about that because WordPress gives us a lot of ability in the background to do our thing on SEO. Surprisingly, a lot of websites don’t have that. So, it needs to be optimized for SEO. All that other stuff helps, no doubt, but you’d have to be able to take it up to that next notch to get the most out of it. Bottom line, we definitely want to make sure that it looks very pretty, but your website needs to be fast. We haven’t even talked about security, but it needs to be secure and needs to be mobile-friendly. So keep all of that in mind. I know it’s a lot, but again, we can help you with that stuff. I think people need to just review their website. Right now we’re building a new website for Fusion One Marketing, but I don’t necessarily go to our website every single day. However, we should review it and everybody should review their website periodically.
Digital Marketing 101: Social Media
Sarah: Because it’s very important. Okay. So let’s talk about our third and we’ve got, let’s see, we’ve got six today. Social media. I think sometimes too when we say digital marketing, I’ve heard this more than once. “Oh, so you do social media?” It’s like, no, not exactly. That’s part of it, but not everything! Social media is really important. It’s another beast. It’s always changing. It’s got so much to it, but your business needs to have a social media presence and it needs to have an active social media presence. Once you build your Google My Business listing, and you’ve got your website, then the next stage would be social media, build it. Find the platforms where you think your customers are, stay there. Don’t feel like you’ve got to be everywhere. Just find where your audience is. And why is social media great? Besides the fact of, you can complain or talk about politics. I’m just kidding.
Glyna: And get in fights and arguments.
Sarah: Yeah. Getting in public fights and airing out all your dirty laundry. Beyond that, you can reach a larger audience and it gives you a really good opportunity to connect with people. What I love too about social media, and we’re finding this more and more, people will send out direct messages. They’ll go to your social media page. So, these are customers who are reaching out to you, and it gives you just the ability to respond to them in real-time so you can provide better customer services. Also branding, you can showcase your brand. You could talk about your products. It’s a great platform to do that, to get familiar with who you are and just that relationship building. I think that’s really cool because people love when you respond to their comments or you share stuff, all that good stuff. Another thing with social media, it also has its own analytic tools. You can go in there and gain insight about your customers, and who’s interacting with your posts. What kind of posts they’re interacting with? What’s seeming to match with what they like to see? Change it up and make tweaks with your social media so that it’s catering to your customer. Above everything else, it’s another opportunity to drive traffic to your website.
Glyna: Yes.
Sarah: That’s another key thing. All those things give you big points and increase your visibility.
Glyna: Yeah! We talk about the recipe for digital marketing and it includes all of these things that we’re talking about. A lot of people think that social media is enough to do it and it is going to help, but you need all of these things. Touch on again, to just stay on the platform of where your target audience is. I mean, that’s a biggie.
Sarah: It is because… let’s be honest… Social media, if it’s done correctly, it does take time. So, if you’re going to be putting the time into it, it’s important to only put your time into where it matters most, where your customers are because every platform has its own demographics and its own age group. That is so important. I think there’s a misconception of, I have got to be everywhere. If I’m going to be on social media, I have got to be everywhere. That is really not the case. You really only need to be where your customers are hanging out, and then you’ll find that connection. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.
Glyna: Yep. That’s so important, and we run into that every day. People are like, “Well, I want to be on TikTok and I want to be on Instagram and I want to be blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” It’s like, okay, let’s stop for a second. It’s not that you can’t be on those places, but let’s really narrow down what’s going to make the most sense for your business and really hit those places hard. Anyway, I know that’s a whole other show that we’ve done and you can find that information on YouTube at Fusion One Marketing.
