Like most businesses, we get several common questions about digital marketing. We thought it would be helpful to put together a list answering all of our most FAQs and share it with our viewers. From social media, branding, SEO, and everything in between, we’ve got all the answers related to digital marketing to help your business!
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Read the Full Discussion Below
Sarah: Good morning! All right, guys, let me tell you. We are just like every other business and we get asked a lot of questions, a lot of the same questions, and we’re here to answer all of our frequently asked questions. We’ve got a full house today! Let’s get started.
Glyna: Good morning, everybody.
Kelsi: Good morning.
Sarah: Good morning.
Glyna: All righty. Welcome to Marketing Mix. Every week, we have different segments to highlight in the name of digital marketing topics. We may mix it up with some tips, tricks, interviews, and today we have some Q and A. But let’s take a look at where they can find our broadcast, Sarah.
Sarah: Sure. Okay guys, don’t forget. Every single week we go live on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. And if you haven’t subscribed, do yourself a favor and subscribe to our podcast, Marketing and a Mic, and follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn. And as always, do not forget about subscribing to our YouTube channel. Every single week, we are churning out fresh new videos, all in the name of digital marketing.
Glyna: As Sarah mentioned earlier, we are excited to bring you a Q and A segment today. We have the most frequently asked questions that people ask over and over. So we wanted to cover some that we have with Fusion One Marketing, and then feel free, if you’re joining us, drop another question in the comments. We’d love to answer that, as well. But I’m going to go ahead and introduce Kelsi, who’s going to be running the show today. Most of you know Kelsi, but I’m going to go ahead and let her get started.
Kelsi: All right. So I am Kelsi and I’m going to be moderating today. We’re going to go through all of the FAQ’s that we have here at FOM and Rob is going to handle all of the techie questions because we know that he loves that. Glyna is going to cover questions regarding websites, mostly all digital marketing type things and then, a little bit of SEO too. And then Sarah is going to handle all of the branding and social media questions. You guys ready?
Glyna: Ready to roll.
Kelsi: All right. We’re going to start-
Sarah: We’re ready.
Kelsi: With-
Sarah: Nothing too tough for us, Kelsi. It’s all right.
Kelsi: All right. Yeah, guarantee that. Not really our questions there, everybody else’s. All right. So Sarah, if I have a brand new business, where do I even begin when it comes to marketing?
Sarah: Okay. So talking about branding, branding really is your identity and it’s your personality. It’s just the message that you want, not only to put out, but that people out there are saying about your business. So really, the first thing that you want to start with when you’re a brand new business is you kind of want to figure out what that is. What is my message of my business? What are we about? Who is our target audience? I can’t tell you how important…That should be one of your first steps, is who your target audience is, because that’s going to direct all of your marketing initiatives. So you really want to make sure that you figure out who your customer is and where to find them. But along with that too, with branding, you want to get your name, of course. You want to make sure that name is not taken. So don’t go out there and start getting all your t-shirts and then find out that you can’t even, the name is taken and make sure that the website that you want is all ready. So don’t, it’s one of those things, don’t put the carriage before the horse. You want to make sure that you have everything available once you’ve established that. So, get your domain. Go get your company name and then stop there. Call Fusion One, and we will help you walk through the entire process and get you, because it’s really important to talk to a marketing consultant. That’s the best thing, the best route to take.
Kelsi: Absolutely.
Glyna: Yeah, exactly. And logo, too. Don’t want to make sure that you, with that brand, you want to make sure that you have a beautiful logo. Rob always says, “When you’re thinking about your logo, think about how it will look everywhere.” I think that’s a really important thing on your branding. Don’t make it so small that when you put it on your shirt… Rob, sit up so we can see your logo.
Rob: I’m hard of hearing. Give me a break.
Glyna: So anyway, make sure your logo, you want to think of those things too.
Sarah: Like that.
Glyna: Absolutely.
Rob: One of the things that I will bring up too is when you do decide on your name and if you are going to do local SEO or SEO, your name of your company will make a difference in where you rank.
Glyna: Oh.
Kelsi: Oh. That’s important.
Sarah: Yes.
Kelsi: All right. So Rob, the next one’s for you. I hear you guys talk about Google algorithms all the time. Can you explain what that is in layman’s terms?
Glyna: That should be easy.
Rob: So, with Google, and I’m using the search engine as a general term here, Google wants to provide their users the best results possible when you do a keyword search or a search on anything. What they’ve done is they’ve come up with hundreds of ranking factors that says, this will give the end-user the best results for what they’re looking for. Okay? These results, these ranking factors, there’s hundreds of them. They’re not public to the public. People that say they have it, they’ve just guessed or they’ve either done some testing. But the hard part and why it’s important to have somebody professionally help you with this is that algorithm changes between five and 600 times a year.
