BUILDING YOUR BRAND ONLINE TO GET RESULTS.
Now that your website is live you need to think about marketing your website and learning how to promote your brand online and digital marketing can be daunting to those at the start of their journey, especially when you don't have any experience or knowledge of marketing your business.
There is no point in having a great looking website if you your customers cant find you, so marketing and building your brand is so important to the success of your business and if you don't implement a simple marketing strategy, your target customers will never find you and wont know who you are and what you offer.
This Digital Marketing guide explains everything you need to know to get your brand noticed online, connect with your target customers and take your business to the next level.
1) START A BLOG ON YOUR WEBSITE
The first thing you should do when you launch your new website is to create a blog and start writing regular blog posts.
Posting content regularly on your website, whether its giving useful advice related to your industry or just some news or updates on your company, you will give a reason for your customers and potential customers to keep coming back to your website and search engines like Google will reward you for creating fresh content and rank you higher in the search engines.
Creating Blogs is one of the most popular forms of content marketing and is used by the most successful companies as their main marketing strategy to drive traffic to their website and generate leads.
Extra tips:
Use various snippets from the blog like some of the key blog information, statistics, graphics or a catchy title and use them for creating multiple social posts and keep linking to that blog post to drive traffic to your website. Allow comments if you want your customers and potential customer to have the ability to engage with your content. Add your latest blog posts to your monthly newsletter so existing customers can read your latest blog posts.
Cost: Free
Difficulty: Easy
Necessity: Highly recommended
Further reading:
Should you add a blog to your website?
If you don't have a blog installed or are unsure if you have one, then please get in touch and we will set it up for you.
2) WRITE CONTENT REGULARLY
There is no point adding a blog to your website if you don't keep it updated regularly, so create a schedule for creating blog posts and stick to it.
We recommend that you write a blog post once a week for small to medium sized businesses and more regularly for larger companies, but you can write multiple blog posts and schedule them if you have time to do a few in advance and you can schedule them over the month to save time and keep your customers and target audience up to date.
If you are too busy to write your own content or you are not good at writing or struggle with words, then look at members of staff who can maybe write blogs for your business, or you can outsource to a third party or we can take care of these for you.
Cost: Free or we can support on our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: intermediate
Necessity: Highly recommended
Extra tips:
Download this blogging calendar to ensure you have a schedule for creating and posting blogs. Stick to a particular day and time every week and schedule posts in advance to save time. Link your social media posts to your blog to drive traffic.
Further reading:
Should you outsource your blog? | How to write an awesome blog post
3) LAUNCH MAILING LIST AND CAPTURE YOUR CUSTOMERS DETAILS
Growing a mailing list is important to grow your brand online and reach out to potential customers and keep in touch with your existing clients.
Whether you have got 5 customers or 15,000, adding optin forms into your website and creating a mailing list is one of the best way to build your brand and generate leads.
Your website can have optin forms to capture email addresses and you can link it to popular email marketing tools like MailChimp and send out monthly emails to your customers to keep them up to date with your latest blog posts, offer tips and advice, add any special offers or news you have.
It is a really effective way to to engage with your customers and maintain loyalty and it also helps you attract and secure new customers.
If you struggle to get customers to sign up to your newsletter, try dangling a carrot and give them an incentive by giving discounts, free trials, giveaways as a reward for signing up
Cost: Free for up to 2,000 subscribers if creating your own newsletters or we can setup and support on our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: Intermediate
Necessity: Highly recommended
Extra tips:
Add your mailing list optin forms into everything like your website homepage, blogs, social media, content and ask your existing clients to sign up, too
Further reading:
Why building your mailing list is so important | MailChimp alternatives
If you don't have a mailing list installed or are unsure if you have one, then please get in touch and we will set it up for you.
4) EXECUTE A SEARCH ENGINE STRATEGY
Once you you have launched your new website, created a blog and setup a mailing list on your website, you are still at beginning of your digital marketing journey to build your brand online.
Your new website is new to the search engines and you are competing against lots of competitors that are more established and will be ranking above you in the search engines like Google. When a potential customer types in your service or product in Google, are you showing up in Google first? or is your competitors above you when you type in a keyword? Do a quick search now on Google
The chances are that, if your website is new or if your competitors are optimizing their websites, they will be at the top of Google and you will need ongoing Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to get above them.
