Checklists save you time. The checklist down the bottom of this post should help if you need a starting point for digital marketing.
But first, the 3 main steps in any business plan, offline or online are …
- Get as many people as possible onto the website and looking around. The physical business equivalent is getting people in the door.
- Make them offers and get contact details. The most valuable asset of any business is its file of interested prospects and previous buyers – email addresses, phone numbers etc.
- Now that you have their details, make them more offers.
A website needs exposure & needs to be set up as a marketing tool if it’s going to be successful in expanding business. That means making it part of an overall internet plan, which is what digital marketing is about.
Traffic to the website
SEO comes up a lot in conversations about getting people to a website. But unless you’re a big business with a good amount of free time and money, SEO has decreased as a viable source of visitors over the last few years (due to the amount of knowledge & effort required).
Currently the best place to start is Facebook. Their targeting based on people’s likes lets you run ads specifically to VERY specific groups – people who like self-help books, or horse lovers or people interested in leadership, etc.
Facebook ( as well as having the best targeting options at present ) is cheap compared to Google, and you can start with a low budget ( like $10 to $20 per day in some niches ) measure the results and then scale campaigns that are doing well. A good campaign can then be duplicated elsewhere, like on Google where costs are higher.
A basic digital marketing checklist would be …
- Decide on a specific offer that you’re going to promote – a sale, a new product or service etc.
- Add a page to the website for this specific thing.
- Create a campaign to promote the specific offer.
- At the Ad Set level (Facebook) or Ad Group Level (Google), target VERY specific audiences.
- When creating the Ad, make sure the link goes to the specific page for that thing offered.
- On the dedicated landing page, also offer a coupon code or free no-risk thing in exchange for their email address ( or phone number ).
** Some people will will leave you their contact.
** An occasional 1st-time visitor will get in touch or buy something. - People who don’t buy ( most of them ) or leave an email address ( most of them ) can be “retargeted”. This means running ads on other websites they now visit to remind them. This will get more response.
- Send emails to the list you collect, offering them new things.
To help with all this – initial research, a chart showing the flows and a list of useful tools, you can get this internet marketing toolkit.
What you need …
- A “responsive” website that adjusts for device size ( way over 60% of people now visit by phone ). A site that’s as easy as possible to manage & deploy deals and offers, because they need to be frequent as in any offline business. I cover the best website platform here … https://spellboundweb.com/9-steps-to-balancing-web-development-costs
- A Facebook account with a business page ( or Google Ads account ).
- A retargeting service ( we prefer http://www.perfectaudience.com ) probably about $25 per week. Retargeting can be cheap.
- An email marketing service. All trade-offs considered the best solution I find is www.getresponse.com