Glyna: Yep.
Rob: Okay. So most of the time it’s small little changes, but ranking factors could be anything that’s on your website, that it could be is it mobile friendly? That’s a big one right now. Okay. Number two is that my website doesn’t have duplicate content. So each one of those factors are actually rated, and then based on your website, is actually showing up in the organic search.
Kelsi: All right. Perfect.
Rob: The one thing that I did want to go on about that though, is you mentioned Google algorithm. Be aware that every platform has their own algorithm. So the Google algorithm does not apply to YouTube, which is a Google property. It doesn’t apply to Google My Business. Each one of those have their own algorithm. Same thing with social media.
Kelsi: Okay. Good to know. Glyna, this one’s for you.
Glyna: Oh, yay.
Kelsi: So a lot of businesses are on social media these days and you can find a lot of information about those businesses on those profiles. Is it still important to have a website?
Glyna: Yes. I get asked, I do get asked this a lot. People think, well, that’s where everybody’s at. But everybody is still using their mobile phones, still using their cell phones to look up the businesses. And they may make a trip to your social media, but they are always still going to go to your website to see if you’re legitimate or not. There’s a lot of reasons to have a website, but one of the biggest ones is to make sure that you’re a legitimate business and that you still make that good first impression. You do want a website and social media obviously, but again, make that first impression on your website. Make sure it is user friendly. Make sure that it’s easy to navigate. And again, it is your first impression, so let’s make a good one.
Kelsi: We’re going to go back to you, Rob.
Rob: Uh-oh.
Glyna: Already.
Kelsi: Already. So a lot of people know that Fusion One Marketing can do a lot for businesses, but how do they know that they’re actually getting their money’s worth?
Rob: So one of the things that we come up and we tell people all the time, we want to show that we’ve got you calls, which actually translates to more business. We came up with a custom dashboard that we created. We call it Dash. The good thing about it is it’ll track all your phone calls. It will track your website stats. We can actually even track if you have phone-numbers on a billboard, if you have phone-numbers on a radio station. We actually even have people that have put tracking numbers on people, salesman’s business cards to track how many phone calls they’re getting in when they pass out the business cards.
Kelsi: Oh, wow.
Rob: So the way that I tell people, it’s a great way to actually get 30 days of data in 30 seconds.
Glyna: Yeah, absolutely. And here’s just a real quick look at our Dash that we’re very, very proud of. Actually, Rob’s team worked very tirelessly to get this put together and it’s customized like he said, for each customer. It shows all of the calls that we have coming in, total calls and unique calls. And then like this, if you have different locations, it can show the different locations. It also shows website stats, so we have that. So anyway, it’s just a great tool, like he said. You can take a look at that. I think it took us less than 30 seconds to see what’s going on there.
Kelsi: And I would add too, if you’re working with any kind of marketing agency, especially digital marketing, obviously, and they can’t track results, that’s a red flag. And I’ll just leave it at that. Back to you, Sarah. As a business, what social media platforms should I look for at using, look to use?
Sarah: Yes. I see where you were going with that.
Kelsi: Thank you.
Sarah: This is definitely a common question, and there is also a misconception to this. Once you’re on social media, a lot of businesses think, I’ve just got to saturate and I got to be everywhere. And that’s really not the case. You really only want to use the social media platforms where your customers are because let’s face it, social media, it is work. You need to be consistent with it. You need to put relevant content out there. Each social platform has different formats and their own little rules on posting. So, don’t waste your time trying to be everywhere and blanket everywhere if you’re not going to be effective with it. I would say to make sure to first find out where your demographics are. Where are they hanging out? And that’s where your business needs to be. It’s where your product, where your audience is and do that and make sure that if you are on those social platforms, be consistent. And if you can’t be consistent, find somebody that can be consistent for you because there’s no point in doing social media if you can’t do it correctly.
Glyna: Amen, Sarah. And you mentioned targeting and I was like, woo. You mentioned targeting a couple times. Oh, my gosh, we can’t tell people that enough. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
Sarah: Yes.
Kelsi: Absolutely. Okay, Glyna. We were talking about websites a minute ago. In order to have the best type of website, how many pages should there be? Is there a minimum or a maximum?
