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How to Massively Improve your Digital Marketing

Ready to grow your leads and sales via your online marketing?

The beginning of a new year provides a natural opportunity for every company to review, evaluate, and plan needed innovations for the year ahead.   This is even more critical to do with a company's online presence and technologies because the web changes and advances so quickly.

Digital-Marketing-Funnel--2

Step 1: Attraction Phase Foundations

Below is Part 1 of a two part series on key areas that marketers should review and evaluate to maximize the digital business opportunities in the year ahead.  We'll first look at the ATTRACTION portion and the keys that serve as the building blocks for all other components.

Web

Central to a company's online presence is their website.

responsiveWebsite's today need to take a few keys into consideration.  First, have you evaluated a mobile user experience to your site?  Depending upon your industry, mobile traffic to your site can account for 25-55% or higher of all traffic!  With the massive ongoing growth of mobile Internet users, businesses need to either have a mobile site solution or a responsive website.  A mobile site is a alternative, unique website that is displayed to the user when it is detected they are using a mobile device.  Often this is at a sub-domain such as m.yourdomain.com.  The other option is a "responsive site" where the behind-the-scenes programming adapts the site display according to the browser of the visitor.  So if the visitor is determined to be on a mobile, they see a mobile friendly view of the site, if on a tablet, a site maximized for the tablet screen, and the same for a full site.

The key is offering the visitor the best possible experience however it is they come to the site.  If a user arrives to your site and is not easily able to read content or navigate, studies show they leave abruptly, and in business this means a lost opportunity.  Maximize the opportunities by implementing a site strategy that works well for different devices.  It's simply good business, both for marketing and sales.

Content Marketing

Related to the web presence offered to visitors, is the actual content offered to those coming to your site.  As I have outlined in past articles on content marketing, a content strategy needs to encompass three primary types of content.

1. Top of Funnel Content - Engaging & Attracting

2. Mid-Funnel Content - Content offering resources for Lead Capture

3. Closure Content - Specific offers and Sales opportunities

Content for the top of the funnel is first.  This needs to be broad, searchable, and relevant content.  This is "planting seed and watering" or put another way it is "chumming the waters" to attract your desired audience.

It is content that is helpful and serves to expand and grow your audience.  Think of it as the "chumming the waters" prior to fishing for sharks.  It draws in a crowd and gets them excited about your site, prior to the actual fishing with baited hooks.

This post is an example of "Attraction Content".  I'm simply offering you guidance and help that can help you begin to think through your digital marketing efforts and needs.

Attraction also applies to Social Media posts.  Your social brand posts cannot be solely focused on your company, they need to be social and engage the user.  People are on social media to connect and be entertained, and a business must intersect with this!  Here are two Facebook examples of businesses doing Attraction Marketing:

Starbucks - www_facebook_com_Starbucks www_facebook_com_coconisfurniture_ref=br_tf

Neither post is a hard sell at all.  The first is just a fun visual image that ties back to a unique product and connects with Valentine's Day.  The second post by the furniture company is a great way to connect to the owners of the business and reach friends of the business and family by sharing the achievement of the son of the owners.  This is not salesy, but it personalizes the business and is a great social connection.  The bonus is that by doing this it is getting great comments and reach, both of which help extend the reach of the Page to other people on Facebook.

The second area of content is mid-funnel content which serves to move visitors into leads.  This type of content offers something useful in value in exchange for a simple name and email sign-up.  It can be access to a eBook, a video, a podcast, or something or resource related to your products and services that that those interested in your offering would find of value.  The opportunity it provides a business is the ability to grow their email list, through which nurture campaigns to educate and ultimately offer a opportunity to buy can occur.  The value is that these can be setup once and then run continuously to reach hundreds and even thousands of visitors.  I'll outline more on the lead capture tool specifics in the next article.

The final area of content strategy to plan for is the "closure content" or specific sales offer content.  This will likely be only 15-20% of your overall content plan (top of funnel is 35-50% while mid-funnel lead capture content is 20-35% of the overall mix of blog posts and topics on your site).  If it is more than that, your audience can get turned off from continual sales pitches but if you are offering content that is largely of great value to them in educating and resourcing them mixed in with timely offers, then it all works together.

So as the days wind down on the current year and you begin to look ahead to how to grow your business in 2014, a key will be your digital strategies.  Start now with evaluating the changes needing to be made to your website, and begin to plan the topics for your content strategy.

In part 2, I continue with more on the specifics of lead capture technologies, getting your message out via social media distribution, and lead nurture campaigns via email.  The overall plan I outline fits within my 6 Key Areas for Digital Marketing outlined in the infographic below:

Digital-Marketing-Funnel--color

Read the rest!

Got questions or need help with your Digital Marketing?  My team does Digital Marketing Audit's based on this funnel and I can also serve the Digital Marketing implementation and management needs (both social and web).  Contact me to get the conversation on your needs started!

 

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