You had an idea. You wanted to use your skills to establish a business that everyone would love. Your family and friends were onboard and beyond excited, but nowhere near as excited as you were. Not only were you about to start a business that you were truly passionate about, you were about to overcome all odds and undoubtedly take the biggest leap of faith you would ever encounter.
But you were just getting started. Not only did you still have to get your infrastructure in order, but you had to hire staff and start thinking about strategic partnerships to help take your business off the ground. Yet you did it! You pulled all the ingredients together and built the foundations for your enterprise. Not only did you go against the odds, you crushed them! The business looked great, your products/services were fantastic, the customers were happy... but you hit a block.
New customers were becoming harder to come by! What the heck happened?! You did everything right, you were friendly with your staff and customers, you offered jaw-dropping specials/promotions, you even did a direct-mail advertisement to the local community to offer them an exclusive special, yet your growth was still declining.
You knew people loved your business, you knew your products/services were amazing, but you didn’t know why you weren’t acquiring new customers.
Skip to today. It’s 2019, over 80% of Americans are on some form of social media and we’re exposed to roughly 5,000 advertisements everyday. Odds are, you use social media; whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. Now think of some of your favourite social media profiles (celebrities, brands, influencers, etc.) and think about why they are successful. Typically, they post almost daily, their captions are interesting, their content seems to have a common theme, and they actively involve their community by asking questions and giving them call-to-actions (tag a friend, visit our website, share this link, etc.).
Essentially, they’re building a brand through repetition and community engagement. Which is exactly what your brand needs to do. Think about it. Your best customers are probably only experiencing your brand during the hours that they’re using your product/service. If you’re a restaurant, that means your customers are only experiencing your brand for under 2 hours. That means that they’re spending the rest of their days exposed to other brands and activities. This is where digital marketing comes into play.
You need to translate your brand’s experience for the online community, meaning you need to show off what makes your brand fantastic. These are the 4 essential bases you need to have covered to succeed in 2019:
Social media’s greatest strength (other than building brand awareness and authority) is having the ability to immediately contact your audience, in the form of a free post. You have the freedom to post a picture of your products/services, staff, establishment, customers, atmosphere, testimonials, promotions, etc. It’s entirely up to you how often, or how little, you want to share. However, quality is the difference maker. Are the posts relevant to what your customers would want to see? Or are they just posts, for the sake of posting? If it’s the latter, then you could be deterring your customers instead of attracting them. Instead, stick to posting consistent content that is pleasing to the eye and engage with your audience. If you ever need inspiration, look at your most successful competitors’ social accounts and see what they’re doing and how you can replicate their success with your own brand.
Once you’ve found a style you like, start photographing/documenting everything, but with consistent themes (filters, backgrounds, colours, etc.). It’s a lot easier to spend 1-2 days/month photographing and preparing content for social media, than it is to create content daily. After you’ve photographed and prepared the content, use a social media marketing tool such as Hootsuite or Buffer to finalize and schedule the content for the following 30+ days. From here, you will be able to add captions and hashtags and choose time/dates to post the content. Be sure to use relevant hashtags that fulfill a purpose. If you are unsure of how hashtags work, then think of them as file folders. File folders help categorize information to make it easier to find in the future. Social media hashtags work the same way, they allow users to discover content that they are interested in (such as #foodporn, #throwbackthursday, #pizza, etc.). By selecting popular hashtags, you are essentially giving the social media world a way to find your content. However, you should also include local hashtags to make it easier for locals to find your content (such as #toronto,#beerfest2019, etc.). By combining local and popular hashtags, your content will reach more regions while nurturing your targeted audience. After you’ve started posting content, it becomes time to start engaging with your followers and targeted audience. Begin by going through the list of people that “liked” your content, and return the favour. You could either like a bunch of their posts, or leave a relevant content that speaks to what they’re posting about. By doing this, you’re giving the impression that you care about that person, increasing the odds of that person engaging with your content in the future. After you’ve done that, begin engaging with audiences that post content with hashtags that are relevant to your business. If someone is posting about #pizza and you own an Italian restaurant that makes amazing stone-baked pizzas, you should follow that hashtag and engage with those users in the same way we just mentioned. What this literally does is send that person a notification to their device saying you liked their content (whether it’s Instagram or whatever). This, in turn, will sometimes drive that person to your profile. It’s here, where you need to convert that user. If they are interested in your profile’s content, they might follow you; if they are interested in your products/services, they might visit your website or find directions to your business; and if they have a question about the business, they might contact you. This is the purpose of social media for businesses. By treating it as a sales funnel, you could potentially walk away with 1,000+ new customers every month.
