Build a powerful marketing engine step by step! From brand development to SEO, photos/videos, and organic social, let us guide your business's online success.
Well, now that we know where we’re going, let’s unpack step by step how we can get there. It’s not going to be an overnight success. Building a steady marketing machine is like being the fittest person at the gym. You wouldn’t walk into the YMCA on day one with your credit card in hand and say, “I’m here; I’d like to be the fittest person.” That is equivalent to walking up to your marketing team and saying, “I just heard about SEO; we should be in the top spot on Google.”
The truth is it takes time and consistency, just like fitness at the gym. As a marketing agency, just like a personal trainer, we do have the tools and knowledge necessary to get there. As a team, we just need to be consistent in our efforts and work towards our goal. It’s not magic. The ones that don’t give up are the ones who succeed. The first step is understanding the necessary steps to get there.
The graphic above is a visual we put out each year to explain the different levers we pull to build your business's online presence effectively. We’ve numbered them one through seven and put them in a specific order. Let’s go through them.
Brand development is step one because it’s the equivalent of a house foundation. You wouldn’t build a masterpiece on top of quicksand. You’d take your time and pour a proper foundation that can support years of growth to come. The same goes for building your brand.
Brand Components
Launch Kit has multiple brand development offerings based on what your business needs. Those offerings can be viewed on our brand development page here.
With your brand development components in place, you unlock steps two through seven. The website is where we want to begin. Your business's website is your own corner of the internet. If the internet were a giant spider web, your website would sit in the center. All roads lead back to your website.
We need to build a site that introduces who your business is, what its values are, and what services/products you provide, and make it crystal clear how someone can take the next step forward. This is called a conversion. We want conversions.
Since we took the time to build out our branding components, we are off to a great start. We'll be able to present your identity across the website consistently, write copy that is in line with your values, and speak in a tone that resonates with our target market.
When building sites, we recommend starting fairly simple, getting it published, and then consistently making the site more in-depth as we go along. This is why we structured our web membership program as an ongoing partnership. Good things come with time.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
At this point in time, everyone has heard of SEO, and everyone wants to be at the top of Google, so we wrote a separate article here explaining the actual steps we take to climb the ranks.
Content is the gasoline that powers this entire marketing engine. In today's day and age, photos and videos are the content of choice.
We need to establish a system for consistently creating photos and videos on a monthly basis. This material is going to be used in steps two through seven. The beauty is the photos we shoot next month can be used on the website, on social media, as an ad and in an email blast. With the proper re-formatting, the content we create can be utilized across all touch points.
We provide photo and video content for our clients via our content membership program. We produce media one, two, or three times per month to ensure that we always have up-to-date, authentic material. This consistency is what is going to allow us to move the needle toward our goal of being the fittest person in the gym. Or in marketing terms - top of Google.
Now that we are beginning to develop a media library, thanks to our consistent creation of photo and video content, we need to set up the second ring of the spider web. Remember, your website is at the center. The second ring out is all your digital profiles. This includes Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google MyBusiness, TikTok and YouTube.
These platforms are great for speaking to your existing audience and well as bringing awareness to potential new audience members.
Like the old business gurus have always said - “your network is your net worth.” Our version of this is - “your audience is your net worth.” We all know how valuable your email list is; the same goes for your audience across social platforms. That audience is valuable because, with the push of a button, you are able to communicate directly with them, just like your email list or Rolodex of network connections.
These social platforms are great because we can publish photo and video content that our target market enjoys; they can click our profile to see what we’re up to these days, click the link in the bio to dig deeper, land on a relevant web page, become interested and click that button that says Contact Us. Boom, you just got a new lead. That’s a successful customer journey.
We provide our clients with social media management as part of our content membership program outlined here. Essentially, we’re building out your profiles, posting on the feed between two and five times per week, and actively engaging with the relevant community. These efforts directly build your audience and raise brand awareness.
Checking back in with our marketing system graphic, we have covered steps one through four. Before moving on to steps five, six, and seven, we recommend that clients get two, three, and four up and running consistently for three months. This gives us time to gather data on what efforts are performing and where we have room for improvement. These insights allow us to make better decisions with regard to activations like Facebook and Google Ads. If clients jump the gun and go right to Facebook Ads, sometimes they end up burning ad dollars because they haven't had the time to establish their core profiles and the website.
Quite often, we have clients who achieve their business growth goals with just steps two, three, and four; if that's the case, great! We'll focus on telling the best possible stories and continuing to build your audience.
For clients that have more ambitious growth goals, that's when steps five, six, and seven can come into play. We can use five and six to reach a wider audience. We can use step seven to keep our audience warm by communicating directly on a one-to-one basis.
We hope you found this graphic and text helpful as you begin to navigate the digital marketing landscape. Just remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Half the battle is showing up. The second half is being consistent. By updating your website, creating photo/video content, and posting to your social media profiles, you'll be running laps around the guys who didn't even show up.
Each year, we take a fresh look at the various marketing efforts a small business can make. We've built this framework to get started optimizing your business's online presence.
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