The seven stages of building a total online presence according to Duct Tape Marketing are:
- Content Platform
- Organic SEO
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Online Advertising
- Mobile and Location
- Analytics and conversion
1.Content Platform – Much of what happens online revolves around content. It’s how you get found, why people pay attention and how you start to exchange value. Content platform starts with building a listening station with tools like Google Alerts, TweetDeck, Trackur, Social Mention, Sprout Social and Raian6. You’ll be listening to gain insight into your market, your competitors and important groups, including key journalists, working toward a better understanding of the most important keyword phrases that resonate with customers in your market.
Google Keyword Tool or Wordtracker provide information on the most important ways to show up when people search for a business like yours, and allows you to create blog posts around these topics. Creating consistent content allows you to produce eBooks that allows you to capture leads.
2.Organic SEO – Having someone type a search phrase that is key to your business and finding your blog post or page from your site on page one of the results is the ultimate payoff. Search Engine Optimization can be complex and time consuming, but significant results come from following three elements:
1) Produce keyword rich, education content. Use a tool like Scribe from Copyblogger to help you write more search engine friendly content.
2) Make it easy on the search engines. Make on-page elements like blog titles, URLs, subtitles and internal line work for you. Check out Search Engine News for a great primer.
3) Draw lots of links naturally from other sites – Writing great content will start the process.
Writing guest posts, uploading content to YouTube and Slideshare, making comments on other blogs, will all help.
3.Email Marketing – An engaged email list, eager to hear from you is the most valuable asset you con build. Focus on building a list of email subscribers that want to hear from you. Choose an email service provider (ESP) like Constant Contact, GetResponse, AWeber, MailChimp or Infusionsoft and build email capture forms with your fee eBook or weekly newsletter before you move on to the social media stage.
4.Social Media Marketing – Define your strategy before your tactics. Understand how your current customers are using social media and how you can use social media to somehow serve them better. Create Twitter lists of customers and add their social profiles to your CRM tool. Add a tool like Rapportive to your email. Claim and build your profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Picasa, Slideshare and Pinterest. Your plan to work and engage prospects in all of these networks may not be clear yet, but the first step is to claim the free real estate so you can start exploring when you are ready.
Once you start to share content, build connections, reshare other’s content and discover best practices in each individual network, you can begin to amplify your content and start finding ways to drive prospects to your eBook and newsletter in the attempt to start a relationship headed toward conversion.
5.Online Advertising – Pay per click advertising can be very effective when done right. Test your ideas a dollar at a time. Use your ads to drive content awareness instead of simply to sell. Drive Facebook users to sign up for your eBook first and then you can sell to them over and over again. The basics of PPC are: Use lots of punchy, dramatic ad copy, test, revise and test again; Create tightly focused ad groups with highly relevant ad copy; test some more.
6.Mobile and Location – The first step is to analyze what behaviors your customers exhibit before diving in or dismissing Foursquare or text messaging. Your customers are reading content, searching for things to buy and using reviews to make decisions on their mobile devices. Claim your location based profiles in places like Foursquare and Yelp.
Create mobile and tablet friendly viewing options with tools like WPTouch, Tekora, or GoMobi. Create specific ads, landing pages, coupons and offers that take advantage of the growing use of mobile devices as a major part of the purchasing process.
7.Analytics and Conversion – As you build, make certain you install tracking code from tools like Google Analytics, Spring Metrics or KissMetrics so you can build the data to test and refine from. Then start building conversion goals, funnels and events, tracking your ads and split testing your landing pages, opt-in pages and sales pages to discover ways to increase conversion.
Something as overwhelming and complex as the changing face of marketing online gets a bit more manageable when you start to view it as a system to implement in stages. Do not try to eat the whole elephant at one time!
If your business goals for 2016 include a stronger online presence, let’s get together to define a strategy and set milestones to take it one step at a time.
Call for an appointment at the Cumberland Business Incubator – 931-456-4910.