Google is still the most used method your potential customers will use to search for business services online, so if you are not on the first page in Google, you are missing out on a huge amount of potential leads and enquiries.
There are some basic SEO techniques that you can implement, by creating strong titles and tags on your website which will have been done as part of the initial website build, blogging regularly, creating good content online, getting your business into every possible business directory and adding lots of links to your website online, but for more advanced search engine optimization and competitive industries you will need ongoing search engine optimisation.
Make sure you get regular reports to monitor improvements to your keywords and traffic, like what we do with our clients by providing this online reporting dashboard to monitor improvements to traffic and keywords.
Cost: Free if you only need basic onsite optimisation or for competitive industries see our Search Engine Optimisation Plans
Difficulty: Experienced
Necessity: Highly recommended
Extra tips:
Make sure your website features lots keywords throughout your blog and website content and try and use your keywords as titles, page titles and URLS www.mywebsite.com/mykeyword, Blog regularly, Get in every business or niche related directory you can and keep adding links to your website wherever you can.
Further reading:
What is Search Engine Optimisation? | Local SEO strategies for small businesses
5) PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING
If you want to give your brand or business a boost in the search engines, then you may want to consider Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC).
You can pay a fee to Google to rank your keywords above all the natural listings and you pay a click fee every time a potential customer clicks on your website.
It's important to master the basics of PPC and then experiment to optimise your pay-per-click campaigns based on the performance of your keywords and the returns of PPC marketing.
You can also advertise on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, or check out AdWords if you want your PPC adverts to appear online in different platforms.
Cost: Whatever budget you have to spend (£50 to £20,000)
Difficulty: Experienced
Necessity: Not essential, but great for boosting leads when required. Switch off when you are busy and switch on when you need more customers.
Extra tips:
Don't go into pay per click advertising blind. Spend time researching everything you need to know get the experts to set it up for you.
Further reading:
Practical Reasons to do PPC | 10 benefits of PPC for small business
1) START A BLOG ON YOUR WEBSITE
The first thing you should do when you launch your new website is to create a blog and start writing regular blog posts.
Posting content regularly on your website, whether its giving useful advice related to your industry or just some news or updates on your company, you will give a reason for your customers and potential customers to keep coming back to your website and search engines like Google will reward you for creating fresh content and rank you higher in the search engines.
Creating Blogs is one of the most popular forms of content marketing and is used by the most successful companies as their main marketing strategy to drive traffic to their website and generate leads.
Extra tips:
Use various snippets from the blog like some of the key blog information, statistics, graphics or a catchy title and use them for creating multiple social posts and keep linking to that blog post to drive traffic to your website. Allow comments if you want your customers and potential customer to have the ability to engage with your content. Add your latest blog posts to your monthly newsletter so existing customers can read your latest blog posts.
Cost: Free
Difficulty: Easy
Necessity: Highly recommended
Further reading:
Should you add a blog to your website?
If you don't have a blog installed or are unsure if you have one, then please get in touch and we will set it up for you.
6) GET YOUR BUSINESS INTO THE RELEVANT SOCIAL CHANNELS
Some businesses think its not important to be active on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but you are missing out if your brand or business is not on these platforms and if you are not actively posting and engaging in content.
Social media marketing is so important for your business or brand, so make sure you are on the most popular and most relevant platforms to build your brand awareness and help your target customers find you.
If your brand is very visual like a photographer, designer or you create delicious menus, then you may want to look at Instagram and that platform is becoming increasingly more popular with great engagement. If you deal with businesses (B2B) or more corporate clients, then you need to be using LinkedIn more.
Think about where your target audience are online, what platforms they use most and focus your efforts there. Post on all of your social media channels and see what social media platform is driving the most traffic to your website in your website reporting dashboard and focus your efforts where you are getting the most traction, engagement and links to your website.
We recommend you should start with at least a Facebook and Twitter page and its easy to create an account. For Twitter just follow the signup process and for Facebook you need setup a page rather than an individual account which can be done by reading this page.
Research shows that 36% of businesses have acquired their customers through twitter, 52% through Facebook and 43% through LinkedIn, so you really need to be on these platforms or you are missing out on a ton of leads.