Glyna: Well, we say a starter or beginner website really should start with five pages, if you can. Obviously, we do one page websites. We do however many pages that you need, but really to have a nice beginner website, we say five pages. That gives you enough area and enough real estate to put all of your stuff out there. So that would be, you would have a homepage, obviously, to make your good first impression. You would have a page, an about page that can tell your history and how you do business, which is very important. People need to know that. You need to have your services slash products page and actually, you need a page for each service or product that you have. But if you have just a minimal amount of pages that you can afford, we could do one with all your services and products. A testimonials page is huge. Again, we’ve all talked about, we really don’t buy anything without reading reviews or testimonials. You want to put those front and center, and then a contact page. I know that sounds obvious, but you need to have all of your information, a map where you’re located if possible, and every single piece of or every way that people can get ahold of you. I’d say start there, five pages.
Kelsi: Five pages. Okay, great. Let’s see who’s joining us this morning. It looks like we have Cindy Edmunds and John Chambers. Good morning, guys. Thanks for joining.
Glyna: Good morning.
Kelsi: All right. Back to Rob. What is PPC and why should businesses use PPC advertising?
Rob: The original PPC, just it was very simple. It would be that I’m going to have an ad and it started on Google. And if I clicked on that ad, I would pay per click. Very easy and very simple. It’s evolved. Now social media is involved, which of course you’re not typing in keywords and things like that. But it’s evolved to now, where I can really target a demographics, to piggyback on what Sarah was talking about is I can, if I know that the people I want to reach with that advertisement is on Facebook, I could advertise on Facebook. If I want to do more intentional pay per click where people are actually searching for a product or something like that, we could do Google AdWords or Bing. Or almost every platform out there now has some sort of pay per click including YouTube, Twitter, you name it. They actually have it. Businesses can do… I tell people there’s three things that you can actually do with pay per click and this again has evolved, but we can have them where they advertise a product or service. They click on it. They come to their page, they sign up and say, “I want something.” Number two, companies now can use this as a great branding tool. And what I mean by that is, I can put an advertisement out there introducing a brand new company, advertise this over two or three counties and get 30 to 40,000 people to actually see who this company is, and they’re new to the area. They don’t even have to click on anything. That’s all free advertisement if they don’t click on it. So the other one is, they can actually have a lead gen where they say, “Hey, sign up. What time do you want me to be there?” And they actually fill out a form that they actually get for a lead.
Kelsi: Cool.
Glyna: Yeah. That’s cool. And I know with pay per click, Rob, you always say that’s the place. I mean, people are out there looking to buy. So, if you can do your pay per click advertising correctly, which there’s a lot that goes into that, that’s another show. You have a good chance of getting a lot of business off of that because people are coming. If they’re on Google, they’re looking to buy most likely.
Rob: Yep.
Kelsi: Makes sense. All right, Sarah, talk to me about hashtags. Is there a proper etiquette in using hashtags across different platforms?
Sarah:
Short answer is yes. Let me tell you. Hashtags, okay. Hashtags, you need to be strategic. Hashtags are very, very important. In a way, they are like searchable tools. So a hashtag and it wasn’t always this case, but especially right now on LinkedIn, always on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, they have all now kind of changed the rules with hashtags to where it has become a searchable feature. You want to make sure that your hashtags mean something. Don’t do just silly hashtags that are these run-on sentences, that make no sense. If you want to do that for fun, that’s great. But if you want to do it because as a business, then get rid of that. Be very effective with your mark, with your hashtags. I cannot say that enough. If you’re looking at your hashtags and your, it says, hashtag, I really like what I do and it is so much fun. Just stop. Just stop doing it right now, because if you hear anything here, that hashtags really are a strategic tool. It can be used as a searchable tool on social media, so it can increase your reach and increase your engagement if you use them effectively. And make sure that they match your business. So digital, hashtag digital marketing, hashtag social media, those types of things.
Kelsi: Great.
Glyna: Yeah. This is a huge thing. So Sarah, there’s a couple other things that you always say. Talk about capitalizing letters. When would you use capital letters?
Sarah: Yes. Yes. Thanks for bringing that up. So along with hashtags, if it’s one or two words, you don’t need to capitalize it. But if it’s longer than that, you have to capitalize it, and it’s for obvious reasons, you have to be able to read it. And so that’s sort of what falls into the etiquette, where you want to make sure that your hashtag is legible, that people can read it. I always say that if it is something that is longer, say something like The Best Weekend, you want to capitalize the T, the B and the W, so The Best Weekend. And yeah, again, quit, don’t make up sentences. Hashtags should not be sentences.
Glyna: And each platform, this is the deal too. This drives me crazy. Most people know or a lot of people know that if you post on Instagram, it will follow you to Facebook. In other words, you don’t have to post both places. Most people start on Instagram first, which allows you gazillions of hashtags.
