We are in a new decade of business! The landscape has totally changed from to the start of the millennium as tweeting is no longer strictly about birds, phones are now smart, and faxing is basically extinct. As we are all stuck in our homes, now it the best time to catch up with the current culture of marketing….
1. Research & strategise
If you fail to prepare then you are preparing to fail. You cant just randomly throw content out into a sea of noise and expect to be heard. Time needs to be taken to research and analyse the audience, other companies in your industry, and who you are as a brand.
For example, in terms of the audience, it is often best to start off by honing in on one specific person. After you’ve done your initial research and thinking around your audience, start creating a person by naming them, thinking about their likes, dislikes, fears and aspirations. What’s their social class? Their age? Where do they live? Once you start clearly defining a person, you can make content which they specifically will like, which puts you in a better place to receive engagement than creating general content and hoping someone engages.
2. Creating an easy-to-use website
Your website is your number one marketing asset because we live in a digital age. 84% of today’s consumers think a website makes your business more credible than companies who only have social media profiles. If your website is not optimised for mobile, the likelihood is that your bounce rate is high, meaning that people aren’t staying. People don’t like crawling through sites to find information. Lay everything out clearly and simply while also making it visually appealing.
3. Google My Business
If you’re just getting started with local SEO, your Google My Business listing is a great place to focus your early efforts. It is the listing of important information about your business that shows up when people search using Google e.g. address, opening hours, contact details, public ratings. Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average , which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
4. Choosing your platforms wisely
So often businesses will have an account on the four major platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) without using them all properly. Unless you have a whole team dedicated to marketing, I personally don’t think it’s necessary or wise to have more than two. Put different content out on both channels which you would engage with personally and do not post the same thing across all your platforms at the same time.
5. Get a digital marketer
Often when you are engrained in a business/industry, information which may catch your eye pertaining to that industry/business may not catch the eye of the average consumer. Bringing in an outside person who can crate and post effective content is necessary to making that bridge between you and the outside world. This person should have some simple graphic skills, the ability to write content with an understanding of SEO, and generally be organised enough to get posts up and engage with other accounts regularly.
6. Engaging with your competitors
Make friends with other companies in your business. Theres a reason why companies such as Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos, or the Netflix series ‘Stranger Things’ collaborating with Nike, H&M, and Levis. Collaborating with others gives you both exposure to new audiences while also providing you with a range of new ideas to grow your business.
By Priscilla McGregor-Kerr
@CillaHope_
cillahope 