Cost: Free or we can support on our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: Easy
Necessity: Essential
Extra tips:
When choosing your username, try and secure your brand name as soon as you can and avoid numbers, dashes, underscores if you can
Further reading:
Twitter Tutorial for Beginners | Benefits of a Facebook Business Page
7) POST ON YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA REGULARLY
Once you setup your social platforms, you now need to post on them regularly. This is why we recommend focusing on the platforms where your target customer are and where you are seeing the best results in your website reporting tool.
We recommend that you post on Social Media at least once every day, but if you find that difficult, then once or twice a week will be enough to build your brand awareness.
Tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer are great tools that can be used to schedule you posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This is extremely useful if you want to schedule posts for the week ahead, then you can just schedule them and put your social media on autopilot to let you focus on your business.
You need to decide what to post on your social media and you have a few options. You can post relevant news and articles related to your target audience and industry, or you can post what is happening with your business with news on your products and services.
For best results in your social media marketing, we recommend that you have a good balance of informative posts for your target customers (80%) and self promotional posts (20%) and try not to promote your brand or services more than once a day as its off putting to your followers.
This guide has fifty awesome social media content ideas to help give you an idea on what types of content to post like behind the scenes stuff, news, promotional videos, testimonials, fun stuff you need to find the right balance for promoting your brand.
There is also great auto-scheduling tools like SmarterQueue that recycles your social media posts and you can get an insight into other social media profiles to see what posts work best, what gets the most engagement and likes and when the best time to posts is.
Its important that you are always available to answer any social media queries and engage with your customers and target audience on these platforms - which you can read more on below.
Cost: Free or we can support on our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: Easy
Necessity: Not essential, but important for growing your brand on social media.
Extra tips:
If you're just too busy to focus on your social media or don't have the knowledge or skills to take care of this, then we can support you or take care of this for you digital marketing plans. Research the best, industry related and trending #hashtags for best results. Smarterqueue has great insights into the best types of posts and best #hashtags to use.
Further reading:
Benefits of social media | Should you outsource your social management?
8) ENGAGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS ON SOCIAL MEDIA
f you have implemented everything so far in this guide, then you done a great job getting your website on point and implemented the most popular marketing techniques to help you get initial results from your website.
You now have a great looking website that provides all the detailed information on what your business offers, you have optimised your website for the search engines and you have started creating some good initial content and you have created your social channels and made them feel part of your brand.
The next step is to engage with your customers on your social media channels, so not just post all your news and updates about you and your industry. You need to actively reach out and engage with your customers.
Respond to queries and comments to your posts and content in real time and actively like content that others post. Monitor brand mentions and interact with any post comments.
Using tools like hootsuite, will allow you to monitor your brand mentions and your followers and engage with multiple social channels at once.
Cost: Free, although some social media tools are paid for, We can provide support if neeeded on our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: Easy
Necessity: Not essential, but important for growing your brand on social media.
Extra tips:
Follow your clients on social media and interact with their posts to maintain your relationship and loyalty. Follow your target customers on social media and engage with their posts.
9) BUILD YOUR BRAND AWARENESS BY POSTING CONTENT
Keep creating content as much as possible and add useful content to your website, blogs, email newsletters and post them to your social media channels.
Keep telling your brands story in an entertaining, educational and engaging manner without hard selling to your customers.
When you are producing good regular content aimed at helping your customers and target customers, you are seen as a trusted authority and an expert in your area.
By offering all this free value and being generous with your free content offerings, time, writing lots of useful advice and tips, you can (hopefully) turn prospective customers into paying customers.
Customers don't like the hard sell and they like lots of useful information for free and by providing lots of good content, your customer is getting to know and trust your brand and when your customer is ready to buy, they will turn to your products or services.
Ok, but what kind of content can I put out there? Content can be anything, from blog posts, news stories, infographics, behind the scenes stuff, video content, podcasts, whitepapers or Ebooks
You can even put your best, most exclusive content behind a download wall on your website, that your customers will have to give you some contact details to get this content. This is what we call 'dangling the carrot' or a 'lead magnet' (see below) so you can then start working with the client on a more direct marketing, nurturing focused sales strategy.
Cost: Free or we can support on our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: intermediate
Necessity: Recommended
10) CONVERT YOUR TRAFFIC INTO LEADS
You can convert your website visitors into a lead by 'dangling the carrot' when they visit your website and offer exclusive content for free in exchange for their email address and this is what is called a 'lead magnet' or a 'conversion strategy'.