Digital Marketing 101: SEO
Glyna: So, we’ve done all this stuff and now we have to do SEO. Okay. This is my favorite thing, just because we can build businesses with SEO and by combining it with all this other stuff. You’ve got your Google My Business listing. You’ve got your masterpiece website going. You have your social media rocking, which is consistent with postings every day. Now we need to do SEO. What does that do for you? Well, let’s think about it. It’s pretty much common sense. People are looking on the internet for products and services and SEO is going to make sure that your business shows up when they’re looking for what they need. For instance, if you sell heating and air equipment when someone’s air conditioner’s out, they’re going to Google or will look on the search engines for air conditioning, or air conditioning repair, or whatever. You want to make sure that your business shows up, so that’s what SEO does for you. Everybody’s out there. It’s not just Google. We put our customers all over the internet because these days, people are looking at Bing, Yahoo, Yelp, the Yellow Pages, and Youtube. They’re looking everywhere for people. It’s not just Google. YouTube is a huge place. SEO is going to give you visibility for your website all over the search engine so that people can find you. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell, I guess you could say.
Sarah: There is, there’s so much that goes into effective SEO. Now, we won’t go to that level, but we-
Glyna: We can’t give our secret sauce away.
Sarah: Right, right. Exactly. This is a 30 minutes show and we’re going to stick to it. But there are some basics to an effective SEO strategy. Finding the right keywords, targeted keywords, determines how search engines rank your website and how much traffic you bring in. These are things that if you hire us, we’ll pay attention to, so you don’t need to. But again, if you’re doing the research and you’re trying to build your digital marketing strategy, it’s good to kind of know these basics so that you don’t get screwed around with somebody else that doesn’t know what they’re doing. And we’ve seen that happen.
Glyna: Oh, my gosh.
Sarah: Yeah. So make sure you find your keywords, use those keywords, use them in your website’s URL. Use keywords in your title tags, descriptions, headings. What does that mean? That’s basically when you’re putting together stuff like your website, you’re doing a blog, all that stuff. You want to position those keywords. Because again, these are all things that the search engines are looking for, and include those keywords at your website content. Do it the right way, that you can’t do shortcuts with that. Search engines are on to that. You can’t just put your keywords randomly in there so they don’t make any sense, and say done.
Digital Marketing 101: ROI Tools
Glyna: All right. So biggie, biggie, biggie, ROI tools. What does that mean? Return on investment. If you’re paying somebody for SEO, that claims are going to be bringing you business, you need to know if it’s working. Obviously, you know if the phone’s ringing and those calls are bringing you more appointments and all that good stuff. But you need to track everything. This is so important. Oh gosh. I really feel bad for people when we meet with them and we really get down to the nitty-gritty and figure out how much business they’ve received from how much money they put into their SEO, and sometimes it’s just very sad. We had, well, just recently, we had a company that we were reviewing everything they were doing, and when I asked that question, “How many calls have you gotten from this?” They’d been paying this company $1,000 a month for a year and he said the last month they have received two calls.
Sarah: Oh, gosh. That’s painful. That’s painful.
Glyna: I’m just bragging on us a little. This didn’t mean to be an advertisement for us. But after we got things going, I think it was month two, we were already bringing them over 100 calls to their locations. So, that’s why I’m saying, you have to track it. If you’re paying somebody your good, hard-earned money, make sure that you know what you’re getting out of it. You want to also be able to understand your audience. Where are these people coming from, that are coming to your website? What is their demographic? Again, as Sarah was saying, that way, that can help you with social media and all of that good stuff. But it can also help you make great informed decisions on where to spend your money with digital marketing. So, what we call a “marketing dashboard” can bring all your tracking into one area so that you can take a quick look at it, and be able to see what’s going on with all of your marketing. A marketing dashboard can be a game-changer for your business.
Sarah: A game-changer. It’s so true. It could be a game-changer. I mean, that’s the whole thing is it’s like, why are you spending the money if you don’t know what your money is getting you? I mean really, why do that to yourself?
Glyna: Well, I’ll tell you the bad thing about it is, a lot of people don’t know anything about digital marketing and that’s why we’re covering this stuff because they’ve heard the buzz, the terms, the buzzwords, and they know that it’s supposed to bring them business. But anyway, they don’t take it to the next level. They just take it for granted that the company is going to do what they say they’re going to do.