Sarah: I know where you’re going.
Glyna: And then, you look at their Facebook and it has the same amount of hashtags. Is there kind of a rule of thumb for just-
Sarah: Yes.
Glyna: The main platforms? That drives me nuts.
Sarah: Yeah. Yes. Okay. Instagram, everyone, again, it goes along with the etiquette and the rules and with Instagram, having more hashtags actually benefits you because it really is a very searchable feature. So it’s okay if you have 10 to 15 hashtags on Instagram. It’s not so much okay to have that on Facebook or LinkedIn. In fact, with LinkedIn, they recommend no more than three, because if you do that, it actually starts to decrease your visibility because you’ve saturated it to the point where it’s no longer searchable. You really want to be very strategic with how many you use. If you’re on Instagram and your post said, “I’m going to post on Instagram and it’s also going to post on Facebook.” Don’t make that mistake of using these 30 hashtags on Facebook because it’s tacky. And also, it is, it’s going to decrease your visibility. So that’s when it comes into where you really have to know how each platform works, because it’s not all created equal. And we always can spot those ones where we’re like, oh, they just posted it everywhere and it all looks the same.
Kelsi: I will say too, I noticed recently, it may just be on the mobile version of Facebook, but they’ve got a new feature where when you use hashtags in your post, this little thing pops up at the bottom that says, “Browse this hashtag.” And it grabs one hashtag that you use and suggests it as a searchable tool. So for instance, I saw Mary Beasley with Let’s Be Frank Design’s post yesterday with a hashtag Interior Design. And Facebook says, “Do you want to browse other hashtags for interior design? So, just throwing at out there.
Glyna: So true.
Sarah: Yeah. They do have new features to help you, where you can look at suggested. And there’s tools out there where you can look at your business and your industry and see what are the most relevant hashtags and which ones are currently performing the best. So I’m glad you brought that up, Kelsi.
Kelsi: All right. Back to Glyna. If I work with Fusion One Marketing to build a website, do I own the domain?
Glyna: Yes. I’m laughing at John Chambers picking on Rob.
Sarah: I knew it. I said, it’s just a matter of time before he starts heckling.
Glyna: John, John, John, John. Because what he knows is that Rob puts that in the back of his head. What were you going to say, Rob? I can see on the tip of your tongue.
Rob: Nothing. I’m being behaved. I’m well behaved today.
Glyna: That’s no fun. All right. Yes. If you build a website with Fusion One Marketing, even if we go buy your domain name for you at GoDaddy, you own everything. You own your website, you own your domain name, you own all of it. As well, I guess we should say, as long as you pay your bill. If you’ve paid for it… Oops, Sarah, where are you going? If you pay for it, then it is yours. Now, that’s not the case with a lot of different companies. We run into this all the time and it’s very sad. People come to us wanting a new website and we’ll say, I always hate to break the news to them, “We can’t get your domain away from where you’re at.” Because a lot of agencies, if you’re paying, especially paying a monthly fee for your website, they own everything. They’ll keep everything. You don’t own a thing. You’re just paying that monthly fee forever. And so, anyway.
Sarah: If you feel like that should be one of the first questions, I mean, when you’re kind of shopping around for who to build your website, to be like, do I own my domain? And what happens down the future, in the future, if-
Glyna: Yep.
Sarah: I wanted to separate.
Glyna: You would think. But Rob, we’ve run into that. I mean, since… Why are you laughing?
Sarah: Glyna, you’re on a roll. You crack me up. But as long as you pay your bill.
Rob: I think the right question to ask would be is because some people will ask, do I own my domain? Do I own my website? And these companies will still say yes. Okay.
Glyna: Yeah.
Rob: And that is yes, as long as you stay with the service provided by them and you pay your bill with them. What you should say is, after my contract’s over, because they will always have contracts.
Glyna: Yeah. Always.
Rob: When my contract ends, can I take my website and my domain with me? That’s the question you need to ask.
Kelsi: Good to know.
Glyna: That is perfect, yes.
Kelsi: Rob, can you tell us what is the biggest misconception about which keywords we need to use for business?
Rob: Okay. Biggest misconception about keywords is most people don’t understand keywords.
Glyna: We can start and end there.
Rob: Yeah. So a lot of people don’t understand. First of all, there are two or three big misconceptions that people don’t understand about keywords because all the time you’ll get people who go, “Hey, I typed this in and I’m not ranking for it.” So first of all, one of the biggest misconceptions is to understand, I can type a different variation. For instance, I could type in “AC repair”, or I could type in “A/C repair”. Those are two different keywords.