A lead magnet is an incentive to offer potential customers in exchange for their email address, or other contact information. Lead magnets is usually a digital content download, like a free PDF checklist, template, case study, cheat sheet, report, eBook, whitepaper, video, etc.
Most customers will just visit your website and then move on to the next website while they look for the service or product they are looking for, so its important that you try and offer an incentive to capture their information, so you can contact them if they leave and try and lead them down the path to becoming a customer.
If you want to generate leads and capture your visitors details, then your website needs a lead magnet. Period.
Some potential customers will contact you if they trust your brand and like what you offer, but for most potential customers, they need a good incentive to give you their email address, get to know and trust you and you need to offer them a good reason for doing so.
By giving all your best information away for free, your client will already love the value you are giving them and this will help lead you down the road to forming a great business relationship and gaining their trust.
For example, If you offered a free download on your website that helped give advice or solved a problem like:- 1) 'Top 10 tips to help them in their business and get results' or '10 free videos to help them do something they are struggling with or need help with' or offered potential clients a 'Free consultation or trial' in exchange for their email, or simply 2) just say 'Get in touch for more info' or 'Sign up to our newsletter' like most websites do, What do you think converts better? of course, Option 1) every time.
98% of your website visitors will leave without buying anything, so try and capture their details before they leave, then nurture them (See below)
Optin forms and popups / exit popups, can be added to the website or the targeted pages where you want those to appear to help these lead magnet become more prominent on the page and help conversions.
Cost: Advanced digital marketing plan is required for initial setup, but you can revert to a basic plan thereafter if you want.
Difficulty: Advanced
Necessity: Recommended
Further Reading.
Highly Effective Lead Magnets
11) NURTURE YOUR LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS
Once your client has downloaded your lead magnet, you have provided them with some great initial value, that they hopefully find useful and you now you have their contact information and are now able to nurture them and provide them with more value and targeted information.
You can now send them some more information, so for example if the potential customer downloaded the ' Top 10 tips to help improve your business PDF' you can have an automatic message saying thanks so much for downloading, here is your free guide (Download)'.
You can then follow that up with Email 2 'We hoped you liked your free guide, here is some more useful information and advice to help you' Let us know if you need any support or advice and email 3 which keeps giving them more value, advice and more value and you can add as much as you want into the sequence to keep the emails going and leading your customers towards a customer.
This is usually an automated sequence that triggers as soon as they download your free lead magnet or you can manually nurture the client.
Don't hard sell the client, just keep giving value. This works better than selling every time.
Cost: Please get in touch for more information or view our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: Advanced
Necessity: Recommended
12) MEASURE YOUR WEBSITE PERFORMANCE
It's important to see how your website is performing and to see how many visitors are visiting your website, where they are coming from and how they interacting with your website and what pages they are visiting most, so make sure that you are getting your regular website reports.
Google Analytics is a good way to analyze how many visitors are visiting your website and how they interacting with your website, but for more advanced reporting we provide our clients with an online reporting dashboard, so you can monitor all your important statistics real time.
Look at the pages your customers are visiting most and tweak the popular pages to engage them more and put your best information and lead magnets on there.
For blogs, see what posts are getting the most views and interactions and then keep writing similar blog posts.
If you have added lead magnets to your website, see what ones are converting best and measure your conversion rate and put your best lead magnets on the most popular, related pages.
How your website keywords are performing in the search engines is very important to your business. So make sure you track how your keywords are ranking in Google and other search engines. Especially useful if you are getting your website optimized
See what social channels are driving the most traffic and focus your attentions on the areas that are returning the best results.
Cost: Free for Google Analytics / Premium Reporting Dashboard included in our digital marketing plans
Difficulty: Easy
Necessity: Highly Recommended
WRAPPING UP
This guide has some great useful advice to help you start your journey into digital marketing, but we have only scratched the surface and there is so much marketing options and strategies that you can implement and every business is different and needs a marketing plan tailored to your business needs for the best results.
You can take this free advice and implement what you can or we offer marketing support and can take care of your marketing for you on our digital marketing plans
If you have any questions or need help or advice, then please get in touch with our marketing experts, who are here to help.