Digital Marketing 101: PPC
Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So now that you’ve got all your pieces and you’ve got your ROI tools, this is another one that is pay-per-click. There should be a little disclaimer on this. This is not a staple for every business, but it works incredibly well for some businesses. How it works is, it brings visitors to your website by using ads, and they’re positioned right in front of your customer demographic and you only pay when someone clicks that ad, when they take action, so to speak. So, it reaches people in a more targeted area and what’s really cool about this is it could extend your reach beyond your local search. In other words, if you want to get more customers beyond your little local demographics, pay-per-click is brilliant for that because it really can expand the reach of the people that would buy what you’re selling. It just gives you that quality traffic and that’s what’s so important. You can set up these ads so that it’s put right in front of the eyes of the people that are most likely going to be making a purchase of your product or service. It’s so targeted in that way and when it’s put together, it has to be put together with the right keywords, with the right type of content, the right call to action, all that sort of stuff. But it’s just great because its position. These are ads that are going to be right in front of people that are most likely going to be converted to buyers. At the end of the day, that’s what you want. It’s great too, because you can turn it on and turn it off. You can monitor the progress of it. So, you can see the performance of how your ad is doing and you can set your budget, it’s really great in having that ability to control your budget.
Glyna: Yes, exactly. As you said, it works great as an add-on to your whole digital marketing strategy. We like to say that SEO is building equity in your website and in your brand. It gets stronger and stronger and stronger over time to where your calls are going to increase. PPC can be something that can fill in those spaces while we’re building that equity. That way we can get some leads coming in a little bit earlier, but it’s a great add-on. We’re using a lot more now, like you said, to expand people’s region, which is very important. So, cool.
Honorable Mention
Glyna: You have all this stuff, but I do have an honorable mention that’s very, very important. Reviews or otherwise called reputation management. It’s all about your reputation on the internet. The more reviews you have online, the better the search engines are going to view you and they’re going to give you preferential treatment over your competitors. Now we’re talking about reviews, but they need to be pretty good reviews or to have. If you have one star out of five, we have a problem. That’s where reputation management comes into play. That’s the golden goose that we’re all chasing, is trying to keep up with reviews. So, make sure that you’re managing all of that. Make sure you’re checking all of the places that you have your information, like Yelp, Yelp is famous for people complaining. And if you’re going to get a negative review, it’s going to be over there. I see it all the time. It’s like, ugh, not another Yelp review.
Sarah: Yes. That’s so true.
Glyna: But just keep on top of that and add them consistently. It’ll leave a lasting impression on customers and people who are checking you out.
Sarah: Yeah. Got to have some. We all look at reviews, right?
Glyna: Oh, yeah.
Sarah: We always look at reviews. So if you’re a business and you don’t have consistent reviews, positive reviews, it can really affect you and your reputation. What we’re talking about is, you want to just make sure you’re staying on top of that. That’s sort of your building block. I wanted to ask you one last question. You really shouldn’t do just one thing. We’ve given you the big picture of the website and your Google My Business and social media and SEO and tracking tools, ROI tools, and pay-per-click. Why do you feel like it has to be everything or what’s the value in that for getting more business?
Glyna: Well, we’ve mentioned the parts and pieces, and this is important for businesses. If you can’t afford to do the whole ball of wax all at once, let’s make it make sense. But, if you want to get the most out of your business and the most out of digital marketing, you need to have that whole recipe. The bottom line is that’s going to give you the best chance to be found when people are searching for you and going to build your business. It really turns it into a profit center after a few months, if you’re doing all these things the correct way. This should be your number one revenue-generating thing. Even over salespeople, everything else, it should be if it’s done correctly. So, that’s the bottom line. You’re going to be where people are looking for you.
Sarah: Yeah.
Glyna: What do we say? Yeah, our tagline is always more calls, more business because that just makes sense. And that’s what the bottom line is.
Sarah: That’s the basics. Again, we wanted to present it so that you’ve got a really good, solid winning strategy. So that’s it for us today.
Glyna: Yeah. And as always, feel free to reach out to us because you may have some of these things in place, and then we can just fill in the spaces to make it all work together. We would love to have a free consultation. We love talking about this all day long, so reach out to us. And also, we will be back next Friday for another episode of Marketing Mix. So please join us next Friday at eight. And until then, I hope you all have a wonderful week!