Kelsi: Aha.
Rob: Okay. “AC repair in Chelsea” versus “AC repair near me” are two different separate keywords. That’s one of the biggest misconceptions. The other one is to realize that keyword volume searches in one area will not be the same in another area. I’ll give an example of this. We have an attorney and they kept on telling us they’re an attorney, they’re an attorney. Well, in his location, people search for “lawyers” more than they do “attorney”. And then you go two hours north and all of a sudden in that city, they search more for “attorneys” than they do “lawyers”.
Glyna: And it was a huge difference. It wasn’t just a slight difference. It was a difference between hundreds of searches a month for those keywords. So-
Kelsi: Wow.
Glyna: You got to be careful or you have to work with somebody that knows all that stuff.
Rob: The other misconception that people start to go out and try to investigate things, be aware that most of the tools that are out there are going to report to you nationally what a search is. Okay. Whereas we can go in and we can come down and say, “Hey, what’s the search volume in this city? What’s the search volume in this county or state?” But you have to have the tools to do that.
Kelsi: Yeah. Okay. Cindy’s got a good question, and this’ll go to Sarah. In regards to Instagram and Facebook, when is it best to put something on your story versus actually making it a post?
Sarah: That’s a really great question. And that’s one thing too with social media, is that everything’s got a shelf life to it. Again, those stories are very quick. You’ve got 24 hours and it’s gone. And now as those stories increase, you’ve got to just go down the line of all the stories. That being said, they are very much increasing in the engagement, I should say engagement, of impressions and people seeing them. So, when is it best to put something on your story versus actually making a post? I look at it as the stories are good for something that’s entertaining, that’s light. It’s again, it’s a story. Those should be more of your personalization. Something that’s more informative, educational, those types of things, those go best in a post. But something that is very light and adds a personal touch and very quick, if you can make something super quick and funny, that’s when you should do a story. So look at it as the actual aspect of the narrative, a story that’s of your business. That’s when you should use stories. And when it’s something that lends itself to more of educational, informative or frankly just won’t fit in a story, it needs to go into a post .
Glyna: And it’s so different. I know Sarah, you and I have had this conversation. It’s so different between personal pages and business pages. I think we had talked about playing around with, and I think we have to play around with it more because there’s not that much, there aren’t that… I can’t talk this morning. Like Kelsi always says, words are hard. There’s not that many statistics out there saying what works the best for businesses. But we were even saying that maybe businesses that might be a great place to put specials. Or Cindy, in your case, “just listed”. Those kinds of things that catch people’s attention because the engagement is higher. You want to use that space for it, for things that you want people to see first.
Sarah: Yes.
Kelsi: Great. Okay. So, for Glyna. You make it no secret that you love, love, love SEO. Tell everybody why you love SEO.
Glyna: Well, SEO has always been one of my favorite things from the beginning and I’ll tell you why. If it’s done correctly, you can see businesses change from, are going from just starting out to really taking them to the 10th level. And it’s so exciting. I think Rob would probably say the same thing. It’s so fun. And even you guys get excited when we’d look and say, “We got them this many calls this month.” We don’t say clicks. We don’t say impressions. If we can literally bring them new phone calls to their business every month and then keep increasing that, it is so awesome just to see businesses increase and build and grow. That’s why it’s my favorite part is because we can see what we’ve done for them. I guess it’s just really just fun. Rob, do you have anything to add to that?
Rob: Well, no. Well, we talk about it all the time. We always love to have a new business on, that when you try to call them, they’re too busy to talk to you or they don’t have time to talk to you. Then you know that’s a good sign. It’s not that they’re blowing you off. It’s just, they’re too busy to actually talk to you right now.
Glyna: It’s just, yeah. It’s so awesome. And we’ve seen businesses get larger buildings and get more locations and more employees, just because of what we’ve been able to do with SEO. And it’s fun. It’s just really fun to see them grow like that.
Kelsi: It really is. I’m new to it, but I do love the feeling. I understand it. Well actually, we’ve hit our mark here. It looks like we’re about out of time. So we will be taking these other questions into part two here soon. Glyna, did you want to wrap it up for us?
Glyna: Sure. As always, if there’s anything that we can help you out with as far as digital marketing is concerned, give me a call. We do offer free consultations and can answer any of your digital marketing questions. And really, any of us would love to talk to you and brainstorm about what you have going on with marketing or give you some ideas of things you can do. Especially because 2021 is right around the corner. Thanks so much for joining us today and thanks to Kelsi for being a moderator and our awesome panel. We will see you next time!