If your business has been around for a while, odds are you have some form of website. Perhaps it’s just a splash page with contact information, or perhaps it’s a sophisticated website that has an integrated e-commerce store. No matter how your site currently functions, you need to constantly ask yourself: “How can I make this better?”. Either you can guess, you can ask your customers/staff/friends/family for their opinions, or you can read the raw data. By integrating analytics (ex. Google Analytics) into your website, you’re able to see important information about how your visitors are behaving on your website; and you’re also able to see information about the users themselves to help you make decisions going forward. For example, if you see that majority of people using your site are visiting your “about” page, but leave (bounce) your site almost immediately, then you know that page most likely has room for improvement. By seeing how people travel through your site, you’ll sometimes be able to discover what it is that they are looking for. If you think you know, try using this information to make improvements; then check your analytics to see how new visitors are behaving after the change. By constantly updating and improving your site, you will benefit in the long run. But you also need to be certain that you have a call-to-action on your website that can convert website visitors into paying customers, otherwise you could be missing out. Depending on your business, that call-to-action could be to contact you, make an online purchase, subscribe to promotions (daily specials, giveaways, etc.), download an app, leave a review, etc. Make sure you have at least two call-to-actions to make sure you are taking full advantage of your website traffic. Last but not least, make sure your website looks great. If it’s tacky or looks like something built in 2010, then there is potential for your customers to make bad assumptions about your business. Take a look at your most successful competitors sites and see how you could repurpose their designs/content for your own. It’s a lot easier than starting from scratch.
Hooray! You’ve updated your website, your social media looks great, life’s great! But, no one seems to be visiting your website and you aren’t exactly sure why. Is it just plain bad luck? Probably not. Odds are, your website isn’t being discovered because it has poor SEO. That could mean a few things, but it essentially means that your website isn’t being found on search engines (Google, Bing, etc.). This could be because your website doesn’t have much written content on it, perhaps your website doesn’t have a mobile-version, perhaps your business has poor reviews, or perhaps your content lacks meta descriptions or proper heading tags. There are many different factors that come into play when Google’s algorithm is deciding your search engine ranking. But the best way to ensure that your website has strong SEO, is ensuring that your website answers the most common questions that your target market would be asking. This is why blogs help improve SEO for websites, because it’s an organized area of the website where you can jam a lot of relevant content into instead of overwhelming your website visitors by putting endless content on your home page. Start by researching the most common Google search queries relevant to your industry, and writing 500+ word blog posts answering those questions. This will increase the odds of someone stumbling onto your website. But to truly make sure that your website can be found through search engines, it’s best to work with a specialist that can ensure that your website’s SEO is as strong as possible.
Well, you know that advertisements work; otherwise it wouldn’t be a $500 billion industry. But there’s no way that you can compete with the big brands if other companies are spending that much money on advertising. Fortunately, you’re wrong. Facebook and Instagram ads are more affordable than most people can believe. Typically, a $150 monthly budget for Facebook ads can reach over 100,000+ impressions depending on your targeted audience and the quality of your ad(s). Compare that to direct-mail, where $150 can maybe reach 150 households, and it will quickly seem obvious that Facebook Ads are the way to go. Not only are they affordable, but you can accurately target people based off of their Facebook profiles. For example, if someone is male, 27, lives in Toronto, and likes pizza, then you can target that person and increase the odds of that person seeing your ad and clicking through to visit the website of your Toronto-based Italian restaurant. But don’t just think about these ads as a place to push awareness, they function best as outlets to market your business’s promotions. For example, let’s say your Italian restaurant has daily specials. In that case, you should create an ad for everyday of the week showcasing that deal. And only post that ad during the hours that the deal is active, creating a sense of urgency.. encouraging the user to visit your business to claim the special. There are endless ways you can utilize the power of Facebook Ads, but by ensuring you are taking advantage of the opportunity to advertise to a targeted market for next to nothing; you will win in the long run.
No matter where your business stands currently, you will benefit by including these key areas into your marketing strategy. If you find it confusing or have any questions/doubts, feel free to reach out to us and request a free consultation. We will be able to help bring 1,000’s of new customers into your business, every month. Right now, we’re offering a free website rebuild for new clients (worth up to $3,000 CAD). Two spots are still available. Contact us today.
